"An Invitation to a Secret Society", 2023, Mastroianni

Michelle · Aug 2, 2023

You may remember Adam Mastroianni from such threads as this (about why peer review is crap) or this (about how people believe things could be better). But he recently posted an appeal to join his secret science society (that's not really secret):

I hereby invite every curious human to do science and post it on the internet.

Ask questions, collect data, write stuff, and make it available to everyone. You should feel as free to do and share research as you would feel uploading a video to YouTube or a song to Spotify.

You don’t actually need my or anyone else’s permission to do this, but sometimes people need a little encouragement, so: come on in!

Actually, let me make that a little more urgent: Please come in, we need you.

See, scientific progress has slowed. We fund more research than ever and get way less bang for our buck. We spend 15,000 years of collective effort every year on a peer review system that doesn’t do its job. Fraudsters can publish dozens of papers before they get caught, if they get caught at all.

This is bad. Our world is full of problems, and science is the main way we solve them. We’ve got climate change, an obesity epidemic, and a lot of sad people. There are folks dying of poverty and preventable disease. Heck, we still mainly make electricity by burning dinosaur bones. This can’t be as good as it gets.
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It's a great follow-up piece to the peer review piece mentioned above. Among his points is one that @Jonathan Edwards has made that good science does not necessarily require a lot of money.

In fact, if you're willing to use simple methods, you actually have an advantage over professional scientists. The pros wanna look cool to their colleagues (and win big grant money from the government), so they have to use the fanciest, most advanced techniques, even when simpler stuff would do them better. That's great for you, because it means the professionals will rarely investigate important questions if they don't require giant magnets or ten thousand computer cores or whatever. Cheap ideas are just lying around for you to scoop up. So scoop ‘em, darn it!
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He's even set up a Discord server for people to join if you reach out to him explaining the science you're doing. Given that we have had people here off and on talk about setting up studies, this might be one such avenue to explore.

I also like that he despises the term "citizen scientist" as he finds it terribly condescending.

If you call what I’m describing here “citizen science,” I will karate chop you. I despise that phrase. All science is science, regardless of the author’s credentials. Slapping the label “citizen” on science done by people working outside of institutions is just a way of widening the moat around the ivory tower, of reinforcing the false idea that only people with PhDs and academic jobs get to do “real” science.
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"An Invitation to a Secret Society", 2023, Mastroianni

Michelle Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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"An Invitation to a Secret Society", 2023, Mastroianni

Michelle Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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