The authors are silly to think otherwise. It is also not surprising that Science published a flashy article without a lot of oomph behind it. It's what they do.
"Drinking goats milk gives X-ray vision𝆯, according to new study!"
...
𝆯 - Accuracy to be followed up in paragraph 42, subsection 3, in a subsequent journal from a third party.
So, the flashy headline gets used by "whoever" wants clicks (etc), but the follow up details are unlikely to be seen.
Sounds like a literal plan for knowingly spreading misinformation.
Side note - Anyknow know how to escape an asterisk here on HN, so it displays instead of starting an italic block? Only workaround I've found is to use 𝆯 instead, which isn't quite right. :/
Science/Nature/etc are broadcast journals. They're for publishing results that people outside your field would find interesting. Typically these are new and flashy results and sometimes theyre slightly suspect. Mostly theyre not. A refutation or null result typically isn't interesting to the audience of these journals- nor should it be.
This bit I don't really understand.
If someone is interested in X, why would they be ok with carrying around what turns out to (likely be) incorrect knowledge about it?
That approach is more equated with (say) Wired, who are famously inaccurate in many details "for a good story". eg Wired is entertainment.
That's not what Science (the journal) is supposed to be about though. Or is it?
Lots and lots of people outside the field continue read about this and remember it. Many millions of people. I remember when I first heard about it. I’m not in the field.
A notice in Science is at least noteworthy to that same public, even if it still won’t get a fraction of the same coverage. At least people who tried to track down the original research would find the follow up study as well.
Most of the arguments here (and in the slate article) have been talking about Science shirking their scientific duty. They are not.
Perhaps you can argue that they owe it to the quality of public discourse to print this article, but they certainly don't owe it to the scientific discourse.
For you to dismiss the fake news that this Science journal article generated, combined with the justifications of ignoring or dismissing arguments by all conservatives as essentially a scientifically proven mental disability is astounding.
I'm not dismissing anything here except the argument that a journal is required to print all counter research to all their published articles
> A refutation or null result typically isn't interesting to the audience of these journals- nor should it be.
In the context I don’t see how to read this as anything other than denying that it matters that millions of people believe this to be true. You literally say they shouldn’t be interested.
That context is one of a professional scientist who understands the caveats of new (i.e. not improved/refined) research being published in a journal like Science. That is the audience that Science's editors select their articles for.
The fact that (some of) these articles get gobbled up by uncritical media is a difficult problem to address. I doubt printing this refuting article in Science as opposed to FieldJournalA would yield much improvement to the situation.
I think you're wrong. The uncritical media does read Science but it won't ever read special journals. Thus, the wider public will be exposed to original bad research, but will never be exposed to the correction. The fact that people in the field who are specifically interested in this specific topic of research (all 25 or so of them) would know the truth is nice, but nobody would even think to seek out these people and ask for their opinion, when everybody already knows the "truth" (which happens to be false).
How do we know that? I mean, we know that science gets things wrong sometimes, and that's fine because it is usually correcting itself. But this knowledge relies on the fact that if group X does bad research, there's always groups Y and Z that would try to replicate and report if it failed. However, if you get your knowledge from publications like Science, then you'd only read about group X but never about Y and Z. So what would you knowledge that "most flashy results are not suspect" base on, given current replication numbers, strong incentive to publish flashy results ASAP, and a policy of not publishing refutations?
> A refutation or null result typically isn't interesting to the audience of these journals- nor should it be.
Why? As a layman with interest in science, to me "scientists from group X discovered that drinking camel milk will make you live forever" is substantially different that "scientists from group X claimed that drinking camel milk will make you live forever but 5 other groups of scientists say it's bullshit and that research is garbage". The former presents the result as unchallenged pinnacle of scientific knowledge, and the latter as highly suspect and very much possible baloney. I as a layman who has no way to verify any of that myself and read all special press would have a lot of value in distinguishing the two situations.
The field of study has nothing to do with it. If a journal publishes a result, they are ethically obligated to publish further work that refutes that result.
Too general. Few in science would accept this. The claim here is the weaker one that journals are ethically obliged to accept failed replication studies - and even that is non-obvious to me. (Should Science also be obliged to accept _successful_ replications? No? So it should accept papers on the basis solely of the results? Hello, publication bias.)
Rather than publish the entire paper, they could publish the single sentence:
> Issue 55, Page 8, the paper we published has been replicated with more data, and results do not support the original research conclusions. See paper entitled "Foo" published in "other journal" for details.
> If a journal publishes a result, they are ethically obligated to publish further work that refutes that result.
This isn't a violation of scientific ethics and I think its a silly argument to make. Journals aren't the parents of research results they publish and somehow responsible for all counter arguments or competing data points.
Indeed, legally and ethically Science is free to do what they want and should be held so by all external parties.
However, we, its consumers, are equally free to no longer pay attention to it, since its quality as a scientific journal is somewhat suspect. Anyone who truly believes in science (with a small s), ought to appropriately lower the amount of prestige with which they view science after such accusations.
Subsequent refinements and discovery of systematics and how to account for them improve the research, and often change the results, but those results don't make it to Science/Nature/etc because they don't belong there (usually).
So, really you should be taking the mindset that articles in these journals should be taken with a grain of salt. Whether that should have an impact on their prestige? I suppose thats a personal decision.