“The Median Researcher Problem” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Claim: memeticity in a scientific field is mostly determined, not by the most competent researchers in the field, but instead by roughly-median researchers. We’ll call this the “median researcher problem”.
Prototypical example: imagine a scientific field in which the large majority of practitioners have a very poor understanding of statistics, p-hacking, etc. Then lots of work in that field will be highly memetic despite trash statistics, blatant p-hacking, etc. Sure, the most competent people in the field may recognize the problems, but the median researchers don’t, and in aggregate it's mostly the median researchers who spread the memes.
(Defending that claim isn’t really the main focus of this post, but a couple pieces of legible evidence which are weakly in favor:

• People did in fact try to sound the alarm about poor statistical practices well before the replication crisis, and yet practices did not change, so clearly at least [...]

---
First published:
November 2nd, 2024
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vZcXAc6txvJDanQ4F/the-median-researcher-problem-1
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.