We need to throw out a mindblowing amount of science and start again
thespinoff.co.nz
thespinoff.co.nz
If any science is related to politics or there is some business/financial incentive I just assume it's skewed.
Take for example the harvard study that is responsible for the US obesity. The study found that sugar does not make you fat, because of food conpanies.
Or the guy that discovered the ulcer cause and cure. It was ignored because the fake ulcer treatment industry was a multi billion dollar one.
The "I F***g LOVE science" guys that will beleive anything, because SCIENCE are the worst
How about we start calling it rationality? A bit more self-descriptive, and perhaps a harder to word to weigh down with political gibberish and marketing speak. Scientific Method -> Rational Method, For Science! -> For Rationality!
Science traditionally demanded speaking in clear terms, now it is all about obscuring incentives and methods in order to P-hack a conclusion.
For the "non-exact" ones there is always possibility of corruption. I think the current establishment for some areas in science is politicised, and there is a system in place - you have to be published in certain prestigious publications to receive money, but if you do not follow the political status quo, everybody will cut ties with you.
I guess more transparency about data collected and videos of experiments would help, but I don't think that's a solution. This is a problem only few worry about, the system is perfectly happy the way it is.
This whole incentive - corruption relation reminds me about greek democracy: You want to chose the leader that doesn't want to be chosen, so that he would not have incentives. The athenians also chose people at random instead of elections, to minimize the chance of picking someone with special interests.
Maybe it's like that in every field, but it's frustrating to see documentation of the problems, know that everyone knows about them at some level, but nothing is done about them, and everyone goes on as if the problems don't exist. It's going to take a lot of massive change, like at the level of congressional intervention or something, and once it does, there won't be any restitution or anything. Everyone who benefited still benefits, there's no correction, nothing.
At any finite time, it is difficult to guarantee that science has the correct answer — especially in ”complex systems” where many factors interact, including through feedback loops. The very idea of repeatable controlled experiments (at the heart of the scientific method) is fundamentally limited in its ability to address such systems. So for all practical purposes, decisions (be it individual, or policy) need to often accommodate uncertainty/incompleteness in knowledge and try to “convexify exposure” — rather than trying to bank on having the correct & complete knowledge.
In contrast, a decade-long effort to generate foundational data sets gets you a footnote or acknowledgement. Think Tycho Brahe versus Copernicus.
The imperative of generating snappy, and preferably simple series of stories is that scientists focus intensely on reductionist systems and neat little “mechanisms”. To get to mechanism, the modus operandi is to trim away fundamental system complexity. Complex state-dependent feedback systems get converted into sad but comprehensible cartoons. And we are surprised that findings do not replicate? The one phrase that makes me cringe in the biomedical literature is “necessary and sufficient”. In your dreams!
Yuri Lazebnik’s wonderful “Can a Biologist Fix a Radio” is a classic commentary published in 2002, well worth reading in this context. “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor” by Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording (2017, PLoS Comp Biology) is the update for all of you on Hacker News.
The current structure of science usually does not reward high quality persistent data and metadata. This seems antithetical to what we are usual taught about the scientific method. The reality is that doing data justice has been getting lip service from day 1. I still see little evidence of serious efforts in this regard (genomics being a welcome exception) since the true cost of data preservation and sharing is staggering.
A salutary final note from Richard Hamming, that I do not mean in any way as an excuse: “In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.”
In both cases though high quality data/metadata are just as important—perhaps more so, than the big ideas.
>"By the mid 2000s there was also an extensive body of work on the biology behind the gene’s function and malfunction. And all of this was part of a much wider field of research called candidate gene association studies, a methodology that enjoyed massive media exposure from the early 90s to the late 2000s as biologists identified the genes they claimed were responsible for obesity, mental illness, diabetes, addiction, gambling, cancer, crime, and numerous other behavioural disorders and diseases.
This was a golden age for high-profile genetics research. Almost every week brought another announcement that a candidate gene for some social problem or illness had been found. And, these announcements concluded, now that the gene causing the problem was known and the biological nature of the malady identified, a cure was surely close. Grants were funded and biotech companies were launched, billions of dollars were invested and exciting new technologies were trialed, all based on candidate gene discoveries.
And none of them worked because all of this was bullshit."
I wonder, if every scientific theory that is eventually disproved "only looks like science but has no actualy truth value", how about Newtonian physics? Was that "junk science that just hadn't been debunked" until Einstein and General Relativity?
Are all scientists who have followed an avenue of research that didn't pan out in the end quacks, pseuds and wackos?
Or is there maybe a simpler, more nuanced view that doesn't happen to tar every past generation of science with a very offensive brush?
Maybe PhDs should be able to give out points there to offset the fact that most experiments aren't going to show much.
Maybe there's a correlation between what we recognize as 'thoughtful experiments' and 'good outcomes'.
Or just some other measure other than 'non-nill results' otherwise everyone will be predisposed towards those.
Our ancestors ate almost entirely plants. Even we modern humans only recently started getting a significant proportion of our caleries from meat/animal fat.
Now we have cardiovascular diseases being the main cause of death and one of the leading causes of poor quality life in peoples final years. It's unfortunate
the reason why the studies done so far have not been able to find a link between vaccines and autism is that they do not take into consideration that other things also cause autism. even though there is a connection between vaccines and autism, vaccines save too many lives for any rational person to want to stop their administration.
Fortunately, we have figured out how to tease out the influence of a single variable among many: test vs. control groups. If the sample size is large enough, most variables will average out to have the same effect in both groups.
Maybe because your comment is not the assuring "vaccines don't cause autism" and people already chose the assuring narative.
Vaccines do cause a lot of bad stuff, however for mass population it makes sense to vaccinate, as the benefits outweight the drawbacks.
If that’s not snake oil I don’t know what is.