RFP on Negative Metascience - by Tim Hwang - Macroscience

A few weeks back, I wrote about negative metascience. While “traditional” metascience is about studying what makes science work well, or faster, negative metascience is the idea that there’s value in attempting to defend scientific processes and institutions against inhibitors of progress. While we need a traditional, positive metascience to improve our science, we also need a better understanding of science’s failure modes. That’s what negative metascience is for. In that piece, I suggested that the research community would benefit from an ongoing set of case studies that conduct post-mortem investigations of cases of scientific failure. With enough of these case studies, we’d have a typology of how healthy research ecosystems break down: how they become sclerotic, misdirected, captured, or otherwise unable to expand our knowledge of the world. We’re putting our money where our mouth is. Macroscience is looking to commission 2-3 rigorous case studies in the coming months that will tak

A few weeks back, I wrote about negative metascience. While “traditional” metascience is about studying what makes science work well, or faster, negative metascience is the idea that there’s value in attempting to defend scientific processes and institutions against inhibitors of progress. While we need a traditional, positive metascience to improve our science, we also need a better understanding of science’s failure modes. That’s what negative metascience is for. In that piece, I suggested that the research community would benefit from an ongoing set of case studies that conduct post-mortem