My actual high school experience. I enjoy math these days. When I was expected to learn and demonstrate it, I was an unstable teenager unsure if I hated myself or my parents more. (Spoiler alert: it was my parents >_>) Doing math made me slow down and make space in my head, which let out all the dead Hanks and Deans allowed the TRUAMA to flood in.
You can’t just collect and analyse the data either, you have to write a kickass paper, design an appealing poster and present it like it’s the best thing ever and the respective talk…oh yea and then you have to write tons of kickass proposals to get the funding to do more experiments to collect more data and analyse it and… :)
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).
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