Mary Soderstrom, a Montreal writer, has written a recently-published book called The Walkable City. From a blurb:
The idea that a city might not be walkable would never occur to anyone who lived before 1800. Over the past 200 years there have been dramatic changes to our cities.
Over the same period there were also dramatic changes in the practice of science. Maybe the biggest change was the introduction of significance tests and associated logic. Just as cars took over cities, so did significance tests take over statistics textbooks. Cities built for cars made it hard to walk; statistics textbooks full of significance tests made it hard to teach how to generate ideas.
How to generate plausible new ideas — ideas worth testing — is pretty much a mystery to most scientists, as far as I can tell. The idea generation:idea testing :: walking:driving analogy provides a little guidance, and at least makes it clear that something is missing from today’s scientific education. Walking is slower than driving; idea generation is slower than idea testing. Walking is more exploratory than driving; idea generation is more exploratory than idea testing. Walking is much cheaper than driving but it may take a lot of walking to discover somewhere you want to drive; techniques for idea generation should be very cheap because it may take a lot of use of them to discover an idea worth testing. Walking is “softer” than driving; perhaps idea generation will never be as mathematical as idea testing. Walking is far more flexible than driving; idea generation methods must be far more flexible than idea testing methods. It is hard to drive somewhere that no one has ever driven before but it is easy or at least much easier to walk somewhere new. Which should suggest to a scientist that if all you know how to do is test ideas, it will be hard for you to innovate.
The way science is supported in America is horribly biassed against idea generation — grant proposals must be all about idea testing. I don’t know if the people who run that system have any idea how unbalanced and unhealthy it is.
I think the opposite. Most grants in the health field are for things like mining databases for disease-lifestyle correlations (i.e., looking for ideas about possible causes of disease). Very few are for actual research into causation and the mechanisms of causation. So huge numbers of what are essentially hypotheses are generated each year, but few are followed through on and established and proven. Hypotheses are merely step 1 in the scientific method, and that’s as far as anyone ever goes these days.
“Most grants in the health field are for things like mining databases for disease-lifestyle correlations”? You have a source for that? Schools of public health, where such correlations are studied (in the epidemiology department) get far less money than schools of medicine.
My source would be our daily news feed, where we report on about 30 health news stories per week. Perhaps schools of medicine put out fewer press releases, but I doubt that. Or perhaps we unconsciously select stories of a certain sort.
But I’m pretty confident I’m right. Publish or perish. It’s easier and takes less talent to data mine, especially when there are so many “peer reviewed” journals of varying quality that almost anything can be published (check out Brian Wansink’s thirteen 2007 publications — they’re not all crap, but there’s quite a few of them are). It takes time, money, and true insight to actually cook up a research protocol that can go beyond correlations, so there are fewer publications by fewer researchers. You obviously can’t meet the Wansink annual quota of thirteen publications if you’re doing serious research, even if you dribble out all kinds of interim papers based on a major research project.
Now I understand. Epidemiology generates far more press releases per grant dollar than lab science. University press offices don’t bother trying to get publicity for 99% of the research their faculty do.