Publish or Perish
I remember my dad lamenting his scientific publish or perish workplace culture, lightheartedly explaining to me one day how promotions were awarded:
Using that simple method, I doubt that Albert Einstein would've gained a promotion in 1905, due to the (meagre) weight of his Annus Mirabilis papers:
In fact, Albert did not score a promotion in 1905, as detailed in his 1905 Performance Appraisal:
This is a patent office, Albert. Your job is to transform written patent applications into clear and precise language, and to study applications and pick out the new ideas of an invention. These are the priorities. Where does it say that your priorities are rewriting the rules of the Universe, unifying space and time, unifying radiation and matter, or demonstrating the existence of atoms?
Regrettably, I had to put you down as "poor" for "works well with others" and "shares credit appropriately". You had no co-authors on your five papers, and your citations were quite skimpy: no citations at all in your June and September paper, only one citation in your April paper, and not much better on the others. You wrote that your special theory of relativity came to you after a discussion with your friend Michele Besso. But you didn't even acknowledge him in your June paper. This is an area for improvement.
You seem to lack a flare for self-promotion. Lucky for us our PR department stepped in and changed your L/c2 equation into the much more marketable E = mc2.
Based on his performance as a patent clerk, I cannot recommend Albert for a promotion at this time.
-- from Einstein's Patent Clerk Third Class Performance Appraisal of 1905
Curiously, Einstein was passed over for promotion for three long years, until he "fully mastered machine technology", remaining a lowly Patent Clerk Third Class at the Swiss Patent Office until 1 April 1906, when he was finally promoted to Technical Expert Second Class.
See also: Performance Appraisals from the Agile Imposition series.
The Sad Story of Giordano Bruno
In 1600 Giordano Bruno was found guilty of heresy by the Roman Inquisition. He was then humiliatingly paraded naked through the streets of Rome (with his tongue lashed to prevent him speaking) and finally burned at the stake, with his ashes thrown in the Tiber river. His crime? Declaring that the stars are distant suns surrounded by their own planets.
I'm still amazed at how far ahead of his time Bruno was, his bold conjecture only recently verified by exoplanet detections by the Kepler space telescope. If there is a heaven, I hope Bruno smiles every time Kepler finds a new exoplanet and I look forward to paying my respects to him at his statue, located at the site of his execution.
Galileo was only placed under house arrest for the lesser crime of suggesting that the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun (rather than the other way around).
Scientific Culture
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.
-- Planck's Principle (Scientific autobiography, 1950, p.33,97)
The process in the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments or empirical observations based on those predictions. A hypothesis is a conjecture, based on knowledge obtained while seeking answers to the question. The hypothesis might be very specific, or it might be broad. Scientists then test hypotheses by conducting experiments or studies. A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable, implying that it is possible to identify a possible outcome of an experiment or observation that conflicts with predictions deduced from the hypothesis; otherwise, the hypothesis cannot be meaningfully tested.
-- from Scientific method (wikipedia)
Thankfully, Science has come a long way since the days of Galileo and Bruno. Today, the scientific community expects:
Update (see erix response below): the four Mertonian norms (often abbreviated as the CUDO-norms) are:
Because it undermines science, scientists take misconduct very seriously. In response to misconduct, the scientific community may withhold esteem, job offers, and funding, effectively preventing the offender from participating in science. There are also strict rules around scientific publications, as detailed at publishing process and responsible referencing:
Though the traditional Scientific method has served us well, it seems we need new methodologies to tackle the urgent problems facing us today.
Crisis Disciplines
On an evolutionarily miniscule timescale, cultural and technological processes transformed our species’ ecology. These changes that have transpired over this period have come about largely to solve issues at the scale of families, cities, and nations; only recently have cultural products begun to focus on solutions to worldwide problems and wellbeing. Yet we lack the ability to predict how the technologies we adopt today will impact global patterns of beliefs and behavior tomorrow ... social interactions and external feedback make it difficult, if not impossible, to reason about cross-scale dynamics through argument alone (i.e., these are complex adaptive systems).
Humanity faces global and existential threats including climate change, ecosystem degradation, and the prospect of nuclear war. We likewise face a number of other challenges that impact our wellbeing, including racism, disease, famine, and economic inequality. Our success at facing these challenges depends on our global social dynamics in a modern and technologically connected world. Given our evolved tendencies combined with the impact of technology and population growth, there is no reason to believe that human social dynamics will be sustainable or conducive to wellbeing if left unmanaged.
Other crisis disciplines thrive on a close integration of observational, theoretical, and empirical approaches. Global climate models inform, and are informed by, experiments in the laboratory and the field. Mathematics describing disease dynamics suggest treatment paradigms in medicine, which can be tested and validated.
A consolidated transdisciplinary approach to understanding and managing human collective behavior will be a monumental challenge, yet it is a necessary one. Given that algorithms and companies are already altering our global patterns of behavior for financial reasons, there is no safe hands-off approach.
-- from Stewardship of global collective behavior (cited by erix)
As argued convincingly above, the traditional scientific method, requiring laborious peer review for example, is too slow for crisis disciplines and better alternatives must therefore be urgently sought. On a more positive note, we've been forced to do this sort of thing before - the Manhattan Project and rapid vaccine development during our current COVID-19 pandemic spring to mind.
Other Articles in This Series
References
Historical References
References Added Later
Updated 26-Sep-2021: Added paragraph on Mertonian Norms.
In reply to Organizational Culture (Part VII): Science by eyepopslikeamosquito
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