Problems of modern science?

You basically mean teaching kids how to figure stuff out themselves.

School is designed to do the opposite of that.

One problem that is old but still very much around are fake results and dishonest writing. Believe it or not some published results are simply made up. Sometimes referred articles have no connection with the subject at hand and have probably never even been read by the authors. Some articles aren't written by the people who are named as the authors.

Some of these things are supposed to be screened by journal reviewers however many are biased / incompetent or simply overworked to do their job properly.

This produces a lot of literature of poor quality that does "science" no good.

One example I can think of is a study where I read that concluded that wwightlifting induces weight loss and improves cholesterol. But rather I would argue that lifting itself doesn't really induce weight loss as the kcal burned are rather small (this is even true for cardio), but rather the people lost weight because they were completely untrained individuals who suddenly began physical activity, and the cholesterol improvements came from weight loss itself, which we know improves cholesterol values, and not so much the physical activity since it was not heavy aerobic activity. And any cholesterol changes that may have came from weightlifting were simply because these people were completely inactive prior to the study

By far the biggest problem with modern science in communication. Mainstream perceptions of some areas of science - for instance, genetic engineering (specifically GM plants and ESPECIALLY GM animals) - can be incredibly negative due to an outright communication issue between academia and the general public.

Academia has become such an isolated circlejerk that's impenetrable and uninteresting to the average person, and that can lead to people actively working against their own best interests due to a lack of understanding.

A really good example of this is something that happened to my professors. A vegan animal rights group uprooting a whole experimental grop of GM pineapples because they contained genes derived from cows.

>Literally so vegan their pineapples can't contain a single strand of cow DNA
Is this where we've come to now?

The main problem, from my experience, is perverse incentives. Scientists are under so much pressure that it's not at all unheard of for them to resort to borderline shady or (more rarely) outright fraudulent tactics. The high levels of competitiveness is a double-edged sword.

pseudoscience in fields dependent on statistics and subjective evidence like psychology and sociology

pseudoscience among the general public, typically quack medicine and nutritional science

confusion over necessary standards of proof, often experiments and studies are performed in a very ad-hoc manner and accepted without question just because they appear in reputable paper, sometimes experiments are repeated and don't show the same results, sometimes researchers trash results not in favor of preconceived notions, sometimes excessive standards of proof are demanded to stall a line of research

politicization of science, sometimes a science is attacked for political reasons, sometimes confirmation bias drives research

This.

Producing "content" at all costs in order to be "recognized".
Catering to ideology in order to get funded.
Etc.

- salaries are so low you can hardly make a life long career in it
- environment is extremely toxic, ref. Kissinger asked what was worse: national or academic politics and he said it was academic politics since there was so little to fight for
- academic fraud is rampant, see retraction watch and Clare Frances en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clare_Francis_(science_critic)
- correspondingly academic morals is in a plunge
-- and nobody is doing anything about it
- some branches are off da railz:
-- string theory, a half baked hypothesis, wants acceptance purely based on "beauty"
-- global warming is distilled politics
- knowledge event horizon is getting closer

Part of this is threatening PhD students to add their names to papers they never contributed to. If you refuse your warlord PI will go full feudal on you and you can kiss your hopes of graduating with a PhD goodbye.

Back in 1989 when the Tienanmen massacre made Chinese students want to remain abroad at all cost, many PIs split their postdoc salaries in two, so instead of getting one post doc at 20k per year they got two desperate Chinese post docs at 10k per year. With no money their only option was to work and work some more in the labs and the production and publishing went up. It was essentially slavery.

GREED. Fear. Hate. Ethics.
Money decides what gets scienced and only to confirm hypothesis. Evidence that disproves what the money wants science to find is defunded and thrown out. Also hidden from the masses. That's modern 'sci'

There are many problems with today's science. Apart from how poorly understood it is by the majority of people and how that leads to pushing personal agendas, science's core itself, the millions of investigators, is rotten.
Why? Publishing pressure. The global race for funding has lead to more and more shitty publications with poor experimental procedures, which not only constitutes trash itself, but it also leads to more trash if investigators pick it up, and using its info.

Here is a good example: >

The problem was known already back in 1974:
calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

This should be compulsory reading. It is sad that the problem has gotten out of control.