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People distrust science by press conference. If they have a good result, they should publish it in a peer reviewed journal with all the details. There were qu
by oldgradstudent 4y ago
People distrust science by press conference.
If they have a good result, they should publish it in a peer reviewed journal with all the details.
There were quite a few results in the last two decades that were announced by a press conference and turned out to be completely false.
And I'm not even taking about the details of this specific result.
Press conferences are not
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoI think I agree and I share the skepticism for several reasons. Especially lately, we face really high levels of distrusts in most institutions. I can maybe see a reason for this approach in the form of "we don't want to just hand over details of this tech to everyone in the world" ( not that is a very good position, but I can at least understand the rationale ), but that is about it. You can mess with stats and so on ( especially in social fields ), but it may be nigh impossible to present results in energy field that are not replicable and still claim a win. Are we being distracted from something?
- donquixote25 4y agoIf you were familiar with NIF, you would know that they absolutely will publish the details of the experiment just as they published the details of the experiment that achieved ignition in August 2021: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.075001 https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...
- oldgradstudent 4y agoNASA also publishes. Yet we still got this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVSJLUIQrA0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVSJLUIQrA0 BICEP2 was a respected scientific collaboration, and it ended up like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iasqtm1prlI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iasqtm1prlI The even took a touching video of one of the participants notifying the theorist that predicted the result about their achievement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA Just a two off the top of my mind.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- swyx 4y agocan you elaborate on what was wrong with the NASA thing?
- oldgradstudent 4y agoOther than not being true? https://phys.org/news/2012-07-scientists-nasa-arsenic-life-untrue.html https://phys.org/news/2012-07-scientists-nasa-arsenic-life-u... https://retractionwatch.com/2021/01/21/why-one-biologist-says-its-not-too-late-to-retract-the-arsenic-life-paper/ https://retractionwatch.com/2021/01/21/why-one-biologist-say...
- donquixote25 4y agoWhat is your point? That we should distrust everything in a scientific journal? You are shifting the goal post. First, you wanted a publication. Now, you say that would not be enough? I am inclined to believe a publication unless other plasma physicist come out with a contradictory information. It's easy to be cynic...
- oldgradstudent 4y agoMy point is that people should distrust science by press conference. The minimum is to wait for the publication. Even then, scientific skepticism is the rule, not the exception. Especially in fields that are price to hype.
- ASalazarMX 4y agoThis is my pet peeve with the current way of popularizing science, it's just a step apart from "what these scientists found will shock you! News at eleven!". Seems aimed more towards attracting funding than showing a technological breakthrough.