Every year over one million scientific articles are published, but how useful are they? It is impossible to get an overview of the content, but the media reports indicate that researchers are not concerned with publishing something they are reasonably sure of, but rather what may be the case, or what may happen. This is what we in scientific theory refer to as guesses or hypotheses. Historically, researchers have largely kept these private guesses to themselves until they had clarified the matter, either alone or after discussion with colleagues. There is a good reason for that. The vast majority of new ideas and hypotheses do not survive further research. As many as 99 out of 100, we must believe Einstein. That estimate is supported by what is in textbooks in a subject published at ten-year intervals in recent decades. There is usually little or no news in the latest issue. This means that today’s researchers are helping to spread many, in a scientific context, unfounded claims. It destroys confidence in academia. However, publishing ideas and guesses is tempting. It is an easy way to increase the number of publications. It’s easier to rewrite and find some support for an idea, than to test it out. The latter usually takes many years. It took Isaac Newton over 20 years from the time he as a student got the idea of gravity, until he had a finished product. He did not publish anything about gravity until he thought he had solved the problem. The history of natural science shows us that what was published were precise proposals for solutions. They were therefore also clear on what one did not want to observe, or risked. Delimiting in the outcome space, excluding an “infinite” number of conceivable and often undesirable events, is an important part of science – perhaps the most important. It’s science in a nutshell. It is based on determinism – given A then B, and only B. However, much of today’s scientific news comes in the form of vague claims. Given A, there is an x percent probability of B. These are not only imprecise statements, there are also statements that do not exclude anything. How to understand this tendency to redefine what constitutes good research? I think part of the reason is that the number of researchers has increased faster than funding. It has therefore become a struggle to become visible. Due to the lack of concrete answers, one is therefore almost forced to publish and disseminate highly preliminary ideas and hypotheses. However, this is something you expect to read about in applications for money and in project descriptions, not in scientific publications. Many of the publications also suggest that something serious may occur and that there is therefore a need for more research. This reinforces the impression that these are applications for financial support. History also teaches us that in research, the number of researchers is not important, but the quality of them. Today, there are about 10 million researchers, one for every thousand people. During the 19th century, there were only a few thousand active scientists at any one time, one for every million people, and they came up with about half of the slightly more than 50 laws of nature. In other words, there are more researchers at the University of Oslo today than there were in the entire western world 150 years ago. Success in research seems to require a very special talent, a “scientific instinct” as Albert Einstein referred to it, connected to an extraordinary dedication. When Newton was once asked how he could discover so much new, he replied “by thinking about it all the time.” The university and college sector in Norway employs about 15,000 academics who spend about half of their time teaching, the rest is devoted to research. This means that almost 1 in 100 working adults in Norway are government-employed researchers. The large proportion of researchers is defended by saying that the teaching should be research-based, but in order to provide teaching at bachelor and master’s level, according to the Mjøs committee, which laid the foundation for the Quality Reform, it is not a requirement to be or have been an active researcher. It is only a requirement that you have a good knowledge of the scientific method / thinking. This is something most people get through their own education and practice of their subject. About 40 percent of a cohort now take higher education. Higher education is therefore becoming a general education, as high school was in the 1970s. We must take into account that good research is not grassroots sports. It is an extreme sport for the brain. Only the very best and the most dedicated are able to bring a subject forward, ie set new “records” or come up with completely new “sports”. In today’s system, most of those who are most productive in research teach on an equal footing with others. They should not do that. We must take up the debate about how many publicly paid researchers we should have in higher (general) education. My suggestion is that more academics should prioritize teaching new cohorts with students. There will be better management of intellectual capital.
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Academic broad sports – Expression
