I looked at other articles on that author's site and found a topic that was discussed here more than once that I would be interested in hearing opinions about:<p><a href="https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/" rel="nofollow">https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/</a><p>The title is "Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors" and the contents is piece by piece refuting that book.<p>Checking google, it was discussed on HN actually: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850</a><p>and in this sub-thread: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21792342" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21792342</a><p>Quite a few other potentially interesting links, even if only to check some things more deeply. Also, <a href="https://guzey.com/fiction/hntop1/" rel="nofollow">https://guzey.com/fiction/hntop1/</a> ("How I got to #1 spot on Hacker News and why you should never try doing the same")
There seems to be a tension between “all ideas come from PIs who direct slaves to do experiments” and “students and postdocs came up with their ideas and did everything, PI just paid salaries and equipment”.<p>My experience is that all labs fall somewhere between these two extremes, and within labs people are spread along this axis.<p>I felt a contradiction where the author states all ideas and execution comes from lab members, while quoting Boyden on the early days of expansion microscopy.
Nice article. I love hearing podcasts with scientists as guests (eg Boyden quote on expansion microscopy).<p>Even better is when the hosts are themselves working scientists.<p>Recently I got really into this podcast by Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher that tries to find how scientists navigate “day science” (eg formal papers and grants) vs “night science” (mucking about in the lab). Highly recommend if one wants to hear discussions by biological scientists talking about creativity.<p>Check out “Night Science”.
>I am confident that somewhere between 10% and 50% of papers published in good journals are wrong, meaningless or fraudulent.<p>This is entirely unsurprising to me. On top of this, reporters will see something interesting in a big name journal and report on it yet that usually adds a whole 'nother layer of incorrectness that the general public picks up as "fact"
"There were always large parts of science that were wrong or meaningless, so the present situation is not worse than the past in this respect.<p>Even if 10-50% of the studies I mentioned in the first section turn out to be wrong, the pace of correct and important results is still astounding."
having been there (last was in the fray 7 years ago now... geeze time flies) here are my thoughts:<p>1. These are all technological developments, not scientific developments. Even MRNA-vaccines leading edge stuff was being built when I was in grad school (20 years ago). So judging by what technical developments are coming out now, may be a lagging indicator on science.<p>2-1: Absolutely correct. Out of 10 years in science I only did 1 "officially on what we were funded to do". The other nine were on sneakily independent shit, or on fully independent (hard money) experiments.<p>2-2: No comment either way, have no experience with 'methods development' at least in the sense that he's talking about.<p>2-3: correct in the short term but wrong in the long term. If you are foolish enough to be a postdoc that puts everything into the science, you won't get promoted, so your track record of being a good scientist ends on the vine.<p>3. Correct in the short term but wrong in the long. I did exactly this but couldn't keep going because being a postdoc was terminal for me.<p>4. Correct. I tick off at least four of these bullets, including "unwelcome demographics".<p>5-12. All correct, without much else to add. Well said!<p>The biggest problem in sciences (biological) in the US is that we let the good quality scientists burn out and quit, and those who advance are mostly people who are playing the game (with a negative selection for those who are actually good scientists, because playing the game is so competitive at this point that it burns time effort and brainspace). This is a leadership defect. We don't give professors instructions on how to groom, including putting time, effort, and political capital into their grad students and postdocs to become lab leaders in their own right (if that is what they want)<p>One thing that the author does not (and cannot) address is deep knowledge, or thinking about things from first principles, a la feynman or musk. I think as we have more and more interdisciplinary scientists jumping in at the interdisciplinary level, we're already in an era where diletanttery (especially in trendy science mashups like biophysics) is high. This will further dilute expertise and make it hard to separate the wheat from the lemons. Once had a coworker grad student think you could drop a bacterial plasmid into a mammalian cell and get protein expression. I told him I would do it for him, but "I did not think that would work". He then confidently reported a positive observation (which, thank god, did not make it into any sort of publication). Dude is now a associate professor of genome sciences at university of washington.
I'm concerned by #3 "Nothing works the way you would naively think it works (for better and for worse)" which seems to imply that all or most of life sciences is funded by the NIH. What % of life sciences funding comes from the NIH and what are the other big sources?
> I am confident that somewhere between 10% and 50% of papers published in good journals are wrong, meaningless or fraudulent.<p>My experience is that this lies closer to 50%. This is the real problem with academic research and it’s only getting worse over time
After this, Guzey went on to work on the NGO [New Science](<a href="https://newscience.org/" rel="nofollow">https://newscience.org/</a>)