Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
Thats just one aspect of science where I think that anyone who can claim "we know and understand this phenomenon well enough to make massive, sweeping environmental changes with profound economical impacts, or well enough to say at this point we can safely ignore this" is an idiot.
This is become more of a general problem in many fields. The shear amount of data that can be produced these days really is swamping those of us trying to keep up. Even in my own field the amount of data that used to compose an entire publication, and months of work, some 15 years ago can now be generated in under a minute. We rely on software to filter the data for us, but much of that is still in the developmental stage and it has several shortcomings. It's painful watching publications come out sometimes. You know what they're seeing may well be an artifact of the software, but you're unable to do anything about it. Sadly the researcher usually remains clueless until their 'bio-marker' starts failing miserably in further testing. Not fun seeing someone chase ghosts for 5 years. Of course other fields laugh at what we consider to be 'big' data, which really scares me sometimes.
The ability to create terabytes of data in a relativity short time is part of the problem, you also have a lot of science being done these days. Add in that cross-disciplinary projects are all the rage, and it just makes it hard to keep up with everything that going on. I have about a half dozen publications I try to follow just in my own narrow field. If we try to increase from "proteomics" to a more useful level like say "medical research" or "drug discovery" well good luck keeping up and getting your own work done.
So pretty much
this.
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That monster in the mirror, he just might be you. -Grover