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Right plant has had a rough life
You ever just have to sneeze but can’t?
Looks like they put off the science fair project for too long and had to throw this little number together the weekend before. Been there, I still remember mine: what genre of music will cats like? Hypothesis: classical. Result: hard rock. Sampled 4 cats over 5 genres, took an hour. Methodology was crap. Sample size was crap. It was a non-experiment that scraped a “you tried” grade
There should be more value placed in publishing things that didn’t work as hypothesized. That way scientists in the future can know if a particular approach just doesn’t work.
Something like this, but completely normalized in the scientific world, where it’s ok to publish attempts, whether they succeed or not.
yea unfortunately publishing science (in certain levels) unfortunately now involves %50 razmatazz, %30 having some well established coauthor and %20 over selling. It has turned into a weird ecosystem that feeds on resource (jobs) scarcity in academia and makes insane profits for publishers.
Not surprised it attracted all kinds of vultures that feed on the scraps (predatory publishers). It is really smelling decay and puss from a mile away.
My PhD is a proof my hypothesis is wrong. It was a depressing time 😅
I think we can agree “Good reseach” is in the how-its-done. I wish journals would chose/require/verify the how-its-done (time frame, resources, hypothesis, method etc) but after that be contractually required publish whatever conclusion is discovered by the team/project they picked and verified.
Often, it’s about not proving your idea wrong, but about proving wrong the idea that your idea is wrong.
This is why my field (reinforcement learning) is unfortunately not science.
(Can’t really publish “hey I tried this algorithm and it didn’t work”)
…because people don’t accept that it’s wrong? Or some other reason?
I guess I should’ve clarified; in reforcement learning “I was wrong in numerous ways” almost always translates to “unpublishable, try to not be wrong next time”. Nobody cares if a reinforcement learning hypothesis didn’t work, its only worth publishing if it worked well.
Gotcha.
I thought that was the norm in all academia these days? Can a physicist (or anyone from another field) publish results that didn’t go as expected and save future scientists some time?
I know a good bit of micro biology, psychology, and medical trial fields can. But thats about the limit of my “other fields” knowledge.
