What we can call the Age of Materialist Science has given us a scientific academia landscape with the following dysfunctional features:
People trained as scientists are coerced into accepting or paying lip-service to doubtful belief tenets such as the nonexistence of souls and spirits, the neural origin of all mental effects, and the accidental origin of all biological innovations, contrary to a vast number of facts and observations.
Much of what is called science consists of the belief dogmas of a belief community, often ideas contradicted by much observational evidence, such as beliefs that human mental phenomena are purely brain effects.
Scientists act like conformist members of a belief community, afraid to challenge belief dogmas that have become kind of sacred tenets in their community.
Scientists are effectively encouraged to ignore a vast body of relevant observations of the paranormal, observations conflicting with the materialist belief tenets of the scientist's belief community.
Much of the activity of scientists consists of doing poorly designed experiments trying to provide evidence for various beliefs prevailing in the scientist belief community.
A system of peer review exists by which anomalous observations and contrarian analysis and heterodox viewpoints can be prevented from being published.
Smug achievement legends are constantly repeated, even when they make no sense, such as the claim that a nineteenth century scientist did something to explain protein molecules and super-complex cells that he knew nothing about.
Overconfidence, hubris and knowledge overestimation is systematically encouraged, along with absurd claims that scientists “pretty much understand” things that are a thousand miles over their head.
Someday this very dysfunctional system may be replaced by something better. Below are some very rough thoughts about some of the principles that a reformed, post-materialist science might follow.
Do not put any previous scientist on any kind of pedestal, or reverently attach special value to his thoughts and theories.
Recognize the strong possibility of an observer getting novel and currently inexplicable observational results, and instead of ignoring such results, direct funding and attention to follow up on them.
Make federally funded scientific research freely available to all, rather than hiding scientific work behind paywalls or in expensive journals that make the taxpayer pay again for research he already funded.
Value all observations by previous careful observers, not dismissing such observations with excuses such as saying people believed the wrong things when the observations were made.
Discourage inflexible and one-sided printed science textbooks, replacing them with electronic works that allow readers to add links and comments that draw attention to errors and omissions in the works, and draw attention to conflicting evidence and contrary viewpoints.
Recognize that humans do not understand the deep mysteries of the origin of life, the origin of large organisms and the origin of minds, and be less generous in funding scientists spending most of their careers trying to bolster previous boasts claiming explanations for such things, while encouraging a critical analysis of their work.
Do not ignore or dismiss repeatedly reported observational phenomena with a claim that the thing cannot be happening because it is impossible.
Recognize that science is only one of quite a few important ways of reaching truth, acknowledging the equal importance of other paths such as logic, mathematics, history, scholarship and direct personal experience.
Revise psychology textbooks and biology textbooks so that they discuss at length hard-to-explain or inexplicable human observations and anomalous experiences, rather than censoring and suppressing such observational reports.
Follow the principle that when reliable observers frequently report specific kinds of observations of the inexplicable and anomalous, such observations should be given more attention rather than less attention.
Recognize the high tendency of social structures such as universities and colleges to create conformist belief communities that may have a negative impact on scientific progress, and give rise to speech customs and belief traditions that masquerade as well-established science.
Create a credential system where anyone who passes a very hard 3-hour test on some scientific subject can be certified as an expert on that topic, even if he has not passed through the conformity-creating system of colleges and universities.
Create and fund alternative structures and organizations for learning and research separate from universities and colleges that have been so infected by conformist belief traditions, not as a replacement but as a rival and an alternative.
Respect the observations of people who are not professional scientists, rather than having some snobbish elitist attitude that observations count for little unless they are made by professors or near-professors.
Revamp the current university and college science instruction system, which suffers from an authoritarian teacher/follower model not varying much from the teaching model of two thousand years ago, replacing it with some model encouraging more dissent and discussion of alternative viewpoints and evidence conflicting with predominant assumptions.
Revamp or rethink the "one-to-many" model of collegiate classroom instruction which tends too strongly to produce a meek acceptance of ideology or dubious claims passed on by authorities.
Replace in many university departments the current habit of giving someone with a master's degree a PhD based only on some very narrow research on one tiny topic, and make extremely broad multi-subject cross-discipline study the thing that gets you the PhD.
Federally fund independent scientists with worthy research proposals, even those working outside of the university system.
Have a large fraction of all federally funded scientific research approved by persons outside of academia, to help prevent "echo chamber maintenance" effects whereby some scientist belief community with "purse string" control keeps funding research designed to support its cherished beliefs.
Create a system in which public comments can appear at the end of every online science paper, allowing the public to dispute poorly designed papers, discuss conflicting evidence, and dispute papers making claims not justified by anything in the paper.
To discourage studies in which researchers feel free to slice and dice data in innumerable ways until they find something "statistically significant," create a pre-registration system for experimental studies, in which papers must only report on whether the results supported a previously announced hypothesis and whether the data collection and data analysis procedures followed matched a detailed experimental plan published before any data was collected. Also have a red-flag system whereby the reader is warned of the failure of an experimental paper to follow such a standard.
Create sample-size calculation conventions and study-group-size standards that limit the proliferation of misleading experimental studies in which false alarms (easily explainable by chance effects) are heralded as scientific discoveries.
Stop acting as if unintuitive principles not suggested by common experience (such as "everything must be explained by matter and energy" or "there cannot be mysterious unseen influences") should be preferred over intuitive principles suggested by common experience (such as "accidents don't produce complex inventions" and "where there's lot of smoke, there's probably fire," which is a good rule-of-thumb in dealing with whether observational reports suggest some underlying reality).
Stop promoting scientists based on the number of papers they have published, and encourage alternate promotion criteria such as the number of times a scientist has published a paper judged to follow a "Best Practices" standard.
End the current secretive peer-review system that acts as an ideological filter preventing dissenting viewpoints, reports of conflicting evidence, and novel observational reports, replacing it with a “let scientists stumble but flag their stumbles” system that will encourage public comments about any mistakes in a scientific paper, along with also a quality grading system whereby inferior papers can be low-graded.
Stop making dubious claims of a scientific consensus that are not established by secret ballots of scientists, and create some system for secret balloting of scientists that will clarify how much they agree on opinions, a system that always offers a variety of belief answers including “I don't know.”
Make a large fraction of all scientific funding go to studies that will be guaranteed publication studies in which publication is assured even if a null result is found.
Make a small fraction of all scientific funding go to groups trying to disprove or falsify prevailing ideas and assumptions.
Reform the speech and writing habits of scientists, to discourage the continuation of misleading speech practices and misleading visuals that are shockingly common in scientific literature.
Stop referring to speculative unobserved things such as dark matter, dark energy and accidental macroevolution as "science," and accurately refer to them as "scientist speculations."
Reform current profit structures that reward bad science and bad scholarship that ignores important relevant evidence, and create novel profit structures that reward best-practices science and scholarship that takes into account all relevant evidence.
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