Related papers: The Natural Selection of Bad Science
At what level should government or companies support research? This complex multi-faceted question encompasses such qualitative bonus as satisfying natural human curiosity, the quest for knowledge and the impact on education and culture,…
Empirical science needs to be based on facts and claims that can be reproduced. This calls for replicating the studies that proclaim the claims, but practice in most fields still fails to implement this idea. When such studies emerged in…
Why do firms produce scientific research and make it available to the public, including their rivals? Prior literature has emphasized the tension between imitation risks from disclosure and scientists' preferences for publication. This…
Decisions to pursue higher education are not fully explained by economic incentives, with social influence and peer effects playing a crucial, yet dynamically understudied, role. This paper develops a theoretical non-linear dynamics model…
Innovation is the direct intended product of certain styles in research, but not of others. Fundamental conflicts between descriptive vs inferential statistics, deductive vs inductive hypothesis testing, and exploratory vs pre-planned…
Humans have developed considerable machinery used at scale to create policies and to distribute incentives, yet we are forever seeking ways in which to improve upon these, our institutions. Especially when funding is limited, it is…
Large-scale replication studies like the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P) provide invaluable systematic data on scientific replicability, but most analyses and interpretations of the data fail to agree on the definition of…
A major factor in the recent success of large language models is the use of enormous and ever-growing text datasets for unsupervised pre-training. However, naively training a model on all available data may not be optimal (or feasible), as…
The explosive growth of scientists, scientific journals, articles and findings in recent years exponentially increases the difficulty scientists face in navigating prior knowledge. This challenge is exacerbated by uncertainty about the…
Human societies are organized and developed through collective cooperative behaviors, in which interactions between individuals are governed by the underlying social connections. It is well known that, based on the information in their…
The use of science for policy is at the core of a perfect storm generated by the insurgence of several concurrent crises: of science, of trust, of sustainability. The modern positivistic model of science for policy, known as evidence based…
Causal models and methods have great promise, but their progress has been stalled. Proposals using causality get squeezed between two opposing worldviews. Scientific perfectionism--an insistence on only using "correct" models--slows the…
Large-scale industrial recommendation models predict the most relevant items from catalogs containing millions or billions of options. To train these models efficiently, a small set of irrelevant items (negative samples) is selected from…
Evidence shows that in a significant number of cases the current methods of research do not allow for reproducible and falsifiable procedures of scientific investigation. As a consequence, the majority of critical decisions at all levels,…
Science consists on conceiving hypotheses, confronting them with empirical evidence, and keeping only hypotheses which have not yet been falsified. Under deductive reasoning they are conceived in view of a theory and confronted with…
Research around AI for Science has seen significant success since the rise of deep learning models over the past decade, even with longstanding challenges such as protein structure prediction. However, this fast development inevitably made…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Biological systems perform complex multi-step processes in a reproducible way despite underlying stochasticity. The standard explanation is micromanagement by molecular machinery that recognizes and corrects specific errors. Here we study…
Over the last four decades, the way knowledge is created in academia has transformed dramatically: research teams have grown larger, scholars draw from ever-wider pools of prior work, and the most influential discoveries increasingly emerge…
This article aims to show the weakness of the current scientific assessments, based on a set of contradictory pseudo-axioms. The six pseudo-axioms are deeply analysed. From the analysis are derived several conclusions. In spite of the…