[ExI] trust the fake science?

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sat, Jun 8, 2024 at 6:11 AM efc--- via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Maybe time to learn from how science is done at corporations? Would that
> improve things? I'm no scientist so I would be interested in hearing from
> the actual scientists on this list how you would fix the problem in an
> ideal world.
>

Depends on the corporation, but I would not call typical corporate science
"an ideal world".

Science in corps is generally done for profit: someone thinks that money
can be had by exploiting a certain phenomena in a certain way.  Typically
this is far closer to "technology" than "science", or at the very least is
"applied science" rather than "basic science".  In most cases one needs to
establish a business case before significant resources - money, or things
that cost money such as on-the-clock employee time - can be spent
investigating an idea.  This is of course hard to do when the particulars
of a phenomena are unknown, while if they are well known, there might not
be much science left to be done.

And then there is the potential for corporate politics to interfere.  A
famous example actually comes from communism but is in the same spirit:
vast resources were spent trying to prove Lyseknoism right, leading to a
snowballing sunk cost fallacy that sucked in more resources despite the
evidence it was wrong.  Indeed, much of Soviet-era science can be seen as a
version of corporate science, trying to either prove those in power right
or to win more resources for the collective, with success not always
honestly judged.

One reason why small businesses are promoted so much in the US for doing
science is that there is less room for this sort of thing.  The business
either produces results or it does not; there is in theory supposed to be
no political connection between the doers and the evaluators, so the
evaluators have nothing to judge except actual results.  In practice,
corruption erodes this somewhat but it does work to some extent.

Anyone interested in this subject would do well to look up the Small
Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programs of many of the federal
departments.  https://www.sbir.gov/about is a good place to start.
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