New study of birds shows citizen science can be trusted

4/23/2025 at 1:32:32 AM

Citizen science, also known as science, has no incentive to falsify results to advance their career since they're already happily employed in an unrelated field.

by PostOnce

4/23/2025 at 3:40:52 AM

You mean like the Bigfoot video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVo6Vj0_Xbo ?

People cheat, even in single games. If there is an online game to find birds IRL, there is an achievement to find a dodo, someone will find it.

I've also see a lot of dubious or even wrong results in preprints and journal articles, so the only conclusion is that there are morons and liars everywhere. Trust but verify.

by gus_massa

4/23/2025 at 3:25:33 PM

Sad but true. For instance, there are subprofessional tiers for many sports like cycling. They generally don't have drug testing because of cost and the presumption that no one would cheat for a mere hobby. But occasionally people get caught because of mistakes.

by xhkkffbf

4/23/2025 at 6:59:58 AM

I have a finite amount of time on earth, I want to see the story in games but i no longer have the patience to learn every mechanic in every game. For idle games, speed up time. For survivors-likes I might hack up the meta currency a bit to get the game loop to plane out earlier (gold in vampire survivors, e.g.), for FPS unlimited ammo is usually enough. I've never cheated in an online game, going all the way back to warcraft and StarCraft on dialup. Never cheated at cards, either.

My point is, I am an ethical and moral person and I take umbrage with the link to other forms of cheating.

I have "finished" a lot of games, though. If I actually want the challenge I get the game on a console.

by genewitch

4/23/2025 at 4:25:28 AM

> no incentive to falsify results to advance their career

There still personal ideology, teh lulz, basic cluelessness, and just being nuts.

by tbrownaw

4/23/2025 at 3:20:41 AM

This cynicism isn’t helpful. You’re right that there are issues with incentives in science but most scientists are attempting to produce quality work.

by etrautmann

4/23/2025 at 6:39:00 AM

I’ve been working on a citizen science project recently. I realized I don’t really care if no one uses or trusts the data. I want to do it, I want to learn, and I think the outcome will be useful at the very least to increase awareness. Maybe that’s good enough?

I think academia is walled off in part for good reason, but I have a feeling more people should participate in citizen science projects too. Even if you aren’t doing anything ground breaking, you still might be inching things in the right direction. It’s a great way to care about things, teach your kids, explore new skills and techniques with equipment, etc. I wish I started sooner.

by steve_adams_86

4/23/2025 at 1:33:26 PM

The pursuit of truth shouldnt be restricted to specific institutions. Go ahead

by anothereng

4/23/2025 at 1:26:23 AM

My wife is prof at a decent uni in the states teaching big stuff™ and I got into a conversation about this with her recently, where we landed was "will academia ever trust plebs like me?" and after an hr or so of back and forth it was evident to me on average: it will not. I'm still thinking about what I think about that, but it was certainly my resolve, at least within my wifes institution (will remain unnamed).

by neom

4/23/2025 at 2:02:02 AM

My disillusion with credentialism reached its peak when I published my first paper as an undergraduate student. That paper was based on a project I'd worked on part-time for maybe half of a semester. After my professor pushed for me to write a paper about it, I obscured the subject matter with the adequate specialist jargon and convoluted technical style and it was accepted by a fairly well-regarded publication uneventfully. I was on an accelerated curriculum planning to pursue a Master's degree and had much higher expectations for academia. I ended up dropping out after earning my Bachelor's. I'm much more sympathetic to independent researchers than to academics these days, and if I were to engage in serious research again, I would probably publish it independently rather than going through academic channels.

by bananalychee

4/23/2025 at 1:30:47 AM

Academia is a walled garden protected by paper degrees and the cost of tuition and time.

Anyone who can achieve results without suffering the same tribulations to join the ranks of professors is a threat at best, a charlatan at worst, and to be dismissed regardless.

by zdragnar

4/23/2025 at 3:24:00 AM

That’s not at all what this article is about. It’s a piece of published work by an established scientist who used data collected by users of birding apps. The non credentialed bird app users did not publish this paper…

by etrautmann

4/23/2025 at 2:32:22 AM

uh... maybe in your field. personally i've never seen good physics on Vixra or good biology anywhere except in biorxiv or journals.

by thelaxiankey

4/23/2025 at 2:43:09 AM

Ever heard of an engineering firm?

by odyssey7

4/25/2025 at 5:16:18 AM

I mean, for like, some ML research, sure. For certain, even most, aspects of electrical engineering, absolutely. But for biology? Absolutely not.

And even in more computer-adjacent fields, this is still ridiculously reductive. Geoff Hinton is an academic through-and-through, and he changed the world even for computer scientists. What about someone like Don Knuth? I mean, even google's pagerank started as an academic project.

Engineering firms do great research too, but this is not the only way.

by thelaxiankey

4/26/2025 at 1:51:50 AM

You'll be disappointed to learn that most new medication approvals are obtained by pharmaceutical companies, rather than academia.

by odyssey7

4/23/2025 at 2:35:00 AM

Good news, or just deserts, the feeling is mutual.

A large part of the electorate distrusts academics and is in turn dismissive of academics’ priorities and recommendations. It’s correct for members of the public to distrust institutions that are not earnest.

The casualties are, of course, enormous.

by odyssey7

4/23/2025 at 2:24:58 PM

> will academia ever trust plebs like me?

What do you want to do?

Get a billion dollar to get a new particle collider? Buy 1000 lab rats and try some experiment? Get 3 graduate students to expand your personal theory? -> The answer is no. But even someone with credentials will have a hard time getting that unless they have a good team and track record in similar task.

A position as a collaborator in a research group? -> Perhaps. As a full researcher is difficult but not impossible. The main problem is to ensure you know everything that "everyone" already know. You must start with a small collaboration in a side task. Also, there are many positions in helper task, like sysadmin or lathe expert or ... that don't require a Ph.D. but they require someone who really knows what is doing and can understand both the requirements of the team and the tools.

Publish your own research? -> Possible, if you pay for the 1000 rats yourself. The main problem is that what is "useful", "interesting" and "interesting for academia" may have a weird intersection. So you may get something that is useful or interesting but nobody in academia may care about it. Or you may reinvent the wheel with another name. Or the theory is "obviously wrong". Do you have a control group? There is a finite time to read new ideas, so people in academia has to filter too weird theories (even weird theories published in papers). Sometimes the theory that is obviously wrong is correct, but most of the time is just wrong. Does the new theory has at least one experimental prediction?

In some cases is like wanting to be a F1 racer. Nobody will give you a position unless you are an expert F2 racer (or something).

On the other hand, pg published "A plan for spam" in a blog post. No new academic research. No new weird structure. Nothing new. Just useful when nobody knew how to deal with spam. Also, cperciva made a comment a few weeks ago telling that his most cited "paper" is only a "preprint" that was never accepted for publication, because nobody care about a weird side channel timing attack (or something like that, I can't find the comment).

There is definitively a problem, but a few years ago got we got in our university like 5 independent persons that solved the Goldbach conjeture. Each one got a voluntary graduate student to talk and explain the ideas. After a few month of meetings, the conclusion was that none of them had good ideas to prove the Goldbach conjeture.

What do you want to do?

by gus_massa

4/23/2025 at 9:43:19 AM

I use iNaturalist to log my observations and I think one benefit of such platforms is the large number of eyeballs available: casual observers see things not captured in more formal scientific field work.

This happened to me: I saw an unusual bee while walking in a nature reserve. I posted it on iNaturalist and it got identified as a seldom seen bee. A bee researcher contacted me to get the location for a field study, resulting in a paper that documented the bee's natural behaviour.

Other iNat observers have spotted moths and insects that haven't been seen for decades, for example. In this way, citizen scientist are helping scientist to find out more about nature.

by sohkamyung

4/23/2025 at 1:20:16 AM

Didn't the majority of science used to be done by "citizen" scientists?

by malfist

4/23/2025 at 2:14:26 AM

yes, and a lot of humanity's most important work

by jppope

4/23/2025 at 1:26:51 AM

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by huntr2asterisk

4/23/2025 at 2:45:17 AM

If professional science has gotten to be more about trust than reproducibility, then professional science cannot be trusted.

by odyssey7

4/23/2025 at 12:51:22 AM

Well, define "trust".

This example is using what sounds like crowdsource apps as a measurement instrument. Which is going to have different limitations and different sources of interference than other measurement instruments, but of course it can work if what you're using it for is able to handle this.

by tbrownaw

4/23/2025 at 12:57:18 AM

Yeah - it seems a stretch to go from "These two systems accurately showed a known behaviour" to "All citizen science systems can predict everything all the time"

by awesome_dude

4/23/2025 at 1:18:49 AM

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by janwandersun

4/23/2025 at 3:25:42 AM

For certain values of "citizen science". When you get to the perpetual motion proponents and the anti-vaxxers, that might be a problem there.

by drivingmenuts

4/23/2025 at 2:13:03 AM

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by sieabahlpark

4/23/2025 at 3:28:19 AM

This entire thread is replies is extremely disappointing. Obviously there are issues with credentialism but the widespread cynicism and rejection of the scientific enterprise throws the baby out with the bathwater. The scientific method itself is about continuously identifying what’s wrong and iteratively improving our knowledge. That inherently involves making some wrong turns and mistakes and spending money on some things that don’t pan out, but I’m surprised to see so many voices here arguing for less science.

by etrautmann

4/23/2025 at 6:45:48 AM

"I guess you want less science" is exactly the kind of thinking that people dislike. "Science" used to be a magic word. Then people realized that science is done by scientists who are, you know, human, and hence subject to the same biases as all other humans. There's no monolithic "Science". It's just a concept. It doesn't exist. There's only scientists, and over the last five years, many of those scientists burnt their reputations.

by sandspar