# After science: Has the tradition been broken? **URL:** \ **Category:** Lounge\ **Created:** [December 24, 2009, 7:09pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/after-science-has-the-tradition-been-broken/35067 "2009-12-24T19:09:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![PheroQuirk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/9e8a1a/32.png) [@PheroQuirk](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/PheroQuirk)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2009, 7:09pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/after-science-has-the-tradition-been-broken/35067/1 "2009-12-24T19:09:29Z")
[Bruce Charlton’s Miscellany: After science: Has the tradition been broken?](http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2009/12/after-science-has-tradition-been-broken.html) > [@](#): > > The younger generation of scientists are like children who have been raised by wolves. They have learned the techniques but have no feel for the proper aims, attitudes and evaluations of science. What little culture they have comes not from science but from bureaucrats: they utterly lack scientific culture; they do not talk science, instead they spout procedures. ---
**Author:** ![renny](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/pheromonetalk.com/renny/32/2104_2.png) [@renny](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/renny)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2009, 8:30pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/after-science-has-the-tradition-been-broken/35067/2 "2009-12-24T20:30:09Z")
It’s not just the scientists. This article could apply to many fields. ---
**Author:** ![tacitus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/6a8cbe/32.png) [@tacitus](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/tacitus)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2009, 5:34pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/after-science-has-the-tradition-been-broken/35067/3 "2009-12-25T17:34:03Z")
Reminds me of what **Robert Skidelsky** said about **John Maynard Keynes** … he was really a philosopher who had gotten good at economics. IMHO anyone worth his or her salt in any discipline needs to have a larger framework that contains that discipline… the larger framework provides the necessary perspective that the discipline itself is necessarily a contingent perceptual position that can be, may need to be, continuously updated and rescripted, rather than someting like a solidified lava flow… ---
**Author:** ![coreykeith](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/pheromonetalk.com/coreykeith/32/670_2.png) [@coreykeith](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/coreykeith)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2009, 9:25pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/after-science-has-the-tradition-been-broken/35067/4 "2009-12-25T21:25:24Z")
By definition capitalism is gaining money often at the expense of others. In science there is fierce competition for research dollars. Negative results or uninteresting findings dont get funded. What would you do as a researcher? If you dont get funded you do nothing. In my field of medicine, you get paid more to do a safe, sometimes un-needed stress test, rather than giving the patient reassurance. What would you do? ---
**Author:** ![PheroQuirk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/9e8a1a/32.png) [@PheroQuirk](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/PheroQuirk)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2009, 4:43am UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/after-science-has-the-tradition-been-broken/35067/5 "2009-12-26T04:43:37Z")
> [@coreykeith](#): > > By definition capitalism is gaining money often at the expense of others. Under a market economy with a strong civil society, one can choose one’s aims. As Michael Harris, the founder of Androtics, has so very often said one can succeed in business by doing the right thing, by making your customer’s lives better. If your understanding about capitalism is that it is about making money, no matter what, then perhaps it is time to explore a site like [mises.org](http://mises.org), where you have the potential to see a very different view of the world. > [@coreykeith](#): > > In science there is fierce competition for research dollars. Negative results or uninteresting findings dont get funded. What would you do as a researcher? If you dont get funded you do nothing. Well - this is the phenomenon the author is horrified by. It did not used to be like this. What we have today is a grotesque Devil’s depiction of the true Spirit of science, contrasting very unfavourably with practices before World War 2. It was not so long ago that people were motivated by honour and by doing the right thing, regardless of petty advantage they might give up by acting so. > [@](#): > > In my field of medicine, you get paid more to do a safe, sometimes un-needed stress test, rather than giving the patient reassurance. What would you do? Personally I would rather find a different field - create my own niche if I had to - where I could best serve my patients’ interests and earn a decent living. The thought of padding procedures for business reasons is detestable. Of course I do not claim to succeed in living up to the moral standards I would like to always and in every situation. But one ought to have them - and a society that just doesn’t care about such things is headed ultimately for disaster. > [@](#): > > Reminds me of what Robert Skidelsky said about John Maynard Keynes… he was really a philosopher who had gotten good at economics. Keynes was a talented, amoral, unprincipled man who chose to become a monetary quack, offering up the academic justification to pursue long-discredited remedies to governments that had started down that track anyway, in spite of the criticism from economists. (He utterly failed to see the crash of 1929 and imbalances that preceded it and had a very mixed record as a speculator). > [@](#): > > IMHO anyone worth his or her salt in any discipline needs to have a larger framework that contains that discipline… the larger framework provides the necessary perspective that the discipline itself is necessarily a contingent perceptual position that can be, may need to be, continuously updated and rescripted, rather than someting like a solidified lava flow… Yes - until World War 2, and the Samuelsonization of Economics, the subject had a much broader, historically-informed flavour to it. The behavioural economists and students of neuroeconomics are in some ways only catching up to what the practitioners of political economy had known a century previously. ---
**Author:** ![PheroQuirk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/9e8a1a/32.png) [@PheroQuirk](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/PheroQuirk)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2009, 9:08am UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/after-science-has-the-tradition-been-broken/35067/6 "2009-12-27T09:08:40Z")
[Profumo After the Affair by Theodore Dalrymple](http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2006-03-15td.html) ---
**Author:** ![SteveO](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/87869e/32.png) [@SteveO](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/SteveO)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2009, 10:59pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/after-science-has-the-tradition-been-broken/35067/7 "2009-12-29T22:59:11Z")
It’s so nice to have two of the people I respect most on this forum in the same thread.