Faith-Based Empiricism

Before you judge the analogy with theology as being too harsh, conduct the followingexperiment. Randomly select one of your own publications from a year or two ago and think about what would be involved in reproducingthe results. How longwould it take, assumingyou would be able to do it? If you can’t reproduce those results, why do you believe them? Why should your readers? Our inability to reproduce results leads to a debilitatingparadox, where we as reviewers and readers accept highly em...

 The Extended Peer Community

The perspective of Funtowicz and Ravetz on post normal science [59] – characterized by conflicting values and deep uncertainties – is useful in moving forward on messes and wicked problems. When the stakes are high and uncertainties are large, Funtowicz and Ravetz point out that there is demand by the public to participate and assess quality, which they refer to as the extended peer community. The extended peer community consists not only of those with traditional institutional accreditat...

 We Have No Book That Captures the Basic, Most Important R...

As individuals, we are amazingly ignorant and incapable. How many of us, alone in a wilderness, could make a flint knife? Is there anyone now alive who knows even a tenth of everything there is to know in science? How many of those employed in the electricity industry could make any of its components, such as wires or switches? The important difference that separates us from the social insects is that they carry the instructions for nest building in their genes. We have no permanent ubiquitou...