Shibboleth

 

 Expressionism / Otto Mueller/ Zwei Mädchen Am Waldrand

Been spending time thinking about one of my long term pet peeves.  I suppose that this stupid COVID thing had exaserbated the problem.

There is a lot of woofing about there about “trusting the science”. I haven’t trusted the science for decades because of what science’s metamorphosis into a raw material supply for the public relations/business crowd.

Folks have been writing about and discussing the “replication crisis” for so long that the damn thing has it’s own Wikipedia Page.  But the gist of the matter is that most of the work being done and passed off as “the science” is not really very good.  Most of it is performed by folks who are racing to get out first, and in doing so they rush the job, botch the statistics, and fail to do the necessary replication work.  

So over time, the “science” being pushed out by Ivory tower types is not very good.  They are pushing hard to get out into the world to score some coin in order to start paying off the six figure student loans that they have racked up.  Students are frightened of the debt they are looking at, faculty are pushed to the edge by publish or perish, and the myriad journals are in thrall to the companies that pay advertising.  It is just a sadly broken system.

It is worse at the industry level.  Science is at best third tier important, Finance first, PR second, science third.  It’s about “sales” baby.  Nothing else.

Nope, science has turned into a shibboleth.  Nothing else.  When I hear/see folks talking about science’s role, most of what I see/here is more an act of defiance or suppliance rather than what the data means and that meanings connection the greater world that resides outside their laboratories or computer models.