On the surface, modern science glitters like a shining jewel, a rare instance of government spending that works. The MEDLINE database lists more than 1.6 million scientific papers published in 2022 alone. Scratch the surface, though, and the picture looks less rosy. Validation is dicey. Retractions are ramping up. Outright fraud bubbles up more frequently. Politics, not reason, is firmly in the driver’s seat. Breakthroughs are rare, and seemingly independent of spending. More and more, science seems to be something like a very expensive version of Head Start: a money sink that has no aim but self-preservation.
Is science broken? So says the Broken Science Initiative, founded in 2022.
This event features William Briggs, one of the collaborators of the Broken Science Initiative. He is a writer, statistician, scientist and consultant. Previously, he was a professor at the Cornell Medical School, a statistician at DoubleClick in its infancy, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, and an electronic cryptologist with the U.S. Air Force. Briggs is a collaborator on The Broken Science Initiative.
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