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Comment by cies | Hacker News Reader

Many stories like this and people wonder why the general public is less "believing" in science lately. I think sadly the general public is right not to believe as strongly in science as it maybe once did, the results though are dramatic in "baby bathwater" kind of proportions.

I think science should fix itself. Just publishing paper should not be the metric to reward. A retraction should seriously reward the flaw finder (like sometimes with exploits), and really harm the flaw author/publisher: both scientist and journal.

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It is very good that the general public is less believing in science.

I remember well when the public was very believing, including me, and in hindsight it was always undeserving of such faith.

It was a very misguided thing to take a conclusion as fact, so long as it be called “science”, for often upon closer inspection the methodology was dubious, and it was never attempted to be reproduced, so even if the methodology were sound, the data could either be a fluke, or outright fabricated.

This is not a new development; if anything, the critical stance is the new development. It has been going on for centuries most likely that completely fabricated data stoot the test of time because no one bothered to replicate it. When I was at university in the 2000s, we were already told of respected researchers that fell from grace as it was found they had been fabricating data for decades and it took this long for someone to catch wind of it, as no one bothers to replicate research in this world.

The only new development is that now, some are starting to.

“Science” is not enough to believe it; the methodology must be inspected and found to be salient, and the data must have been replicated at least once, præferably more, by another independent group.

To be credible does not require infallibility. The broader social consequence of the general public losing faith in science is not that they will suddenly become enlightened in the nuances of the scientific discovery process -- it is that they will turn to alternative sources of truth. Science isn't a perfect source of truth but it is a heck of a lot better than seeking truth through mythology, tribalism and the opinions of ideologues. Scientific literacy is the ideal state, but the world is not that.

I find that much of the newly inspired criticism on science after the appearance of the replication crisis did not go to alternative source of truth but started to admit that there is much that men don't know and won't know.

The problem is man's arrogance that it knows, that it can find a solution to every quæstion it asks.

“science” is also not even close to “not infallible” it is a complete coinflip whether any peer-reviewed result is even worth the paper it's printed on.

Dare I say it's under that, because it's a coinflip whether the data are even reproducible, but the conclusions derived from the data, even if they be reproducible, are almost invariably involving bigger leaps of faith than making data up.

Last week in a university course, I was surprised to read in A Short History of Physics in the American Century (Cassidy, 2013), that at least with Physics, US public perception of science had been tumultuous following the WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. As a scientific discipline, it only reached maturity through the war-effort, which earned it infamy for bringing about terrorizing nuclear weapons.

I sometimes think it's just a population problem. There are so many of everything and there's so much competition to be the best and succeed the rules and customs we have in place for most of the things is just ancient in comparision and it keeps getting older by the minute

> Many stories like this and people wonder why the general public is less "believing" in science lately. I.

Eh im not sure bad studies is the cause.

Scientists, especially doctors, wanting to use their authority i some debates while 2 of them can be saying completely opposed things maybe, however, contribute...

Problem is more serious than that.

What is happening is that the bad studies are being used for policymaking.

Examples: the "nutrition pyramid" that encouraged carbohydrates and blamed health issues on animal-based food, was later found out to be based on research that was blatantly corrupt, with researchers getting bribes from food industry to manipulate or hide results (a case of hiding results: one researcher that found out that vegetable oil causes decrease of blood cholesterol, also found WHY it happened, but omitted that part from his paper... the reason is that cholesterol is needed for cell maintenance, and consuming only vegetable oils cause a deficit from it, the body pulls cholesterol from the blood to repair itself, and even that might not be enough, with some people suffering damage).

Or a lot of pharma circlejerking that turns into law or regulations.

Or the paper mentioned in the article, that was about video-games and aggression, with many countries passing laws regulating video game consumption based and such papers.

Or the original reason Cannabis was banned (long story short: part of the reason is that they wanted to ban hemp fibers, that was being an obstacle to some newly invented synthetic fibers, some of the government people involved, had stocks of Dupont and other fiber companies, and "accidentally" banned hemp fibers while "trying" to ban the drug, based on manipulated and fraudulent science).

Or more seriously: the papers that recommended "Austerity" and basically destroyed the livehoods of millions of people, later were found out to have math errors that changed the conclusion completely.

And the list goes and goes on.

Hemp fiber was in competition with wood fiber harvested from Hearst-owned western-US forest land. Hearst also owned a newspaper chain, and found using it an easy way to eliminate the competition. Hemp is both cheaper and better-quality than the wood fiber for paper, but had no newspaper-chain backing.

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