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I'll go one stronger and say "You Shouldn't Trust Any One Scientific Study You See". Individual studies can be really interesting. They're important for resea
by saalweachter 8y ago
I'll go one stronger and say "You Shouldn't Trust Any One Scientific Study You See".
Individual studies can be really interesting. They're important for researchers to know about to inform their future work. But any one study - even ones that are done honestly, with good methodology and sound foundations - can be just totally wrong. There could be confounding factors you couldn't have known about that completely invalidate the result. Your test subjects could be unusual in some way, your animal models could be a poor analogue for humans in this particular case, you could have just had really aberrant statistical flukes in your statistic sampling.
It's the body of scientific research, the dozens, hundreds, thousands of studies stacked on top of each other that bring certainty.
- jacksnipe 8y agoI think you meant “shouldn’t”.
- KineticLensman 8y agoYes. Science can be an adversarial process as people converge on the truth. Like a legal trial, you shouldn't take out of context any single statement from a defence or proceution lawyer as representative of the whole truth
- gitgud 8y agoThat is a great analogy, just like scientific studies a defence or prosecution can argue to win, but in the end it's usually the evidence that swings the case...
- saalweachter 8y agoOr it’s like seeing one great play in the middle of the game. It may be a beautiful play, it might have scored the team you’re rooting for a point, but until you know the whole game you don’t know who won.
- GiuseppaAcciaio 8y ago^ this. Especially on highly sensitive topics like medicine, I tend to be cautious when reading about the findings of any single study; whenever someone tells me "there's a study that says [flavour of the day]" my immediate reaction is to go see if there's a Cochrane meta-analysis :)