> It's a mistake to equate "scientific research" with "the truth" or "reality". Aside from some fundamental questions on what "scientific research" exactly is,

> It's a mistake to equate "scientific research" with "the truth" or "reality". Aside from some fundamental questions on what "scientific research" exactly is, it should be pretty obvious that "someone published a paper somewhere" is not really worth much of anything on its own; you can find published papers on all sorts of topics that are clearly nonsense. And yet it's an even bigger mistake to discount the idea of knowledge gain through the scientific process. Remember, we're not talking about two separate attempts to gain knowledge - we have one systematic but flawed attempt, whereas the opposite is simply not trying at all. Just because you cannot exactly determine the mass of "bias in scientific publishing" doesn't mean you can't try to systematically study it, to find objective metrics by which you determine some order on some scale. Just think about this from the other perspective. Is there any piece of knowledge you have that is fundamentally impossible to study scientifically? Is there an unwritten law of the universe preventing somebody from formulating a system by which emotionless judgement is denied? If not, why would you not want to see scientific evidence, to at least lessen the chances of you being fooled by the interests of others?