<story><title>The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit</title><url>http://quillette.com/2016/02/15/the-unbearable-asymmetry-of-bullshit/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brownbat</author><text>The job market right now in the US forces grad students to attempt innovative research with remarkable conclusions. As a consequence, everyone&amp;#x27;s trying to prove more outlandish things while few are bothering with replications.&lt;p&gt;If the field were sane, you would train all the apprentices on replication studies. Once they demonstrated dispassionate expertise with the tools, only then would they be allowed to try to use those tools to test their own ideas, where they will have a strong emotional preference for how the study will come out.&lt;p&gt;If universities hired grad students based on their replication work, not on their eye-popping original research, we&amp;#x27;d have better science and better scientists.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Balgair</author><text>That is nearly the opposite of what the PhD was designed to do. Modern academic training comes out of the church and the old guilds of middle Europe and is still in use today in many fields (chefs and plumbers to name a few).&lt;p&gt;The Bachelor&amp;#x27;s degree is loosely similar to an apprentice&amp;#x27;s role. The young boy (they were almost exclusively male) worked in a shop or with a priest for some time. He learned the trade, the tools, and gained some experience from &amp;#x27;level 0&amp;#x27;. When you are done with the apprenticeship, you are &amp;#x27;cleared&amp;#x27; to work in other shops and are known to not be a total moron or break tools or burn down shops.&lt;p&gt;The master&amp;#x27;s degree is just that. You are considered a master of the craft (like plumbing or prinitng) or the discipline (like The Book of Mark or Crusader History). As such, you typically have a master&amp;#x27;s level project. Something that is &amp;#x27;new&amp;#x27; or shows that you know your stuff. That might be a very decorative silver bowl or a thesis.&lt;p&gt;The Doctorate means you are &amp;#x27;world class.&amp;#x27; Not just a mastery in a field, but a paragon of it. Today, that means that you are &lt;i&gt;the&lt;/i&gt; expert in your little niche of underwater basket weaving. There should be no-one better than you. This means you MUST have produced something new or novel way of thinking about the God or something. This has always been the idea, if not the practice.&lt;p&gt;To change that and say that the doctorate should be the bachelor&amp;#x27;s is very big. To suggest that PhDs should just replicate experiments is anathema to the idea of graduate education and would be a tremendous waste of time and energy. When you enter the Phd, you are assumed to already know how to do all the replication and the facts about the field. Granted, fields are exponentially larger than they were in the 1600&amp;#x27;s, but you still should know stats and biology if your PhD is in cancer biology.&lt;p&gt;I think you are totally wrong about this. What you are suggesting should be covered in undergrad and I think it largely is.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit</title><url>http://quillette.com/2016/02/15/the-unbearable-asymmetry-of-bullshit/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brownbat</author><text>The job market right now in the US forces grad students to attempt innovative research with remarkable conclusions. As a consequence, everyone&amp;#x27;s trying to prove more outlandish things while few are bothering with replications.&lt;p&gt;If the field were sane, you would train all the apprentices on replication studies. Once they demonstrated dispassionate expertise with the tools, only then would they be allowed to try to use those tools to test their own ideas, where they will have a strong emotional preference for how the study will come out.&lt;p&gt;If universities hired grad students based on their replication work, not on their eye-popping original research, we&amp;#x27;d have better science and better scientists.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>themartorana</author><text>A lot of the time those same students are doing the bulk of the legwork for those findings then attributed to a professor, who is under greater pressure to advance (not confirm) science, who may or may not have even participated heavily in the grunt work of that research. The professor then punishes the work under his&amp;#x2F;her name, with no credit to the work of the students.</text></comment>