Why is food still a source of stress? Food is a solved problem. The amount of food waste alone is just staggering. Healthcare and housing are harder problems. There's no abundance there. But there is something seriously wrong with the link between food production and food consumption.
Food is far from a solved problem. There are many food deserts in the US, where the best you can hope for for groceries is a gas station mini mart. “They can just drive further to a real grocery store.” Yes, but they start cutting into their grocery budget driving there and back, limiting what they can buy. In extreme cases, it obviates the purpose of the trip entirely.
Food is a solved problem? You cant be serious. How many animals are unnecessarily slaughtered every year for food? How many people still cant access clean drinking water? How are we going to provide for a ever growing population? Food is an insane issue we have no real solutions for without causing incredible amounts of suffering to animals while also heavily damaging nature in the process. Solved problem my ass.
It's complicated. There is a whole lot of corruption and fraud in science. But this kind of fraud doesn't end up leading to dominating narratives. The fraud remains part of the 99% of science that is invisible to the general population and that is precisely why the fraud isn't so easily uncovered in the first place.
Depending in the field and impact, reproduction becomes “free” because other scientists try to build on the results. Science is often about chasing the latest, hottest thing
If they can’t reproduce the original, they should get called out eventually
In over 80 volumes of ASTM publications, I would estimate they may amount to more kilos than that.
Almost all of the actual lab work requires statistical determination of repeatability & reproducibility to be calculated between different labs, and the summary is included with each document.
I would say there is way less than a kilo without this.
And the amount of supporting raw data on file amounts to kilos which dwarf the pages published. Formally accessible so everything can be thoroughly reviewed at any time in the future, allowing for complete reconsideration if called for.
Scietific instrumentation doesn't stand still.
So it definitely can be done. Even if it's to the extreme not suitable for everybody else.
The less-reproducible documents are there, they did the best they could, but have a smell not shared by the good stuff. You know "exactly" how good or bad the underlying science turned out to be in the real world.
Paradoxically, or intuitively, as the case may be, if you're going to utilize the less-reliable techniques (most likely because they're the best there is), you may need to know how bad they are most of all.
Maybe other publications should raise the bar on statistics as appropriate, I figure zero statistics is about as far as you can get from ASTM "standards".
Some places probably have a lot further to go than others and it would be nice to have a whole lot sweeter smell all around.
I thought it was understood that's what they do these days.
People can probably appreciate that lot of the kilos are more figurative than ever, but there's still enough hard copies made to fill big trucks though.
I'm not in academics professionally myself, how universal would you estimate it is among their journals these days to require a statistical study between an adequate number of different labs before final publication?
It depends a lot on the area. I'd not be so pessimistic. The problem is how many of the papers that reach newspapers are reproducible? I guess less than the average. And also strange results that are misinterpreted to get a amazing but wrong layman explanation.
