why science is stupid
I’m resubmitting the grant that I submitted to NIH last summer with major revisions. It’s just a fact of science that research has to be hypothesis driven; scientists are rarely able to do research just for the sake of doing it without basing in on prior observations. so I have read the previous research, and I have come up with a hypothesis: the populations of cells in the brain that I am looking at are different in many ways, but in one key way they are not different. The reason science is stupid is because other scientists only want to see positive results that DO show some kind of difference. I like to think that these cells are different in this one key way, but I can’t find anything in the literature to suggest that they are. So my hypothesis is that they are the same in this one key way. Because it’s a negative hypothesis, it will never get funded by me or anyone else, so no one will ever figure it out and show whether or not they truly are the same or different. I could try to make up a bullshit hypothesis about why I DO think they are different, but the reviewers will say “where is your evidence?”, and I won’t be able to give them any, because no one has had the opportunity to do it because science is positive-result driven only. science is supposed to be the pursuit of knowledge and truth, but half of knowledge and truth will always remain a mystery as long as science doesn’t want to know about negative results.
