Metascience Since 2012: A Personal History

Metascience for whom? A question as old as science.

Before we fix science, we need to ask who built it!

Metaventory — the meta-science community

A comprehensive community of the people building meta-science and the tools they make — psychology and economics first, growing science-wide.

AI Review and the Golden Age of Metascience

When I was a Ph.D.

The Journal of Scientific Integrity

by Laura Luebbert and Lior Pachter Background (by LL) Four years ago, during the first year of my PhD at Caltech, I participated in a journal club organized by the lab I was rotating in. I was assi…

What Scientists Said: Results from Astera's First Essay Competition

Astera recently hosted its first essay competition, focused around metascience.

Developing creative identity

I was a theoretical physicist from 1992 to 2007. It was a romantic activity, exploring the fundamental nature of the cosmos! I became a university professor, wrote papers and books, and got to explore some of the most beautiful ideas ever discovered. In parallel, I also developed a fascination with the social systems humanity uses to make knowledge. Systems like the university or peer review are immensely deep inventions: our discovery system is itself one of the great inventions of humanity! But I believed a radically better discovery system must be possible. I became obsessed with this idea, eventually giving up tenure to work on it1. My first big project was to write a book helping develop and spread the fundamental ideas underlying the modern open science movement.

A Vision of Metascience

How does the culture of science change and improve? Many people have identified shortcomings in core social processes of science, such as peer review, how grants are awarded, how people are selected to become scientists, and so on. Yet despite often compelling criticisms, strong barriers inhibit widespread change in such social processes. The result is near stasis, and apathy about the prospects for improvement. People sometimes start new research institutions intended to do things differently; unfortunately such institutions are often changed more by the existing ecosystem than they change it. In this essay we sketch a vision of how the social processes of science may be rapidly improved. In this vision, metascience plays a key role: it deepens our understanding of which social processes best support discovery; that understanding can then help drive change. We introduce the notion of a metascience entrepreneur, a person seeking to achieve a scalable improvement in the social processes of science. We argue that: (1) metascience is an imaginative design practice, exploring an enormous design space for social processes; (2) that exploration aims to find new social processes which unlock latent potential for discovery; (3) decentralized change must be possible, so outsiders with superior ideas can't be blocked by established power centers; (4) ideally, change would align with what is best for science and for humanity, not merely what is fashionable, politically popular, or media-friendly; (5) the net result would be a far more structurally diverse set of environments for doing science; and (6) this would enable crucial types of work difficult or impossible within existing environments. For this vision to succeed metascience must develop and intertwine three elements: an imaginative design practice, an entrepreneurial discipline, and a research field. Overall, it is a vision in which metascience is an engine of improvement for the social processes and ultimately the culture of science.

Power/knowledge : selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977 : Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984

xi, 270 pages ; 22 cm

Mapping an Ecology of Integrative Approaches to Addressing the Metacrisis

Dear friends, The Institute of Applied Metatheory (IAM) is pleased to announce the release of a new white paper that charts the landscape of leading-edge responses to the global metacrisis. In “Mapping an Ecology of Integrative Approaches to Addressing the Metacrisis”, IAM scholars Brandon Norgaard, Nicholas Hedlund, PhD, and Claudia Meglin provide a sweeping (albeit

Speculations on the Future of the Scientific Method

The following essay was published 20 years ago (January, 2006) on my blog The Technium. I edited the intro here, but the speculations are basically unchanged.

Individual Experience vs. The Cochrane Review

On my decade-long exploration seeking a scientific language for singular evidence.

The Periodic Table of Cognition

I’ve been studying the early history of electricity’s discovery as a map for our current discovery of artificial intelligence. The smartest people alive back then, including Isaac Newton, who may have been the smartest person who ever lived, had confident … Continue reading →