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Knowing what is science and what is pseudoscience is a science itself. To take a trivial example, consider the climate change topic. Read a couple randomly chos

Knowing what is science and what is pseudoscience is a science itself. To take a trivial example, consider the climate change topic. Read a couple randomly chosen papers and if you’re unlucky, you might come out of it thinking global warming isn’t real. (Remember, papers like that do exist and although they are a minority, random number generation doesn’t know about that.) How do you know if the papers you read are a representative sample? How do you know the papers that are published are a representative sample? It boils down to some disturbing epistemological conclusions. You can use metastudies, but then the metastudies could have the same problem, or worse, might not exist. (In my experience they usually don’t.)

boomboomsubban 6y ago
>How do you know if the papers you read are a representative sample? How do you know the papers that are published are a representative sample? You don't. You use the sources you've seen to make the best analysis you can, fully prepared to drop it if with further evidence.
- ironmagma 6y ago
  That’s the very reason you can’t “trust the science” in general though. Science is a good tool for knowledge when there has been a repetition of studies, but when all you have is a few, you’re kind of screwed. You can’t claim to know even a basic thing without being an expert in the field these days as a result. A large part of this though is down to lack of discoverability of similar studies which I think can be helped.
beloch 6y ago
References to climate change are going to become something like an index fossil for papers written in the current decade. A paper might seem to have no connection to climate science at all, but if the authors can grasp for some tenuous link that lets them put "climate change" in their abstract, they will. Say you're a researcher fifty years in the future who is doing a literature review. When a paper about anti-hydrogen trapping works in a reference to climate change, you won't even need to look at the date of the paper to know, roughly, when it was written.

boomboomsubban 6y ago

>How do you know if the papers you read are a representative sample? How do you know the papers that are published are a representative sample? You don't. You use the sources you've seen to make the best analysis you can, fully prepared to drop it if with further evidence.

ironmagma 6y ago
That’s the very reason you can’t “trust the science” in general though. Science is a good tool for knowledge when there has been a repetition of studies, but when all you have is a few, you’re kind of screwed. You can’t claim to know even a basic thing without being an expert in the field these days as a result. A large part of this though is down to lack of discoverability of similar studies which I think can be helped.

beloch 6y ago

References to climate change are going to become something like an index fossil for papers written in the current decade. A paper might seem to have no connection to climate science at all, but if the authors can grasp for some tenuous link that lets them put "climate change" in their abstract, they will. Say you're a researcher fifty years in the future who is doing a literature review. When a paper about anti-hydrogen trapping works in a reference to climate change, you won't even need to look at the date of the paper to know, roughly, when it was written.