[Skybird]

The core problem is two-fold: incompetence, and too many people. Both result in methodological dilletantism.

If you go into academics and maybe hold a title at universit, you are under immense pressure to publish papers and studies to justify the moeny they pay oyu. Or you work for businbess and must find evidence for what business has a in interest in to sell. Sponsors anmd domnors that priovde yearly budgets must be impressed. Media attention. Prestige. Narcissism.

At the same time many simply lack the needed fundamental statistical and methodoligicla training to write a study correctly, to conduct it correctly. This reuslts not only in many papwers beign garbage, but an audience that lacks the competence to rexcongise that it is garbage, becasue they lack the needed profound knowledge of statiscs and methodology as well.


Also, so many acadmeical people around now, it is hard toi find somethign new that has not already been said before. And so quie some do the strangest kind of studies and construct the weirdest claims just to separate themselevs form the mass and trying to get attention and payment that way.


This way, science gets eroded, get hijacked, gets corrupted get hollowed out.

Ideological motivation to see unwanted facts denied and wanted ideological goals being supported, also play a role.

And of course, interest conflicts. One only needs to know that far over 90% (both in Europe and in the US) of studies that are done to prove that a new drug is ripe for the market and fulfills legal standards and regulations, are being paid for by the producers themselves. No company has an interest in showing that the new medicine it wants to sell is useless, or even dangerous.

Corruption, dilletantism, craving for fame, incompetence of the audience. An examples are the studies done for acrylamide and how toxic it is to our health, there you have it all: dilletantism, attention craving, ideology. Or "gender studies" - whcihs impyl are bogus and pseudo science. I have read a few such studies. They made my hairs raising in my neck due to the methodological incompetence on display. The failures were so immense that even a layman in statistics or methods could recognise their problems.

Probably most newspaper articles saying that "a new study has shown this" and that "scientists have shown that", are not worth the time it takes to read them.


Thats why I like these grievance studies. They make mockery of all this, and every time a scienc emagazine accepts one of them for publication it reveals what kind of clueless idiots are sitting in the editorial team. These caspars deserve to be laughed out of their jobs.