That’s ideally science but you’re gonna have low-impact papers if you don’t do the “look at this new thing I ‘proved’” song and dance. Publishing culture and self-promotion in academia make everything worse.
Incidentally, I know someone that tried publishing a paper to explain why a very common method actually led to bad results very often. It showed methodology and had verification from another group using independent materials. The paper was rejected because, “everyone knows that method X works great you must’ve done something wrong”.
There’s a lot of myth-making in how science works, following prescriptive announcements of “the scientific method”. In reality it’s just humans trying things out and using “good enough” ideas regardless of how well they are investigated. If the ideas are truly 100% wrong in a way that precludes further work, they’ll get discarded. But wrong ideas can still persist for decades or more so long as they don’t disrupt other things working well enough. That methodology earlier was “good enough” despite major flaws so the academy said, “it’s actually 100% right” right up until they abandoned the method (which they did for unrelated reasons).
More like “Industry” vs “Academia”. I love the work at the nonprofit academic lab, but I miss the cleanness, efficiency, and prettiness of the for-profit lab. 🥲
I’m gonna go with “immediately after the fall of the soviet union” when the feds pulled the plug on all funding for higher education in lieu of doing donuts in the parking lot and invading Iraq over and over again
When your future began to depend on what you were published in, and those publishers had to compete with corporate interests. Capitalism poisons nearly everything it touches, but especially academia.
Researchers need to afford to live, and that money comes from research grants. If this was even a problem, which it isn’t, the root cause is capitalism.
I love labs were they are like “we use three tools. A toothpick you can get at any restaurant, a device invented in the middle ages that hasn’t changed and is still made by like 30 people tops, and the million dollar magic machine that we don’t really understand”
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