Thoughts on the state of science nowadays?

[Belacqua]

Publish or perish. Nowadays to publish papers, if possible on prestigious magazines, is what every scientist must strive to. No longer you do science and see what happens. Rather, finding positive results and publishing is what matters today.

Publishers making billions out of the work of scientists who earn nothing back (Elsevier, etc). The career of scientists depending on quantity and quality of papers. Which must be done within a certain time and budget limit. Most of the time research has been already predefined by the laboratory or professor.

This is what I heard during my sojourn through academia. Publish or perish, and the need to get grant money -- usually from the government or for-profit corporations -- pretty much determined what research would be done. And to a large extent meant that the results were pre-determined. Some good things may be discovered, but it's a hell of a long way from pure science. 

I also knew some people in the Linguistics department who had similar troubles. Since this isn't STEM you might think it would be less strict, but it's still largely based on data-gathering and interpretation. Department politics determined exactly what the students were allowed to research and whose data they were allowed to write about. Basically they ended up doing the department head's writing for her, and ended up with the ground-breaking conclusion that beginning language learners make a lot of mistakes, while more advanced students make fewer. And they paid a ton of tuition money to have the privilege of writing it up.

My own department was the farthest away from STEM -- philosophy of art and aesthetics. But it was also guided entirely by institutional needs. In that department I never once had a conversation with a peer or a professor about art. It was all about which conference you were going to, how many people attended your presentation, what journal you'd published in. Everybody was publishing somewhere, but nobody had the time or the interest to read it. Even if someone had managed to publish great things, they would have been lost in the general flood of paper. 

I guess some people still manage to navigate the system and end up publishing good stuff. More power to them. They are the exceptions. 

But in STEM once you're out of academia I don't see how things could improve. If you want a living wage you pretty much have to sell your soul to a corporation or the Pentagon. 

We still hear people say "trust the science" and "I trust it because it's peer reviewed," but people with this kind of confidence seem unaware of the political, ideological, and financial influences that are deep into science as we know it.