
Can Big Science Be Too Big? - Reedx
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/science/science-research-psychology.html
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boron1006
> larger research teams did the work of consolidating the ideas and
> solidifying the evidence

As someone who works in science, I hate that this was just kind of a side note
in this article.

If you want to know how to create a replication crisis, just value "novelty"
and "disruption" way more than correctness and replicability.

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jostmey
The scientific approach is the gold standard for validating knowledge. An
individual makes observations, formulates a hypothesis, and experimentally
tests the hypothesis with controls. I believe the reason why science is so
important to humans as a species is because it allows individuals to overcome
their own mental and psychological biases about how they believe the universe
_should_ work.

Now consider this quote from the article: "Psychologists have found that
people working in larger groups tend to ... become less receptive to ideas
from outside."

When humans work together in large groups, new problems arise. I think new
frameworks are needed to set the gold-standard for how humans interact in
groups to prevent _group biases_ and _group think_ from strangling innovation
and new ideas.

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merpnderp
Have Psychologists really proven they use the scientific method? Aren't they
one of the worst offenders when it comes to replication of results?

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krageon
I don't know if they're _the_ worst, but psychology certainly is one of the
first fields that pops into my head when we talk about hard to replicate
results. I find it incredibly ironic that the results that they may or may not
have found are now used as an argument in favour of changing actual science.

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Amygaz
Title is misleading, that is not what the study really suggests. That study
also doesn't do a good job at discriminating between causality and
consequence. Nonetheless, they are careful in their conclusion and suggests
that it is more an organic way of doing things. Smaller teams are more focus
and will work with a lot less, and the PI will try to get famous, so new stuff
it is. While bigger team are going to carry own, try to get it to the next
level. It's lot more incremental, and that is the way it should

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WhompingWindows
Some of the largest studies ever have been performed recently, using very
large particle colliders or very large-sample, multi-site clinical trials.
These scaled-up versions of smaller previous experiments show the big money
and big stakes in science, and also the pushed drive towards publication as a
metric for scientific success.

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glitchc
Can we trust psychologists to tell us anything empirical anymore?

Plus, any article about big science that doesn’t mention CERN is quite
literally pissing in the wind.

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glitchc
Article tl;dr: Consensus stifles innovation. This is not new knowledge. But
it’s the organization’s culture that decides which is more important: See
CERN, Bell labs, Xerox-PARC, HP, etc

