This comment by Carl Feynman has a very crisp formulation of the main problem as I see it.
They’re measuring a noisy phenomenon, yes, but that’s only half the problem. The other half of the problem is that society demands answers. New psychology results are a matter of considerable public interest and you can become rich and famous from them. In the gap between the difficulty of supply and the massive demand grows a culture of fakery. The same is true of nutrition— everyone wants to know what the healthy thing to eat is, and the fact that our current methods are incapable of discerning this is no obstacle to people who claim to know.
For a counterexample, look at the field of planetary science. Scanty evidence dribbles in from occasional spacecraft missions and telescopic observations, but the field is intellectually sound because public attention doesn’t rest on the outcome.
So, the recipe for making a broken science you can’t trust is
The public cares a lot about answers to questions that fall within the science’s domain.
The science currently has no good attack angles on those questions.
As you say, if a field is exposed to these incentives for a while, you get additional downstream problems like all the competent scientist who care about actual progress leaving. But I think that’s a secondary effect. If you replaced all the psychology grads with physics and electrical engineering grads overnight, I’d expect you’d at best get a very brief period of improvement before the incentive gradient brought the field back to the status quo. On the other hand, if the incentives suddenly changed, I think reforming the field might become possible.
This suggests that if you wanted to found new parallel fields of nutrition, psychology etc. you could trust, you should consider:
Making it rare for journalists to report on your new fields. Maybe there’s just a cultural norm against talking to the press and publishing on Twitter. Maybe people have to sign contracts about it if they want to get grants. Maybe the research is outright siloed because it is happening inside some company.
Finding funders who won’t demand answers if answers can’t be had. Seems hard. This might exclude most companies. The usual alternative is government&charity, but those tend to care too much about what the findings are. My model of how STEM manages to get useful funding out of them is that funding STEM is high-status, but STEM results are mostly too boring and removed from the public interest for the funders to get invested in them.
This comment by Carl Feynman has a very crisp formulation of the main problem as I see it.
So, the recipe for making a broken science you can’t trust is
The public cares a lot about answers to questions that fall within the science’s domain.
The science currently has no good attack angles on those questions.
As you say, if a field is exposed to these incentives for a while, you get additional downstream problems like all the competent scientist who care about actual progress leaving. But I think that’s a secondary effect. If you replaced all the psychology grads with physics and electrical engineering grads overnight, I’d expect you’d at best get a very brief period of improvement before the incentive gradient brought the field back to the status quo. On the other hand, if the incentives suddenly changed, I think reforming the field might become possible.
This suggests that if you wanted to found new parallel fields of nutrition, psychology etc. you could trust, you should consider:
Making it rare for journalists to report on your new fields. Maybe there’s just a cultural norm against talking to the press and publishing on Twitter. Maybe people have to sign contracts about it if they want to get grants. Maybe the research is outright siloed because it is happening inside some company.
Finding funders who won’t demand answers if answers can’t be had. Seems hard. This might exclude most companies. The usual alternative is government&charity, but those tend to care too much about what the findings are. My model of how STEM manages to get useful funding out of them is that funding STEM is high-status, but STEM results are mostly too boring and removed from the public interest for the funders to get invested in them.
To return to LessWrong’s favorite topic, this doesn’t bode well for alignment.