Science Is Too Broke to Afford True Facts
Guess our geeky friends back at the lab have failed to sell enough E=mc² merchandise because science is going through a rough patch—and since it’s hard to get out of the hole when you don't have the cleavage to make a profitable OnlyFans account, scientists are selling the only commodity they produce: facts. I'm not saying you should switch to r/TheRedPill for your educational needs, but with its current business model, the scientific literature will end up less committed to the truth than Amber Heard's legal team.
1. Clickbait or Perish
Fact: 2.5 million academic papers are published each year. That's a lot of scientists powering the backbone of the student loan economy and doing whatever it takes to earn their own Wikipedia entries—and when I say "whatever it takes," I mean it. Let's be honest, when your industry is as saturated as the Twilight fanfic erotica genre you'll be willing to get a little dramatic and clickbaity with your findings if that helps you break the news. And no one's cloning dinosaurs or nailing the recipe for the Powerpuff Girls anytime soon, so let me put it this way: anything from underwire bras to hair dye can be cancerous if you want a Nobel Prize bad enough.
In the know: under the "Totally Unnecessary" section you'll find studies like "What happens if you give ecstasy to an octopus?" or "Can you make a knife out of frozen poop?" I don't mean to say humanity doesn't deserve to know if you can slice your dinner with your breakfast, but we have enough important issues out there to at least make this priority number 2.
2. This Study Has Been Brought to You
Turns out doing the good ol' science drains more money than the electricity bill of a crypto farm (and government funds don’t even start to cover the catering for the lab rats), so it became an industry standard for researchers to go look for a sugar daddy in the private sector. This was when corporations realised their Facebook ads budget could be put to better use by getting science-backed testimonials. "Want your Concord grape juice to have brain-boosting properties? Here at Science® we can make it happen." Hold on to your profit-driven butts cause something tells me that in a few years 10 out of 10 doctors will be recommending Sensodyne.
Hard to argue with this: most of the nutrition research is funded by the food industry. And I guess coffee companies have realised that science marketing is more effective than throwing a piano on George Clooney's head for the sake of spectacle. I'm kinda waiting for Playboy Magazine to fund the "Reading Makes Your Ding Dong Larger" metastudy.
3. You've Reached Your Limit of True Stories This Month
The thing with mainstream audiences is that we usually wait for the Neil DeGrasse Tyson documentary to catch up with science. This puts a lot of niche academic journals up for the challenge of monetizing a catalogue that's read less often than Stevie Wonder's home library. So we end up having ones like the Journal of Coordination Chemistry, which charges over $20,000 for a yearly subscription—I don't know what kind of content they offer but hell, for that money I better learn enough chemistry to turn my nail dirt into fucking diamonds.
Here's the problem: as academic journals charge criminal amounts of money for access (a single PDF sets you back $15, out of the dozens an average student may need), we have an avalanche of tinfoil hat wearers hustling content into the wild web with Windows Movie Maker 2012 and a very loose grasp of reality. And that's why lies prevail these days; because most of the truth is paywalled.
4. Best Peers Forever
The main difference between science and History Channel is that not any average Joe can put on the clown shoes, self-publish an ebook and call themselves an "expert." Academic articles have to go through an editorial process called "peer review" before they get published. The problem? Everyone hates peer review. Researchers have to wait forever and a day to get their papers approved, and field experts didn't pick the one profession that’s most unlike a Got Talent panel judge to end up giving a critique on some postgraduate student's homework.
So this happened: papers are now being published without the revision process and dubbed "preprints," or as I call them, "The reason why people were seasoning their steak with Ivermectin during the pandemic." Kids: don't trust rushed science. If someone tells you to take a shot of bleach and jump off a bridge, don't do it—especially if that someone is wearing a Harvard sweatshirt.
5. Nobel Prizes at Lower Prices
Even after kissing enough butt to get a grant and sci-hub’ing their way through paywalls, the economic hardships of an aspiring Carl Sagan don't end there. Submitting a study for publication will still burn thousands of dollars out of their swear jar, and that's without the guarantee that they'll get published. This is when predatory journals come in. The idea for these Aliexpress-knockoff journals is to cut costs from the publishing process by eliminating all forms of quality control. The result? You get scientific literature with the same rigorous fact-checking as Alex Jones four Kill Cliffs deep into a conversation on The Joe Rogan Experience—read: scarce.
Hard to argue with this: if you were wondering exactly how much bullshit can pass through these predatory journals unnoticed, here's a guy that managed to publish an academic paper on how to fight intergalactic parasites with magnets. And when you realise 1/5 of all science produced each year comes from these bullshit publications you'd wish we rebuild the library of Alexandria just so that we can burn it again.
So, technically...
Science is too broke to afford true facts. I wouldn’t say we are on the verge of a second dark age but it seems that selling out to corporations, being clickbaity and skipping editorial processes is the way to reliably make a career in the academic industry. It’s sad to say but when you look at all the money streaming services are making, there’s no other way to put it: business-wise, fiction does beat reality.