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Asked by anon-188237 to Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 15 Nov 2018.
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Paul Matusz answered on 15 Nov 2018:
If you mean about science in general, there is an ongoing discussion whether we need to develop more rigorous, fine-grained theories of the processes we are interested in versus whether we should be collecting more high quality data – from bigge groups of people, using more rigorous statistical tests, etc. etc. Personally, I strongly believe that in science we need to develop a clear hypothesis, from whcih we think how evidence for it would be provided within our experiment (two different things). Otherwise, if we record behavioural responses or, especially, the very rich brain responses, we will not be able to give good explanations to the differences in those across 2 conditions we are comparing.
I hope I understood your question correctly.
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Nadine Mirza answered on 16 Nov 2018:
Science definitely has a crazy amount of important aspects but I think one of the most important parts of science is something called Open Access. For scientists, our bread and butter is publishing papers in academic journals on our research that explain why it was important and what our findings were. These papers are often costly to publish so people sometimes have to pay a hefty fee to read what these papers say. For the longest time that meant research and its results were kept under lock and key for only the people who could afford to pay to read it. It was like an exclusive club.
In came Open Access which was the idea that no one should get to own findings from research and that it should be available to everyone, both in the science sphere and out in the general public. The idea of Open Access is that the institutions where the research occurred are already rolling in money so they should pay for the publication fees and that way everyone else can access these papers and the research for free. I think this principle is so vital because it was one of the first major steps to including everyone in science and letting anyone educate themselves with the information!
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