Quote:
Originally Posted by GRB5111
Wouldn't it become a much healthier scientific environment from a objective peer review standpoint if the scientific method was actually followed where hypotheses and related trials were actually critiqued to make them better?
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What we have here is a pervasive problem that rears its head in every aspect of our society including this one: corporatism, and related maneuvering for power (which certainly exists, and existed, long before our society did this interesting large experiment in corporatism of course).
Higher education in our country is a market. Medicine (as a multi-element genre) is a market. Now, in order to control that market and maximize profitability, it has to seem worth something. The only way this can happen is if the people who have it (paid for it), are officially recognized as more important and more qualified than people don't have it, and if they are recognized as experts period.
(It wasn't enough that the priests read Latin; it was important that they were unquestionable, too. Most Rabbis read Latin too after all.)
Now initially this means that nobody without the qualifier can question, because they must be marginalized fully, as a basic. But eventually this means that even people also with the qualifier cannot question in any way or place where people without the qualifier could, then or later, see or hear it, because that still casts doubt on the integrity or value of the product being sold (in this case "qualification as a scientist"). Even when in the long process of acquiring the end-product, after all, the consumers are still consuming.
The next phase of 'underlying causation' relates to funding. If there was any real desire for science protocol clarity instead of misleading obfuscation and error (by accident or design), it would be a given that all underlying data for any given study be made available either in fine print after the paper or back of journal or on the journal website. So when it says mouse chow you know what's in it. So if they measure 14 things you don't just hear about the 2 (hey, cheerios has more fiber than fruit loops!! -- when for all we know the study compared those two things to two other things that turned out massively better, so if you parse enough data out you eventually find something that the funder is happy with and hence they might be willing to hire you for something else again, as a result). This is a small but obvious thing -- that an appendix should have the raw data in tables or something. You can't do a 10th grade school paper without showing your data; how come you can publish a peer-reviewed science paper without it? This is because the funders don't want it, and the journals recognize that and hence will not require it.
There are other things in the back of my head. Anyway, I'm saying that this is kind of a surface symptom of some very deep and pervasive things -- and these elements are just as alive in other markets, in their own way. We spend a lot of effort railing at these symptoms, but the underlying cause, and the only real solution, is a deeper cultural effort.
You have to file a flight plan just to fly to another city as a pilot in a 1 person plane even though it's nobody's business where you're going any more than if you were in a car, generally. What if any trial that was going to be formal published science had to have a study plan filed somewhere official before it began? And every journal required underlying data provided? These two things would radically, drastically, annihilate 80%+ of the ability of 'funders' to cause -- directly or indirectly -- researchers to lie, overtly or subtly; and would provide the foundation for the process of science to be, at the least seen and critiqued by others, who are greatly prevented solely by not having enough info to go on.
PJ