Smug Science

I think science as a discipline could benefit from a more practical approach.  This doesn’t so much refer to some of the really abstract and intangible research happening in fields like quantum physics as it does to something that I see more and more presented in lieu of actual experiments: computer models.  In just the past few weeks, I’ve read everything from government reports, to news articles, to peer-reviewed scientific papers that leverage as their evidence not practical experiments or real datasets, but computer models and statistical simulations.  There was even one that proudly proclaimed that it was based on interpolated data – in other words, data that is only inferred to exist between known data points.