Difficulty in Knowledge

There was a piece of news recently that Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have recommended that 31 papers from a former lab director be retracted from medical journals because of falsified and/or fabricated data. In academic research, there is an issue that whether a scholar wants to repeat his or her peer’s experiment in order to see the results are reproducible or not. If a scholar repeats an experiment from a top journal article and finds an error, then his or her work will be appreciated and highly likely to be published on the top journal; however, if he or she repeats the experiment but finds no mistake, then his or her work will be less appreciated and not very likely to be published on  a top journal, especially for those who have not been widely respected in the academic world yet. Moreover, as we believe that most of the scholars are honest about what they get from their experiments, then the probability of making errors is relatively low; therefore, the expected returns from repeat peers’ experiments are low, it is not worth repeating peers’ work. However, checking reliability is actually very important.

Moreover, there is a barrier between scholars and ordinary people. First, how many people have heard of LaTeX? It is a text editing software for scholars to write their papers and make their presentation slides, like Word and PowerPoint. Scholars use it because it is maths friendly; however, since it becomes a standard, it actually prevents people outside from writing ‘proper’ papers. Secondly, the terminology in the academic world is very different, and the terminology varies across different academic fields, some terms used in Finance are different from the terms used in Economics.Thirdly, knowledge has become very complicated, it takes time to learn; however, ordinary people do not have the time to study the knowledge.

Overall, there are barriers within the world of knowledge.