#philosophy-of-science

I’ve realized that when scientists tell me, “We need to prevent bad research from being published!” they often mean, “We need to prevent people from gaining academic status that they don’t deserve!” That is, to them, the problem with bad research isn’t really that it distorts the scientific record. The problem with bad research is that it’s cheating.

The growing privatization of scientific research, on the contrary, has raised important concerns for philosophers of science, especially with respect to the growing sources of biases in research that it seems to promote.