IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU
Do you know who I’m thinking of when we are making criticisms that could affect someone’s career, someone’s professional life?
I’m thinking of the hordes of grad students who never had a chance because they wouldn’t fudge results for a dicey PI...
I’m thinking of everyone who started off curious and intelligent, and ended up mired in an unsustainable system where they couldn’t pursue good ideas because they heard ‘we don’t have the money’ everywhere they turned.
(What money? Government and philanthropic money, used to find out stuff and then give the ideas away. There’s only so much of this money, and there’s less than there used to be.)
So. Bad research just doesn’t affect the people in the area around it, the people who might spend years trying to take a dodgy result and extend it.
It affects everyone else who needs the money.
It’s easier to do bad research. It’s easier not to be careful. Slop the numbers around until something works, fudge a few figures, conveniently misplace a few measurements, and then you’ll be able to say you’ve made discoveries. Dress it all up in pompous gibberish. Call a spade a ‘neo-classical earth-inversion mechanism’. Parlay your amazing ‘discoveries’ into requests for more money...
Before you know it, you’ve built an extremely expensive house of extremely cheap cards.
In this context, when you’re pulled up for doing something wrong (or, really, hundreds of things wrong) the thought “why are they picking on me?” isn’t just short-sighted, it’s deeply selfish.
Of course, bad research is selfish in general — you’re not just prioritising your own needs over even the vaguest concept of the public good, you’re going to screw everyone associated with you. If you do bad research, and this gets pointed out at great volume, then everyone who so much as knows where your office is gets it in the neck...
The public get a raw deal, as usual — you are spending their money producing information they can’t use. Of course, the public do not have access to scientific papers anyway because academic publishing is a sullen trash fire, but that’s beside the point.
Other scientists in your field, of course, do not get off easy. As outlined above, they might have previously tried their own experiments based on the ideas you magicked into being. They wrack their brains reconciling your work. They might get lucky — perhaps your ideas pan out, and your bad papers actually have results that stand up. The point is, of course, that you’ve made them take a chance on that, rather than working from a base of information they can trust.
And science in general, of course, is polluted. More things to read, more cheap ideas thrown around like crumpled chip packets. Another ego demanding a place in public life.
For literally everyone else involved, I have more sympathy. You let them all down. No amount of messenger-shooting will change that.