My own, rather bitter, experiences with academic research in the early 1990s led me to suspect that by trying to "manage" academic research at a large scale was utterly counter productive and was optimising for all the wrong things (publications, career progression, money, politics) and was actually dramatically reducing the amount of actual science being done.

I left, co-founded a startup and never regretted it for a moment.

Edit: The point where I was sure I had to leave was when I was actually starting to play the "publications" game too well - when you find yourself negotiating with colleagues to get your name on their paper for a bit of help I'd decided things weren't really for me.

Edit2: I'd wanted to be an academic research scientist since I was about 5 or so when I actually got what I thought was my dream job I was delighted - took me a couple of years to work out why almost nothing in the environment seemed to work in the way I expected them to ("Why is everyone so conservative?") and became, as one outsider described me, "hyper cynical".

I had the 'luck' of being a research assistant at a prestigious academic collaboration involving multiple equally prestigious universities. This was in my bachelor years, and I still hadn't decided whether to pursue a career in academia or elsewhere.

While the experience day to day was definitely fun, it destroyed any desire I had of entering the field. A lot of politics, a lot of statistically suspect stuff (even to me, in my third year of a bachelor), and a lot of busiwork.

After that experience I went into web development (full-stack). What I like about it is that even though there IS politics, even though there IS taking shortcuts, and god forgive me for some of the code I delivered, in the end whatever I work on has to actually do the thing it's supposed to do. It doesn't remove the aforementioned problems, but it grounds everything in a way that is mostly acceptable to me.

As frustrating as it can be to build some convoluted web app that feels like it's held together by scotch tape, it's nice to know that it eventually has to do whatever the client asks for, however flawed.

What does conservative mean in this context? Could you explain it a bit? Thanks!

Apologies, I meant conservative in the sense of resistance to contemplate new ideas rather than the political sense. Somewhat naively I had assumed that academic research was where people would be most welcoming of at least discussing new ideas, whereas I found the opposite to be true.

Actually in some sciences they are. But anything touching medicine... forget it.

Thanks! Could you give a few examples? About what were folks so conservative? Were they stubborn proving/supporting their own paradigm/hypothesis or ... they were just simply not open to any ideas? About methods or about theory? Both?

It was quite a long time ago (~30 years) but I suspect a lot of it was simply because senior academics didn't realise they were actually managers, had no interest in managing or even understand that there were problems.

If I had to guess, in the academic context it would mean no actual novel thinking, just churning out more papers on the same `winning` theories in the field, things where before even starting you have a clear idea of what the result would look like.

The problem with going to a startup is it is kind of like going from the frying pan into the fire. As someone who has worked in both academia and industry, while academia and its pursuit of publications leads to bad behavior, industry and its pursuit of money is even more unprincipled. While it might not be that hard to fool peer reviewers with nonsense, it is way easier to fool venture capitalists, who often know no science and and are just listening for the hot buzzwords.

Is that small-c conservative? Or do you mean rightwing? (curious, I assume the former...)

In either case pretty much all humans are profoundly small-c conservative, "big change projects" on society-scale do often end in war/death/etc. At least, it's probably 50/50 whether its a "National Health Service" or a "World War".

However the reason is deeper than that: evolution does not care if you're thriving, it cares that you are breeding. So you're optimized for "minimum safety" not "maximum flourishing".

So if things are stable then you will prefer to stay in them for as long as possible. It is why people need to "hit rock bottom" before they can be helped, often, ie., their local-minimum needs to become unstable so they will prefer the uncertainty of change.

This is true, and in my opinion there is one more tendency which you also imply.

Not only the public at large, but even University graduates start to an extent distrusting those who are "professionals" in academia. It is simply a whole other world, where you are only judged by the number of papers under your name, perhaps never having contributed to anything practical - seems so detached from real life.

Hk a that old saying go?

Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach.

In my experience this is accurate in the overwhelming majority of cases.

It is worse. If you mention that you are not trusting every scientific results per se, you're being labeled as stupid and uneducated. This sort of absolute reasoning is making the distrust even worse. How can you have trust in a in a system that is unwilling to publicly admit its shortcomings? Trust and honesty come in pairs.

This science-bro movement scares me too. "But SCIENCE said so! You're a SCIENCE denier!"

It feels like a religion, with its own T-shirts and all. Appeals to authority, intellectual posturing… often from people with little understanding of the actual science. Honest insiders are way more careful with any absolute statements.

No wonder there's a (also scary) rise of conspiracy theories.

How do people not observe those as two sides of the same coin?

I think people have to get more serious about separating science as a procedure from scientism (that is, philosophical issues that are often discussed in tandem). When one uses the phrase, “science denier”, it often means, “you don’t agree with my philosophy/metaphysics/economic policy” rather than “you deny these particular facts”, which causes people to be rightly concerned. I’m not optimistic that this is going to change anytime soon, but this, I think, accounts for many of the issues in current discourse.

In the UK we've seen a fascinating evolution from skeptic societies to science denial conspiracy theorists. To _massively_ simplify what's a relatively complex piece of sociological weirdness: using your intuition about how the world works is a good heuristic for spotting charlatans, but it fails you badly when the science tells you something that doesn't accord with your intuition.

I tend to limit my use of "science denier" when an organization or its followers systematically deny scientific knowledge on multiple unrelated fronts.

Interestingly, I have read that in the 1920s and 30s, there was actually an organized relativity denialist movement, that wrote articles and held public protests.

Relativity was a huge philosophical shift from the comparative simplicity of Newton's laws. It's not surprising that there was resistance to it.

Tesla was famously against relativity, telling the New York Times, "Einstein’s relativity work is a magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king".

Indeed, and the anti-relativity movement also had a very strong undercurrent of antisemitism.

Chances are, most of the people marching against relativity had no clue about Newtonian mechanics, and were told stuff such as relativity leading to moral relativism.

>scientists who study Earth's climate call themselves meteorologists

This is just incorrect. Meteorologists don't study Earth's climate, they study weather. Meteorologists don't use ice cores or tree rings for their research, they study much shorter-term fluid dynamics. Climate scientists do study climate, and not weather. The disciplines are related (specifically, they're under atmospheric sciences), but to dismiss either one as being less scientific is picking favorites despite all evidence to the contrary. I suppose you could use the synonym "climatology" if you want a word without "science" in it, but it seems like a pretty silly heuristic regardless.

I don't like the science-bro movement, but I also think they might fill an important niche. The anti-science movement has too many people and too much time and too high of a (answer time / question time) gish-gallop ratio for scientists to possibly engage with. If scientists try to fight the anti-science crowd, they will lose.

Science bros, for all their faults, can trade blows on more even footing, and that's something. Perhaps even a vitally important something. Even if science bros aren't great at science proper, their contribution to societal consensus formation might be as important as the underlying science itself!

Science bros often misuse "anti-science" to try to shutdown opinions they disagree with. Hence people worried about the unlikely event of being killed by a nuclear power plant are anti-science, but people worried about the even more unlikely event of being killed by a super intelligent AI aren't. Misusing the word "science" (particularly by people who don't seem to have a good grasp on it) and turning it into a rhetorical cudgel is harmful, and pushes the idea that science is ideological.

Do you have an alternative for addressing the gish gallop issue?

We agree that science bros have problems, but unless you have an alternative I see them as a net positive, and not by a small margin.

Consensus formation is always messy, but that's not solved by losing.

I found that the movement you talk about is more about putting your faith in the "scientist" as opposed to the actual "science".

It seems much easier to find scientists who will tow your political viewpoint and then people can use them as a resource to prove that unless you take this person's "expertise" as gospel, then it proves you are a science "denier".

"toe"

> "But SCIENCE said so! You're a SCIENCE denier!"

This is re-incarnation of what used to be religion. Religion is alive an well, just not in form that our predecessors were familiar with.