If bad science is making it to publication, or bad science is being accepted by other scientists, then it's not really science. Right? That's a very interestin

If bad science is making it to publication, or bad science is being accepted by other scientists, then it's not really science. Right? That's a very interesting question. I used to be a researcher myself. I love Feynman's "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool." In practice, I would say that there are often incentives for researchers to fool themselves, and researchers do sometimes succeed in fooling themselves and their colleagues. The practice of science has a better capacity for correcting these errors over time than other practices, but I wouldn't retroactively declare a paper "not really science" just because later scientists falsified its findings. (E.g. in chemistry, reports of iron-catalyzed reactions that actually turned out to be catalyzed by traces of platinum group metals in the iron. How did the incentive to report something new and wonderful -- reactions catalyzed by a very cheap catalyst -- influence the original researcher's experimental design and evaluation of the evidence? Unknown.) Nor would I declare that a publication showing "compound X does not induce cancer in mice" not-really-science even if it turned out later that the same researchers silently dropped a line of inquiry that showed X does induce cancer in rats. I tend toward thinking that social phenomena -- including the practice of scientific research, or the practice of religion -- are defined by what their participants do rather than what the ideal definition says they should do. So bad science is still science (if the practitioners are still recognized socially as such), bad Christianity is still Christianity, and so on. These issues are more visible when there's a lot at stake outside the scope of the published findings (global warming, tobacco health impacts, etc.) AGW skeptics are not exactly wrong to mention incentives, but I think they're weighting incentives backwards. I think that many of them see the likely policy implications of certain research conclusions and motivated-reason their way backwards to an exceptional level of skepticism about the research itself. I myself think that AGW skeptics are wrong, that GMOs are a facially neutral tool with potential for both benefits and harms, that herbicides too present both harms and benefits, and that industries trying to influence research to their own financial benefit (Monsanto here, drug companies with drug trials, food and beverage companies with nutrition research...) is both bad and common. This article that we're discussing does not make me think that glyphosate is more harmful than previously reported. I still require affirmative research findings in that direction to change my view. It does make me think that regulatory agencies should be sufficiently funded and staffed to set up their own experimental design and trials for safety, because industry-linked research (worse, facially independent but covertly industry-linked research) is incentivized toward affirming safety rather than investigating it neutrally.