Not a paper, but I've recently been wondering why 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' by Thomas Kuhn doesn't enter into these sorts of discussions. It seems to me that his description of 'normal science', and what is necessary to challenge a paradigm, offers.a lot of insight into problems in science, and especially into the persistence of string theory.
Kuhn was revolutionary and there could be a modern framing of the replication crisis as one paradigm against another. I think the fact that he thought there's no predicting the fall of a paradigm made him a little unhelpful. If you can't predict the fall then you don't know where to look for hope that a bad paradigm is ready to topple. He might have been right and we just have to enjoy the sudden collapse of p-hacking when it happens. I don't think so. I think particularly the statistical reasons for the replication crisis are so well known and so inarguable that we're dealing with a different kind of paradigm. And, maybe as a response, mainstream science has become openly committed to its own survival even if it means ignoring other mainstream peer-reviewed science. Everything on this list is by-the-book science (with the possible exception of Langmuir, but I think he can be endorsed anyway).
So, yes to the persistence part. I don't know if this paradigm is as philosophical as that, though. A lot of scientists want to keep their work going and don't want to adopt the less competitive method of not p-hacking (etc).
Not a paper, but I've recently been wondering why 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' by Thomas Kuhn doesn't enter into these sorts of discussions. It seems to me that his description of 'normal science', and what is necessary to challenge a paradigm, offers.a lot of insight into problems in science, and especially into the persistence of string theory.
Kuhn was revolutionary and there could be a modern framing of the replication crisis as one paradigm against another. I think the fact that he thought there's no predicting the fall of a paradigm made him a little unhelpful. If you can't predict the fall then you don't know where to look for hope that a bad paradigm is ready to topple. He might have been right and we just have to enjoy the sudden collapse of p-hacking when it happens. I don't think so. I think particularly the statistical reasons for the replication crisis are so well known and so inarguable that we're dealing with a different kind of paradigm. And, maybe as a response, mainstream science has become openly committed to its own survival even if it means ignoring other mainstream peer-reviewed science. Everything on this list is by-the-book science (with the possible exception of Langmuir, but I think he can be endorsed anyway).
So, yes to the persistence part. I don't know if this paradigm is as philosophical as that, though. A lot of scientists want to keep their work going and don't want to adopt the less competitive method of not p-hacking (etc).