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Science/journalism is a terrible career, which drives out good people. Also, most people going into science/journalism are unfit for it & should be kept out. How to make science/journalism less attractive to the wrong people and more to the right ones?

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chris

@ctbeiser

· Aug 19, 2021

all my smartest friends are like “i’m not willing to do a PhD because the mental health impact is as bad as having your spouse die” and im thinking maybe this is a contributing factor to the whole “lots of science is fake” problem

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

@QiaochuYuan

Replying to

@Meaningness

a throwaway sentence in Discrete Thoughts casually claimed that science as a profession drastically expanded as a hangover from various wars including the cold war. i don’t have the background to evaluate but seems roughly right to me. way too many people in the field overall

1:31 AM · Aug 19, 2021Twitter for iPad

Replying to

Yes, several interesting sources have said this, and I haven’t properly done the work to check it out. I’ve been adjacent to science since the mid-70s and the drastic expansion of quantity has for sure been accompanied by drastic decline in quality. And this keeps accelerating!

chris

@ctbeiser

Aug 19, 2021

I'm not usually an Eric Weinstein fan but I did find this pdf interesting: ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers

Replying to

and

there aren't nearly enough scientists. We need to understand this world ffs

David Chapman

@Meaningness

Aug 19, 2021

The problem is that when quality is low, quantity exacerbates the problem by flooding the literature with material that is false, misleading, trivial, etc.

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