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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   31415 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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I strongly agree with your point of view. The point of science is to increase our understanding of the world, so it is not a zero sum competition to assign status.

Of course, there exists also what Feynman calls cargo cult science. People who occupy fields which make pretenses of scientific rigor but are actually just bullshitting may very well feel that all the application of statistics etc is just performative.

Being a scientist means leading mankind down the path towards truth, typically zero to one baby steps at a time. Falsifying data -- to decide that you would rather make larger steps than walk in the right direction -- is the ultimate defection from that mission. The professor who fucks his students or the doctor who experiments on PoWs may be worse human beings, but the falsifier of data is the worse scientist.

Nobody is forced to compete in a field which makes any pretenses of scientific rigor. If you don't like statistics, publish on art history. But if you use the language of science in your publications while falsifying your data, you should be expelled and disgraced and spend the rest of your days in some menial job where you can do no further harm.

A similar nonchalance is sometimes seen in defense of academics whose ghostwriters copy paste their thesis from other publications. After all, a lot of people did some cheating in school, and can't see what the big deal is. But to the (debatable) degree that an academic title means anything, it means that you sat down on your own ass and wrote your thesis. Take that away, and there is literally nothing left, and we might as well allow parents to christen their infants 'PhD' instead of 'Kevin' or 'Mary'.

People who occupy fields which make pretenses of scientific rigor but are actually just bullshitting may very well feel that all the application of statistics etc is just performative.

Perhaps they are right. Statistics in itself doesn't produce facts. It just transforms detailed data into aggregates. But if the detailed data is bad, the aggregates will be bad too.

There are fields where proper experiments are very hard, and usually the conclusions you can draw from the experiments they can do, are generally very limited. Then actually doing science properly will result in the field correctly being judged as being rather useless and funding being withdrawn. So the only way these fields can exist is by fraud and thus that it what they'll do.

For these fields, fraud is simply an evolutionary adaptation.

There are fields where proper experiments are very hard, and usually the conclusions you can draw from the experiments they can do, are generally very limited.

Can you provide examples of such fields? I am genuinely curious as one of my current interests is trying to figure out where we've actually hit hard or very large limits in scientific discovery. The problem is that simply "reading the current research" is literally impossible for someone who doesn't have a graduate understanding of math/physics/hard sciences.

I am fine with admitting that there are worthy human endeavors where the scientific method and mathematical models are not the best way to tackle the question. If someone wants to study fairy tales or Greek mythology, I will not insist on them adding p-values to their publications.

But if a field pretends scientific rigor while just cargo culting, that will reliably enrage science geeks like me. I do not have a strong opinion on how much funding there should be available for studying the character of the wolf in Grimm's fairy tales. I do have a strong opinion on how much funding there should be for torturing statistics to 'scientifically prove' that the wolf is a negative character (p<0.05): the amount is zero.

I will grant you that the revealed preference of the funding agencies is different, though.

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