This is a guest post by Zach Ramsay . Zach is a developer at Eris Industries and a prior academic, where he was successful at teaching toads, then rats to play video games. Making science better with blockchains (and IPFS!) is what keeps him up at night.
The thing that had me most excited about Bitcoin back in 2013 was its potential to re-align the incentives in academia and re-define how science and research is conducted.
At the time, I was spending my days training rats in Skinner boxes to hunt crickets, listening to every possible Bitcoin explainer I could get my hands on. It took a good two years, and now the problem set is much clearer. This post is a think-piece on how academia might be improved with blockchain technology.
In what follows, I’ll discuss the problems that perturbed me the most and highlight potential solutions.
Taught in every Research Methods 101 course, the file-drawer problem – more generally referred to as publication bias – does perhaps the most disservice to the scientific community at large. Allow me to explain.
Alice is a researcher in cell biology. One night she dreams up an idea for a potentially groundbreaking experiment. Alice does the experiment, but does not get the result she expected. Alice tweaks a few parameters and tries again. Again, the result doesn’t fit her hypothesis. She eventually abandons this “groundbreaking” idea and moves on to other things.
Bob is also a cell biology researcher. Independently of Alice – but after reading much of the same literature – Bob dreams up a similar “groundbreaking” experiment. After many tries, Bob also fails to get the expected result. Bob moves on.
What’s the problem here? Bob duplicated Alice’s efforts. Why? Alice’s efforts were not accessible to Bob; instead, they were siloed away under “things-that-don’t-work” on […]
