4 ms·

If you haven't worked in science, please keep in mind that the literature has never been seen as holy writ. Wrong stuff gets published all the time. You have to

If you haven't worked in science, please keep in mind that the literature has never been seen as holy writ. Wrong stuff gets published all the time. You have to read critically. Not excusing sloppy work or whatever it was. Just pointing out to any laypeople out there that science has never had (and never required) a perfect professional literature. Far from it.

dbingham 4y ago
Not just that, but it would be impossible to achieve. One study should never be taken as truth - but rather a single data point among many. It's only when we have many data points that give us a trend line that we can begin to say we know something.
- TillE 4y ago
  Right, any casual reader who wants good information should look for meta analyses. You should almost never draw conclusions from a single study.
Pulcinella 4y ago
My copy of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (basically an encyclopedia of scientific facts. Things like melting points, conductivity, etc.) has an opening from the current editor explaining that when he took over as editor he tried to track down the sources of a lot of the data. Unfortunately a lot of the sources for the data wasn’t listed, missing, didn’t seem to exist, or existed but was incorrect. So he undertook a program of re-doing a lot of the studies and finding new, accurate sources. Definitely gave me sort of cyberpunk vibes of “this data just showed up one day and nobody knows where it came from.” Edit: I’ve also run across cases where data is just incorrect and you don’t know how. E.g. a chemical ordered form a supplier is listed as having a solubility of X you the most you can ever get to dissolve is Y and X is something like 13.7 times higher than Y so it’s not like a simple misplaced decimal.
bobsmooth 4y ago

4 ms·

If you haven't worked in science, please keep in mind that the literature has never been seen as holy writ. Wrong stuff gets published all the time. You have to

by tom-thistime 4y ago

dbingham 4y ago
Not just that, but it would be impossible to achieve. One study should never be taken as truth - but rather a single data point among many. It's only when we have many data points that give us a trend line that we can begin to say we know something.
- TillE 4y ago
  Right, any casual reader who wants good information should look for meta analyses. You should almost never draw conclusions from a single study.
Pulcinella 4y ago
My copy of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (basically an encyclopedia of scientific facts. Things like melting points, conductivity, etc.) has an opening from the current editor explaining that when he took over as editor he tried to track down the sources of a lot of the data. Unfortunately a lot of the sources for the data wasn’t listed, missing, didn’t seem to exist, or existed but was incorrect. So he undertook a program of re-doing a lot of the studies and finding new, accurate sources. Definitely gave me sort of cyberpunk vibes of “this data just showed up one day and nobody knows where it came from.” Edit: I’ve also run across cases where data is just incorrect and you don’t know how. E.g. a chemical ordered form a supplier is listed as having a solubility of X you the most you can ever get to dissolve is Y and X is something like 13.7 times higher than Y so it’s not like a simple misplaced decimal.
bobsmooth 4y ago