Interesting essay on Science in the Age of Selfies

[StatGuy2000]

Hi everyone. I wanted to post this interesting essay by Donald and Stuart Geman on Science in the Age of Selfies.

http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/Blog/PNAS-2016-Geman.pdf

The essay raises some interesting questions on the scientific enterprise in the age of online communication and great competitive pressure to produce "results" via publication, and on whether great scientific advances are possible (and possible steps that can be taken to foster a healthier environment for scientific research).

Worth a read.

 

[jedishrfu]

Yes, this essay is in line with the popular notion of multi-tasking where students claim they can write papers, solve problems, monitor facebook and text friends while listening to their favorite music.

Profs commenting on student writing, can identify the multitaskers easily since their writing is often very fragmented with sentences that just don't ft together into a paragraph and with paragraphs that just don't fit into the paper being written making the paper just a collection of ideas that don't go together well.

http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...ided_attention_and_technological_gadgets.html

The other thing I recall with respect to scientific paper publishing, is that journals want to publish positive results only so a few researchers have published novel discoveries when the discovery appeared only once over several experiments meaning that later researchers may not be able to reproduce the discovery.