this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
501 points (80.1% liked)

Science Memes

11161 readers
3550 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yes and? Is the premise that capital only chooses bad things to research?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Capital has certain interests. If your research doesn't produce the results that capital is looking for, you're unlikely to get more funding. As such, it leaves a bias on what we have research for, which can already skew our perception of reality, and sometimes researchers will even fake their results or select certain data to reach a conclusion that's in the interest of the capital.

There are mechanisms in place to try to prevent that, namely peer reviews and reproduction of previous studies, so we'll hopefully get to the truth eventually, but the bias still has a big impact.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

Plus publish or perish is real thing

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yes this all presupposes that this bias is a bad thing. Not saying that it isn't mind you

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I mean I used an example in another thread but take this.

Imagine there is a new disease starts affecting people. We don’t know if it is physical or mental.

The two biggest funders in medicine are government and insurance companies, both of them would benefit from this illness being mental, because due to laws and regulations they have to spend less money on mental illness patients. So we have a mountain of research funded trying to portray the disease as psychological. And no research attempting to find biological causes.

This legitimately happened to an illness called ME, only 40 years later through patient crowdfunding and tens of thousands of deaths later was enough research funded to disprove that it is psychological and show it is neuroimmune.