What Every Scientist Needs to Know

Reference:
– BEACON Researchers at Work: What Every Scientist Needs to Know

I recently wrote a guest blog post for the Bio-computational Evolution in Action Consortium (BEACON) on the importance of teaching, or at least introducing all STEM graduate students with cognitive sciences and cognitive flaws that can affect human mind and reasoning. The full post can found here. The following is a summary of the post:

In a world in which science and technological breakthroughs dominate all aspects of almost every individual human life, scientists and researchers are under an ever increasing pressure to cross and expand the borders of human knowledge. As new discoveries require higher levels of precision and reproducibility, excess workload and hyper-competitive work environments have made researchers more prone to human cognitive biases. A solution to this emerging problem is to introduce all graduate students in STEM fields with the limitations of human mind and scientific instruments and their potential role in false positive discoveries and misconduct of scientific research. I suggest that a full-semester course that covers relevant topics including those mandated by NSF as Responsible Conduct of Research should be developed and tailored for each individual STEM field of research and be offered as an integral core course of every graduate program across the world.