Has anybody else noticed how modern day entomology, despite its widespread adoptions of statistical tools, routinely fails to predict even somewhat realistic likelihoods of an "invasion year" of Vanessa cardui, despite publishing average estimates in lepidopterological guides? Well, the truth is that there actually aren't any statistical trend analysis actually being conducted and only some past data from some locations hidden in supplementary materials – if they even exist, as most data is being collected by volunteers for whatever non-profit organization or profit-driven research company – gets published, beautifully cramped into diagrams without even naming the axes, with values and distances between each value for each species being chosen at random but in such a way that it clearly isn't intentional malice but sheer incompetence. Most of those diagrams are indeed written by "Diplom" holders who never had to undergo proper statistical training, which not is mandatory for anyone studying, well, anything. Those numbers published in popular guides are ass-pulls.
Anything under the banner of "biology" already has been the "oddball" among the STEM subjects simply for being the only branch that actively rejected anything that closely resembled the mathematical "chaos theory" in the 90's out of the blue and after (somewhat) following its abstract core principles for decades. Biology pretty much divided itself so radically that anything related to genetics pretty much gets you stuck in labs with no outside contact and no opportunity to touch some grass, whereas evolution and ecology, and subsequently anything related to those, have drifted so far away from any scientific integrity that their average outputs are WORSE than those of economists and just slightly better than those of political studies[1] – plus also largely spending their work inside their own offices. But it's even worse after applying Feynman's "Cargo Cult" metaphor and Taleb's "Intellectual Yet Idiot" to evolution/ecology because they fit each description to scary degrees.
When you follow projects such as "Retraction Watch", you barely will find any incidence of scientific malpractice in the "soft" sciences. Especially evolution/ecology are chronically underrepresented. Since it does share its output quality with that of the worst economical studies and the best political research, which already is extremely rare to begin with, it is fair to assume that anything but science happens within those fairly isolated branches and has been so normalized that you cannot save them without burning their departments to the ground.
The chase for academic prestige isn't new at all. Plato's Socrates called those chasers "prostitutes" back in his days and even Charles Darwin was guilty of doing it himself because one of his colleagues developed his own evolution theory at the same time but independently, even being better than Darwin's original writings which he had to edit multiple times due to rushing it. It also isn't exclusive to Europe in the slightest, as even faced with death, Chinese students continued to cheat their ways to the top of the hierarchy before the Western Han dynasty abolished the so-called "Five Punishments".
But this always used to be restricted to the "rich" and those already situated in the higher, smaller social classes, hardly leaking through the lowest classes who, for the most part, remained fully unaware of it and never really attributed any wrongdoings affecting them to the academic elites. Now a poor dumbass like me without those formal qualifications and "prestige" can easily smell academic bullshittery from a mile away, even assisting actual students in their understandings of things and passing their useless exams with ease. All they do is consume knowledge in large chunks, spit it back it during exams, and then forget about almost entirely – Germans call this "Bulimielernen", an on-the-nose reference to the eating disorder bulimia.
While we've got the term for this institutionalized cheating, Germany so far has remained quiet on anything related to the rising phenomenon called "publish or perish" and the sharp increase in paper mills across the globe. Indeed, our press barely even wanted to address the replication crisis when psychology became the designated black sheep for noticing and being open about it first – almost like gays were viewed as the main culprits for spreading AIDS once they started to raise awareness for it as the very first group doing so. Few people to this very day truly have overcome this misconception and rather continue to chronically underestimate that HIV mostly spreads among heterosexuals.
This very same poor communication also affects anything related to the replication crisis because especially outside of the US it stopped before it even began, with the crisis affecting psychology in particular merely having been treated as a side note not worthy of receiving all too much attention even within German psychology departments itself. The downside of this "German way of communicating", which isn't all too different from an autist with ADHD and additional Cluster B personality disorders, is that while most scandals successfully get brushed under the rug, very few at virtually every third blood moon get so heavily scandalized that they end up causing even more outright bizarre responses from the actual culprits, with everyone involved openly backstabbing each other after heavily boosting and protecting each other for years[2]. But even those utterly ridiculous scandals are forgotten quickly or don't even reach anyone outside of those convoluted systems in the first place. Once the designated pawn has been sacrificed, everyone immediately reverts to "business as usual" without ever mentioning this instance ever again and even appearing like they have truly forgotten about it the moment they shift their attention to something else out of... boredom, more money or more prestige by covering something else, who even knows at this point.
Suspending the hyperbolic writing for a minute, the reason everything continues to fail is because nearly every aspect of life as a whole has become some sort of neoliberalized, regardless of who is in charge and what they claim their political affiliation to be. Academia perhaps may be the worst among those due to have been prone to it since its inception. No one outside of this exclusive club ever really got close to even comprehend fractions of what effectively is nothing but another industry that is selling a product (i.e. a ladder to a higher social rank). But even its service has gotten so bad that someone, who has never seen a university from the inside and pretty much dropped out of this parallel culture right after local universities presented themselves and forced us to attend every single PR event in our grammar school, has to assist students navigating through this growing jungle of demands and restrictions, whereas those on top of it are spared the consequences from their own demands and only get to experience it once a single deal fails and thus end up getting thrown under the bus, so others can save their faces.
The ironic part is that very few people with no academic-like training whatsoever actually do see through some of this stuff themselves without even being aware of the full extent of it AND end up taking action on their own. This has resulted in two relatively stable biotopes next to my village owned by two older men genuinely caring about nature, yet harboring a deeply-rooted hatred towards academics and any professional hired by our state to conduct some minimal monitoring. The hatred is so strong that they let me do my own amateur research without any restrictions other than to not disclose the exact locations of each of their properties – all despite lacking the necessary credentials, deep knowledge (which I have to acquire on the field, so to speak) and virtually no credibility or money. While this is a positive paradox, this usually doesn't go well, either, especially in Great Britain where "guerrilla rewildings" demonstrate how everyone involved ends up working against each other, rather than attempting to try to resolve any issues[3].
Given all the surprises, out of least likely people to ever mention such an aspect of human behavior as Albert Speer, former Minister of Armaments and War Production of Nazi Germany. His books now are frowned upon among German academics just because a single, now inaccessible paper declared all of Speer's books to be "nothing but lies", despite Speer's claims that his books are subjective memories and introspections on how he eventually came to realize and accept his role as an opportunist who cared more about Hitler's praise and the prestige of being a high-ranking national socialist than anything else. He didn't even wholly hide how much he was struggling when he was forced to engage in introspection during his time at Spandau, even demonstrating an unusual amount of self-contradictions and blame deflection right after multiple attempts at finally accepting his responsibility for this catastrophe that ended in the deaths of roughly 60 million people in total. It is a fascinating study of the psychology of a war criminal that already was privileged before rising up the ranks and almost a stark contrast to the diaries of Joseph Goebbels, who flip-flopped extremely between idolizing Hitler and National Socialism and damning it during his career out of deeply-rooted self-esteem issues due to his disability and perceived lower social rank.
It was Speer who mentioned that each department, and even within each department, everyone involved was constantly in competition with each other and no one really bothered with another until something ended up on stake and provided some sort of additional benefits. Hitler even encouraged such a dysfunctional environment because it provided the immediate results he desired, not expecting that this would end up fueling his grandiose thinking that eventually led to the devastating setbacks at the gates of Moscow that would cause the whole system to collapse. He took the easiest way out, yet most war criminals, especially those in the middle ranks, got away with any sort of punishment – in fact, some pretty much instantly went back at rising through the ranks uninterrupted because neither the freshly-neoliberalized – for some reason they merely called it "ordoliberalism" – West Germany nor the Bolsheviki-ruled East Germany were bothered to care and just desired "business as usual" as soon as possible. German academia still tries to not address any of their institution's past activities, even when none of those currently in charge were responsible for the atrocities of their respective predecessors.
Academia went from "just corrupt" to not even knowing what it's doing anymore and with such a widespread apathy and extreme opportunism that would make Hitler and even the East German Stasi jealous. But in the end, everyone loses in the long run, especially those who cannot even talk.
Back to usual business, this entry is already long and depressing enough.
---
[1]
"Primary studies in ecology and evolutionary biology included in our sample of meta-analyses, on average, only had a power of 15% to detect the biased-corrected effect size identified in the meta-analysis, which is consistent with earlier findings in the sub-fields of global change biology [56, 81] and animal behaviour [10, 23]. When excluding studies with effects that are not statistically significant, the corresponding average power of primary studies was still very low (17%; Table S4). As a result, only studies with largely exaggerated effect sizes (4-fold) have reached statistical significance. Contrastingly, Type S error was small but not trivial (8%); note that making an error in direction can result in a completely opposite conclusion. A lack of statistical power seems to be a general phenomenon in scientific research, low power has been identified in many disciplines (medical sciences = 20% [82], neuroscience = 21% [16], psychological sciences = 36% [27], economics = 18% [83]). Given this, meta-analysis with appropriate bias correction is an important way to generate more reliable estimates of effect sizes [30]. Statistically speaking, meta-analysis is an effective way to approximate population-level estimates by combining sampling level estimates, despite its shortcomings, some of which were shown above. Science is a process of evidence accumulation in which primary studies are the basis that can be used to produce high-order and high-quality evidence (e.g. via systematic review and meta-analysis)."
[2]
This case already is an example of the extremely rare reporting of gross scientific malpractice that wouldn't have become public at all if the University of Kiel wouldn't have ended up not qualifying for the most-desired grants initiative in Germany. The cases that usually get reported almost exclusively deal with mainstream politicians being caught for engaging in plagiarism DECADES after assuming their high-ranking offices and even in spite of it as best shown in the cases of Ursula von der Leyen, current president of the EU commission with an insanely long history of political scandals, and, as an outright criminal example who already spent some time in prison, ECB president Christine Lagarde.
[3]