Quote: (06-01-2016 09:58 AM)Hades Wrote:
The older I get the more I begin to suspect something very fishy is going on in the hard scientific community. It's been a long time I've been musing on this concept.
Doesn't it strike anybody here as odd that it's the year 2016, there's more people and money and news media being thrown at "scientific research" than ever, women are being pushed kicking and screaming into hard STEM fields, and I Fucking Love Science is a cultural meme, but still we have no truly great and intellectually fearless scientific geniuses? They've practically gone extinct. Where the hell is our Einstein?
The last truly great American scientist that I can pinpoint was Richard Feynman. He was of a particularly curious and puzzle-breaking sort and he lived a colorful life of intrigue, accomplishment, and adventure. He died in 1988 at the relatively young age of 70. Since then nobody who's arrived on the scene can fill his shoes.
I'm strongly suspecting that there's a deep and insidious movement in the scientific community these days. It's corrupting it's otherwise noble ideals to serve those in power.
Fully agree with this observation.
I work in scientific research in the STEM field and this is my view on the causes of this problem.
I identify roughly three causes:
1) a decline in educational standards
2) people becoming dumber
3) publication pressure
4) origin of the funding
First of all politicians have been working hard for decades to reduce the educational standards, both in primary and in secondary school. Thirty years ago, students left high school and they were fluent in at least two languages, had an excellent command of grammar and vocabulary in their mother tongue and could play with basic calculus and linear algebra problems. Excellence in these things was strongly encouraged and parents took great pride in the good performance of their children.
And then the politicians decided that this performance-based system was unfair, discriminated the less intellectually gifted (and girls and immigrants who refused to learn the language and adapt to the culture), put too much pressure on children’s shoulders and that school “had to be fun”. Thus, requirements were universally lowered. This coincided with the shift from a male dominated teacher corps to a female dominated one. As a result, today’s 18 year olds are mostly borderline retards with an overinflated self worth. They think they master multiple languages, but they don’t even know the basic grammar of their mother tongue and they definitely cannot carry a conversation or write a text in another tongue. They hardly solve a quadratic equation, let alone calculate a derivative, an integral or a determinant. This is not an exaggeration; I teach courses to engineering students and every year I am required by my superiors to lower my standards because a certain percentage of (ever dumber) students need to pass.
I will not spend too much time on the second cause because I don’t want to search for sources now, but it has already been mentioned on this forum: people are actually getting dumber. Is it because of genetic selection (the dumb breeding more), poor food, exposure to endocrine disruptors and emf’s, inferior brain development due to overreliance on computers and the internet… ?
I don’t know, but today’s people are dumber (in terms of pure reasoning capacity, so not likely explained by a change in educational standards) than they were 30, 50 or a 100 years ago.
The third cause is something a lot of people in academics are fully aware of: the publication pressure. Basically, nowadays, your value as a scientist is solely measured by the amount of peer-reviewed articles you publish in scientific journals (and also by the impact factor of the journal and the amount of times you are cited but I won’t go deeper into that).
The amount of papers you publish determines whether you get funding for your PhD or not, whether you are allowed to defend your PhD or not, whether you get hired as a post-doc, as a professor, whether your research proposals get accepted or not, how much money you receive for your projects or your department…
It makes the difference between being without a job, and being a highly paid and respected professor at a prestigious institute.
Since coming up with an actual scientific advance and writing a paper on it takes many years, it is impossible to participate in the race for the most amount of papers if you take this route. So if you really want to advance science, you will simply not have the chance because you will be out of funding after one or two years due to insufficient output.
Moreover, this peer-review procedure is conducted by other researchers in your field. Thus it is completely impossible to publish a study that attacks the current status quo. You need to suck the dick of those who were publishing in the domain before you were, or you will never be able to enter into the domain.
As a result, nearly all studies published nowadays are slight variations on the existing literature, changing a variable here and there. But no one dares to question the current state of the art or explore new paths.
And finally, the funding plays an important role.
Who pays for publicly accessible scientific research? The government, large multinationals and foundations from billionaire philanthropists.
Do you think they are happy with no matter which outcome? No at all.
The editor-in-chief of The Lancet (most important journal in medicine) sounded the alarm bell last year. He estimated that at least half of the studies that appeared in his journal were purposefully falsified. A friend of mine did research on cancer remedies and he told me that literally everyone “massaged” his data to fit the research hypothesis.
Why?
Do you think that big pharma will spend billions to develop a drug without bringing it to market? Do you think they want you to read that a simple herb is superior to an engineered drug?
Do you think that it is possible in this day and age to publish a study that shows that the brains of men and women are not equal and that as a result, women are less suitable for STEM or decision-making roles? A study that shows that artificial emf’s are dangerous? A study that shows that GMO’s are not nutritionally equivalent to the real stuff and might trigger the release of inflammatory compounds?
Not at all, the researchers who try to research this kind of thing have their funding cut and their reputation destroyed.
I hope this gives you some more insight into why science is so rotten nowadays.
Currently, scientific research does not serve the people. It is simply another tool in the toolbox of the globalist overlords to make people into dumb, obedient, unfit, unhealthy slaves. As long as the tide is not turned, it will remain that way.