Stuart Buck: making 21st-century science better

How do we make science in the 21st century better? Stuart Buck, Executive Director of the Good Science Project has some ideas. More concretely, Buck is part of a broader movement of researchers, activists and philanthropists reimagining how science can be done in the wake of the replication crisis. Between 2010 and 2015 many fields of science relying on statistical methods from the 20th century were found to be plagued by methodological errors that produced the ‘sexy’ results the breathless media loves, but that turned out to be totally unfounded. Not replicable. Though the problem was especially rife in psychology, it applied to many fields that use statistics, even including biomedical science.

On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Buck about the problems that plagued science in the last few decades, and how science has become an overly professionalized quest for publications, rather than a method to uncover the truth. They explore the various planks of the Good Science Funding Manifesto. How do you get rid of the bureaucracy that interferes with scientists in their day to day? How do you get scientists to think boldly and take risks? And how do you enforce standards of open data access? Buck believes that with 21st-century information technology there are wide open possibilities to speed up knowledge production and dissemination.