/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11581726

It definitely encourages quantity over quality, but it's hard to imagine objective measures of scientific performance other than h-index and similar. Quantitative facts are way easier to work with than qualitative when your data set is pretty much the entirety of human knowledge, and any sort of useful statistics will involve frequency of publications and the number of recent citations as variables. Also, university deans need a way to decide which academics are worth hiring, without them having to fully understand their work (since that's impossible in most cases). So I guess we're fucked. All that's left is to do our best to expose people who abuse the system.
>>11189224
Erroneous scientific ideas can become dominant and very resistant to critics, independently of the imperant economic system -- people have won the Nobel in Medicine for lobotomies. Likewise, the socialist bloc produced just as competent scientists as the West during the entirety of its existence, especially in math and physics.
Further regarding Lysenko, correspondence between him and Stalin shows that the latter even ridiculed some of his ideas and that Lysenko managed to get as far as he did by manipulating the correct people and eventually rising to power. Censorship of Mendelian genetics was not as much a state policy as it was a personal crusade of Lysenko's, and it didn't last long. This sort of conflation between science and (corrupt) politics can happen in any system where the government has any sort of decision over which sort of research gets funding -- just look at the whole shitshow around climate and gender research in the US. Pic related is a citation from Rivista di Biologia / Biology Forum 97 (2004), pp. 483-498.