In my world, there's no holy book, no holy methodology. But
there's bullshit all around, and little nuggets of truth if your
lucky, but at the end of the day, you just might find yourself
covered in shit with nothing to show for it.
Scientific papers? They have a publish or perish situation going
on. There is posturing, there is more of a need to show novelty
than there is to confirm other people's experiments. There's no
funding in confirmation, no career advancement.
They're just kids in middle school trying to authentically flub
their way through the book report on a book they didn't read,
because there's a deadline, it's late, and they better sound
good. So they patch up inconsistencies as best they can and hope
the teacher doesn't catch them.
But somewhere in the middle of the posturing, jockeying for
career advancement, seeking funding, kissing ass, covering
mistakes in methodology by diverting to using this REALLY
AWESOME piece of graph-making software... and covering up for
the junior research analyst whose spreadsheet crashed and they
had to fill in some bits of data using statistical
gap-filling...
...there's _SOME_ real science happening. That's the stuff I
look for.
