Theory and practice

Years ago, while listening to CBC's Morningside, I heard this description:

"Canada is a country that works in practice, but not in theory. The United States is a country that works in in theory, but not in practice."

I was reminded of this over the weekend reading a thread about data sharing (https://twitter.com/danirabaiotti/status/1002824181145317376). Universal a data sharing between scientists is one of those ideas that sounds great in theory. So great that people tend to undervalue how it will work in practice.

Another example that I was thinking about recently was post publication peer review. In theory, it might be nice to have a single cenatralized site that included all post publication comments. In practice, blogs have a pretty good track record of bringing important critical comments to a broader audience.

I see this over and over again with people putting forward ideas about how we should do science? The meta science, so to speak. Around publication, peer review, career incentives, statistical analysis. I've been guilty of this. There's old posts on this blog about open peer review that I still think were fine in theory, but not grounded in practice. 

I think we scientists often get very enamoured of those solutions that work in theory, and undervalue things that work in practice.