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If you BELIEVE in science you are doing it wrong.Science is to be learned and understood.When you have data you don't need faith.Why does it work?Why is it the best way to explain phenomena?Excellent question.The answer is scientific method.Here are its steps:Develop a question you would like to resolve through scientific research.Make observations by gathering information through background research and describing the phenomenon you're investigating.Form a hypothesis. This is an explanation of how the phenomenon operates. It can be used to predict future observations.Test your hypothesis by performing experiments and collecting data.Analyze your data to see if it confirms your prediction.Interpret the data and draw conclusions that may serve as a starting point for a new hypothesis. You should be able to confirm whether or not your original hypothesis was correct.Publish and communicate your results.Everything must be repeatable, up for peer review and tested without bias.If results attest to the assumption being wrong, desert the assumption.A scientific theory (like gravity) summarizes a hypothesis or group of hypotheses that have been supported with repeated testing. If enough evidence accumulates to support a hypothesis, it moves to the next step—known as a theory— in the scientific method explained above, and becomes accepted as a valid explanation of a phenomenon.The theory presented must provide the method which led to its becoming for scrutiny and criticism.This theory will FOREVER be challenged and confronted by all new relevant findings and will only remain relevant as an explanation to the phenomena it explains, if such new finding do not contradict it.This methodology makes bias and wishful thinking... well.. irrelevant to the conclusion.Hope this helps.

Didn't read this particular article, but I've read enough of them to guess at what they're saying. “When there are more guns around, more people get shot”. Well, duh! Did you know that most drownings occur on or near water? And most automobile fatalities occur on public roads?The problem with screeds like this, is they talk about TOTAL gun deaths. They include gang members up to age 25 in the group of “children”. They include suicides. They include gang and drug related deaths. They include lawful self defense shootings by lawfully armed citizens and police officers in the line of duty.The simple facts are that in those states where lawful concealed carry either via Shall Issue laws or, as in my state (Kansas), Constitutional Carry, criminals may shoot each other, but are much less likely to try their luck on an innocent victim.I stopped reading political commentary disguised as “science” a long time ago. If you're presenting peer reviewed studies, backed by the data sets you used to arrive at your conclusions, and the questions and internals of your polling, I'll give you a fair read, even if I disagree with your conclusions. But most of them dumb down their article to accommodate the length of the average bowel movement, and call it science. “Why I have a “PhD” after my name, so I must be smarter than you, you fucking Neanderthal hillbilly, so my opinion is the only one that counts. If you were as smart as me, you would be given 2000 column inches in this highly prestigious journal”.No thanks, I'm perfectly capable (despite my lowly Bachelors Degree) of doing research and forming my own conclusions.

I'll restrict the answer to US biomedical research, my field.What does success for an academic research group entail in the prevailing status quo? Consistently bring in the dough and publish steadily. That's it. Not whether the group leader is a thoughtful and successful mentor, not whether all their trainees gain steady, well-paying science jobs, no, none of that good stuff. Just bring in the dough and publish. How such a group operates then flows from these two imperatives. Since wannabees are pressured to emulate what passes for success, this has become the blueprint for all academic research groups, successful or not. Hence it's the prevailing status quo.Dough means grant funding and publish means steady stream of peer-reviewed publications, hopefully some of them in high-profile journals. The group leader, the PI (Principal Investigator), leverages these to climb the career ladder and generate more of the same, i.e., more grant funding for their projects and research publications.It's more relevant to examine how unsustainable the prevailing status quo is. For e.g., if an academic group is successful, are all its participants equally successful? Unfortunately no. A problem more than a few decades in the making and becoming more acute post-Great Recession, prevailing biomedical research enterprise decision-makers have created a system of perverse incentives. Decision-makers are university presidents, upper echelon management and professors, funding agencies, and to a lesser extent, scientific journals.Typically an academic lab has the leader, the PI, and a plethora of short-term worker bees and hardly any permanent staff. The former are post-docs and graduate (PhD) students and the latter, technicians.For far too long, universities have been graduating far more PhDs than can be absorbed into academia. This is clear by the steadily increasing numbers of post-docs, a species practically non-existent pre-WWII. Now, it's even commonplace for biomedical doctorates to pursue serial post-docs until well into their 30s, often into their 40s. No way are all of them getting academic (faculty) positions nor are industry positions expanding fast enough to absorb them. So why is this even happening?Simple. The current system works for the few who benefit from this status quo. Unfortunately those few also happen to dictate the terms. Sound familiar? Similar formula applies to just about any problem that ails society.Certainly the universities bask in the prestige of the academic stars in their stable, yes, the same ones successful in getting grant funding and peer-reviewed publications. A PI with a consistent track record of getting grant funding is a net gain. After all, this is someone bringing more money into the university. The university also gains by graduating a surfeit of PhDs who go on to form the backbone of captive scientific labor needed for biomedical research. Since the pipeline sharply truncates upstream at the tenure-track and tenure levels, it's far more than the entire biomedical research system can absorb into well-paying, stable science jobs but that's not the universities and other stakeholders headache...yet.The PIs benefit as well, those lucky few who make it to faculty out of the bottleneck of too many doctorates and too few faculty positions. Their benefit? Fewer permanent staff, lower permanent overhead cost. It serves their financial interest well to have a revolving door of short-term worker bees who'll rotate through their labs every few years, more senior ones tasked with the extra drudgery of training newcomers. After all, the PI's too busy writing grant applications, presenting at conferences, serving on grant review committees, peer-reviewing manuscripts for scientific journals and drafting their own manuscripts. And what are the hapless post-docs to do, go on strike? Existing in the legally unprotected workplace limbo of an ill-defined temporary position that all too often encompasses the bulk of their youth and middle years, certainly they're in no position to make demands. They aren't even at the bargaining table yet. After all, arrangements such as the University of California post-docs partnering with the United Auto Workers to gain collective bargaining rights remain the exception, not the rule.As Professor, Department of Economics, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, Paula Stephan is one of the rare academic canaries in the coalmine who's made arguments similar to those in this answer. The Careers section of Science magazine named her their first ever Person of the Year in 2012 (1).'Stephan succinctly shows why federally funded academic research generally probes “safe” questions, limiting the odds of both conspicuous failures and dramatic breakthroughs. She shows why the demand for low-cost graduate students and even lower-cost postdocs is perpetual, insatiable, and out of proportion with subsequent career opportunities... Her book's analysis lays bare exactly how and why the pyramid scheme harms the interests and prospects of young scientists struggling to find careers in a glutted labor market...Most importantly, today, "nobody’s arguing that there’s a shortage of people in the biomedical sciences. That’s really over, and that’s a real breakthrough. I think you have to chalk that right up there as a success.”...“I wouldn’t overemphasize,” Stephan cautions. “I think if something wonderful happened and the economy was wonderful and federal funding was flush again, I think [some] people [might] just keep on doing what they’re doing.” And anyway, while widespread acceptance of the problem is a big step forward, solving the problem will be much harder "because coming up with the answer is truly threatening to the way they do business," she says'So there you have it. In the current dispensation, a successful academic research group operates to reflects well on its leader and host university, both of whom are the few benefiting from the labor of the unsung, ill-paid many (see figures below from 2 and 3 for some incontrovertible data supporting this answer's essential arguments).Thus far, akin to putting the fox in charge of the hen house, reform proposals are being drafted by those invested in and profiting from the current system. Are their efforts likely to solve this problem? If anything, history teaches no. Outsiders are usually far more successful in reforming such unsustainable status quos but that's not the case here so definitely unwise to hold one's breath.Bibliography1. Science, Beryl Lieff Benderly, Dec 21, 2012. Person of the Year: Paula Stephan. Person of the Year: Paula Stephan2. Trends in the Early Careers of Life Scientists. Committee on Dimensions, Causes, and Implications of Recent Trends in the Careers of Life Scientists. Board on Biology Commission on Life Sciences. Office of Scientific and Engineering Personnel National Research Council National Academy Press. Washington, DC 19983. National Science Foundation (NSF) National Science Board Science and Engineering Indicators, 2014. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/content/etc/nsb1401.pdfFurther Reading1. Pickett, Christopher L., et al. "Toward a sustainable biomedical research enterprise: Finding consensus and implementing recommendations." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112.35 (2015): 10832-10836. http://www.pnas.org/content/112/35/10832.full.pdf?sid=be48a930-dd53-460d-a6d6-df333460dcd12. Daniels, Ronald J. "A generation at risk: Young investigators and the future of the biomedical workforce." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112.2 (2015): 313-318. http://www.pnas.org/content/112/2/313.full.pdf?sid=c1a74296-330e-4e8d-8a88-346b896146813. Alberts, Bruce, et al. "Opinion: Addressing systemic problems in the biomedical research enterprise." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112.7 (2015): 1912-1913. http://www.pnas.org/content/112/7/1912.full.pdf?sid=c2edb8b4-fe66-49bd-9497-663a50287be24. The Atlantic, Laura McKenna, April 21, 2016. The Number of Ph.D.s Keeps Rising Despite Bad Job Numbers5. The Atlantic, Laura McKenna, September 18, 2015. Can Graduate Education Be Fixed Without Burning It Down?Thanks for the R2A, Ayon Nandi.