Title : Being impolite is good science
Link : Being impolite is good science
Being impolite is good science
We've been interviewing a lot of candidates at work lately, and as part of their interview process they are required to give a talk on their work (many are recent PhD graduates). Coming out of the talk, once out of earshot of the candidate, I often ask my colleagues what they thought of the material. What I've found is that whereas I looked for what was wrong, many of my colleagues tended to focus on the positive. My colleagues are nicer and politer than me, and it started to make me feel a bit rotten: the glass-half-empty guy who always finds something to criticise.
But then I thought: since when was being critical a bad thing when it comes to science? Good science is a very delicate edifice, where one flaw can lead the whole thing to collapse. There's no such thing as nearly-good science. Therefore, the essential role of the critic is to try to tear down the structure, look for the exposed exhaust chute leading to the core fusion reactor. If the work is good science, the critic will fail in their mission. If the critic succeeds, there were problems with the research and the researcher can go back to the drawing board and refine their work until it can no longer be torn down; at which point it becomes good science.
It's hard to critical while also seeming polite. This is not to say that science should be a blood sport, but at the very least all scientists should think of receiving the work of others as an opportunity to learn, yes, but also as a parlour game where the aim is to find a flaw in the logic or execution of the work. Ideally, it should be done in good spirit, and received in the same spirit. This becomes hard, of course, as peoples' pride and egos are almost immediately engaged. Nonetheless, if we want the scientific endeavour to be meaningful, it is essential to all muck in together to try to tear down each others' work.
I know that this sounds a bit like self-justification for being an impolite nit-picky bastard, but bad science is a real problem. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most published work is bad science. In my own field of Information Retrieval, a general suspicion that there was more sound and fury in the published material than real progress led Justin Zobel and some of his collaborators to investigate the record of progress for the previous decade. The result of this study was at the same time shocking and not surprising at all: over the decade from 1998 to 2008, no meaningful improvement to the effectiveness of information retrieval over a number of well-known corpora was achieved. This is despite the fact that dozens of papers claiming innovations and improvements were published during that period. In pharmaceutical research the situation is even worse, with the strong bias towards publishing positive results (especially when sponsored by industry) has led to ineffective and even dangerous drugs entering the market. Bad science is not just an abstract concern.
The bias to publish positive results, even where no corrupting commercial interest is involved, is strong. One of the main reasons for this is human nature, and peoples' over-identification with what should be their dispassionate hypothesis. People simply want "their" idea to work, which leads to a multitude of scientific sins being committed, often unwittingly. The other big driver for this bias is that most journals are more likely to publish papers with positive results than those with negative ones. Consequently, with the enormous pressure to publish in the academic "industry", researchers give the journals what they want: exciting progress! The only thing standing in the way of a scientific field becoming a giant tax-money-wasting cycle of self-congratulatory and self-perpetuating bullshit (or worse, a cheersquad for toxic agendas) is reviewers who are prepared to be impolite and call researchers on the flaws in their science.
*To the extent that I'm a scientist at all, I'm an applied scientist. I can understand the merit of pursuing totally impractical truths in physics, but can't say I'm convinced that coming up with an heuristic to solve a problem that nobody has is particularly worthwhile.
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