That would've been a great reply had the title of the main post not been "Cargo Cult Science".
For me, a "career scientist" is someone that publishes papers solely to hold a position at an org / institute / uni / etc (yes, yes, everyone needs food on the table... not the point here. One can still have integrity). The career scientist couldn't care less about being right, only about how many citations he's gonna get and whether anyone's going to discover any flaws in his paper.
>The career scientist couldn't care less about being right
What you are describing is philosophically, definitively, not science. The career scientist is a scientist who is committed to the scientific method. The career crank is committed to selling the notion that they have all the answers. That could be a citation chaser or a youtube contrarian.
I agree. But unerringly honest people are vanishingly rare, and the second someone with integrity encounters a field of research that could undermine others' research, there is a silent outgrouping and sometimes expulsion. Some science just isn't allowed to breathe.
Why? Do you believe the same is true for other occupations as well? So does a doctor just care how many prescriptions they make, or a police person about how many people they arrest? Have you considered that people aspire to other goals except money, despite they being paid for it?
>So does a doctor just care how many prescriptions they make, or a police person about how many people they arrest?
Someone hasn't heard of ticket quotas before have they? Or the pharmaceutical companies that were effectively buying off doctors for years by expensive trips based on their ability to prescribe the drugs they were selling. We've had to add regulations to these above two 'fields' to prevent exactly this from happening, and in many places it still does.
Honesty and playing by the rules is often the ___domain of the new, shiny-eyed initiates. Unfortunately, not having integrity is often easier for most people.
Lol not trying to be snarky but if you think academics push out papers for purely monetary reasons then I suspect you are very far from academia in your day to day life. Of course PIs have goals besides money! If their main goal was ever money they're an idiot for sticking to the university lab, and it's not like science profs didn't have other career opportunities available.
That doesn't change the fact that the most common non-monetary goal of academics is in fact pretty well aligned with behaviors such as: publishing very frequently/flag planting, farming citations on old publications, exaggerating work in presentations and media press releases, etc. Not all of these behaviors are inherently bad but they easily can be and too often are taken to an extreme.
Said goal is of course intellectual credit, or from a more cynical lense pure ego stroking. And it is indeed a rampant non-monetary incentive in academia.
Anyway, I don't see the problem with someone who has recently pursued a PhD or beyond in academic science ripping on "career scientists". This is the sort of (mostly) informed criticism that science should welcome. Though some are overly negative, they usually still have relevant insights into problems in their field, and it is silly to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
That is markedly different from someone that frequently criticizes scientists from the outside while lacking any actual insight into the relevant technical complications, especially if that person is casting a wide net in what they criticize.
The goal of a lot of modern scientific criticism is to further the conversation amongst those presently in the field, and help those adjacent to the field make more informed decisions - including prospective/very early career trainees, potential interdisciplinary collaborators, and anyone that has a role in directing possibly relevant funding opportunities. If criticisms get co-opted by other individuals for irrelevant goals that is unfortunate but it does not make the criticism invalid.
It's also somewhat difficult in the social media age to avoid commentary that gains steam in the scientific community from reaching broader public exposure, which indeed opens it to misinterpretation. But the alternative of walled off information a la the old school journal publication system is obviously problematic for other reasons.
That is a long winded way of saying that I think some amount of harsh publicly viewable criticism is sorely needed by a number of scientific fields right now, including my own (very much not physics). The fact that criticisms which from what I can gather where initially internally directed eventually gained such external exposure tells me that the message resonated with many scientists, even if just earlier career ones. Whether this person has started to profiteer on their cynicism is tangential to the validity of the original core message IMO.
