One hypothesis is that most science is mostly coming up with decent hypotheses via unbiased human intuition about already-well-understood mechanisms, or in less fortunate cases via social/political/rent-seeking necessity; the testing the hypothesis part is usually very easy to the point where the statistics are superfluous, or it’s very hard to the point where statistics are grant-justifyingly rigorous-looking but woefully lacking in power. Thus by the time you’re actually looking at the statistics they can be good or bad or point one way or the other and it really doesn’t matter much, what matters is the intelligent-person-unbiased-apolitical-common-sense-appraised plausibility of the hypothesis and the epistemological soundness of the methodology. Edit: Daniel Burfoot’s comment jibes well with this one.
I think “science” is just a huge overfunded thing these days. Possibly because the first world is very rich, has a relatively large population at high IQ that is in the market for “a meaningful life” as a luxury good (with their lower needs all met already). So folks from this population go into science.
This was not always the state of affairs. So I think your hypothesis is more about contemporary science, than science overall.
One hypothesis is that most science is mostly coming up with decent hypotheses via unbiased human intuition about already-well-understood mechanisms, or in less fortunate cases via social/political/rent-seeking necessity; the testing the hypothesis part is usually very easy to the point where the statistics are superfluous, or it’s very hard to the point where statistics are grant-justifyingly rigorous-looking but woefully lacking in power. Thus by the time you’re actually looking at the statistics they can be good or bad or point one way or the other and it really doesn’t matter much, what matters is the intelligent-person-unbiased-apolitical-common-sense-appraised plausibility of the hypothesis and the epistemological soundness of the methodology. Edit: Daniel Burfoot’s comment jibes well with this one.
I think “science” is just a huge overfunded thing these days. Possibly because the first world is very rich, has a relatively large population at high IQ that is in the market for “a meaningful life” as a luxury good (with their lower needs all met already). So folks from this population go into science.
This was not always the state of affairs. So I think your hypothesis is more about contemporary science, than science overall.
That’s an interesting thought. Care to disassemble it into smaller pieces?
Are hard sciences overfunded? Soft sciences? Are there too many colleges and universities with too many professors?
Where would you direct the resources from cutting science funding? What would be long-term consequences?