>what you refer to is not Science,its pseudoscience. Pretty much any crap gets published these days, review standards are abysmal and there is hardly any replication.

That's like the argument that USSR was not real communism, etc.

At some point, science is as science does.

There's no some holier, better checked, domain of practice. It is what it is, and it sometimes has replication, more often than not it doesn't.

The end result is the same. When a big tv channel says "Eating fat is definitely bad because this study says so" nobody will check the actual study and see that it was done on 3 mice for a duration of 10 days with completely unrealistic settings. It's still science, it's just misinterpreted or extrapolated.

I see it everyday on HN, people _believing_ we'll all migrate to Mars and terraform it by the end of the century which means climate change is a non issue. Or that we'll get fully autonomous cars by 2020 because Elon "Science" Musk said so and people _want_ to _believe_ in it even though absolutely nothing supports it. It really isn't much more than astrological predictions at that point.

People pick whatever "science" supports their make believe-world and go with it.

Often the studies showing your argument is "incorrect/poorly supported" are poorly supported themselves, and just go uncontested for decades, piling citations.

And that's on harder sciences. In soft sciences (and liberal arts, etc) it's the wild west -- what gets more grants and is more popular at the moment gets priority and is "proved".

I'd say it depends on the topic, and it depends on the standard you hold the papers in question to. For instance, I can find you a paper showing almost anything you like in the field of nutrition in terms of what people should eat. It'll even hold up in the abstracts. Whether it holds up beyond that can get complicated, though; I've lost count of things like "a study that X intervention is good in 20 rats over 5 days if you feed the X rats high-quality X but give the not-X rats low quality not-X" or n=8 human studies or n=20 self-reporting studies or all kinds of stuff like that.

However, sadly, many people believe in much more questionably "scientifically" proven things, largely due to how simple scientific proof appears due to things like the absolute acceptance of gravity on earth. Going with the religion analogy, there are many basic facts in religious scriptures which are true but this does not make many of the more questionable statements such as how exactly the earth will be destroyed and where you go when you die to be true.

I completely agree with you that science done properly is not a religion; however, that is simply not the case for most of us who either through lack of care or time will never go beyond seeing a news article about a certain scientific discovery and believing in it due to a supposed scientific breakthrough published in a fancy sounding journal.

I agree with what you're saying in general, but there's also problems in play in academics that are broader than just bad statistics. The article tries to convey the nature of this problem, but the "chasing a unreplicable effect" or "science sometimes takes awhile to work itself out" is just the tip of the iceberg.

This touches close to home because it's in my area of research, and for years I had many discussions with colleagues about this very same genetic effect and its problems. This SLC6A4 candidate gene research was not just a fluke of incompetence (unless by incompetence you mean much of an entire biomedical field of researchers), and it persisted wildly, with huge amounts of methodological research and money behind it.

Papers advocating for this type of research (and even more statistically problematic research) were published in Nature, with lots of methodological arguments, by established quantitative experts. This doesn't mean it's correct, just that by all superficial indications, it was solid. You had to question these authority figures, and a body of research, in good journals, the actual nature of the argument, and even then you were branded a naysayer or curmudgeon.

Even when people started questioning the effect, then you had people start advocating for more complex interactions (as intimated at in the article) that just amounted to unintentional (or intentional) data fishing and p-hacking with a theoretical cover.

When I started pointing out how problematic this all was to my colleagues, I had some of them outright explain to me that they thought it might be bunk, but it was popular, and if they found something significant, and it landed them a paper in a prestigious journal, why wouldn't they publish it? That is, you gotta publish what's popular because that's how you build an academic career.

I can't begin to explain all the shady stuff I've seen with the SLC6A4 effect being discussed in this article. Some of it was probably completely unintentional, and some of it probably amounts to conscious p-hacking and fishing.

The worst part about this, that's hard to convey, is that, yes, science probably works itself out eventually most of the time? But there's such a focus on popularity and prestige, fads, regardless of veridicality, and much less so on boring rigor and correctness, that entire careers can be made or broken on complete nonsense. The person who catapaults a completely empty finding to fad status has a career elevated permanently, to a nice named-chair-full professor position. The person who is trying to be rigorous, maybe even dispute the finding or disprove it? Much less clear what happens to them, and often it's a thankless task. That is, the fad makes a career, and even after the fad is discredited, people shrug and say "oh well, that person just happened to have a good idea that was wrong." The people who do the hard work of replicating it, disproving it? Well, that's not interesting or worthwhile to reward.

Academics is really broken, at least in many fields.