6 ms·
I don't think there's any objective way to say that a majority of papers are bullshit, even if they are. Failure to replicate is "easy" to show, but doesn't sa
by Palomides 3y ago
I don't think there's any objective way to say that a majority of papers are bullshit, even if they are. Failure to replicate is "easy" to show, but doesn't say anything about the utility or quality of the science done, beyond the absolute basics of a paper describing what a scientist did in detail and not lying about the results. A "sky is blue" paper will replicate, but I'm not sure how you'd find a "fair" way to call it useless.
Anyway, jumping from "50% of papers will probably fail an absolute bare minimum test" to "90% of papers are garbage" is subjectively reasonable to me.
If 90% seems shocking to someone, I suggest they skim a bunch of papers and develop their own feel for how bad the situation is.
- orwin 3y agoI read a lot of history and some linguistics, it seems really fine to me. Linguistic especially, they work on _a lot_ of data, you don't have the "tested on 15 subjects" from biology or medecine effect. Even if i agreed with your "subjectively reasonable" idea, the issue is that non-STEM science encapsulate a lot of different fields.
- Palomides 3y agowhat's non-STEM science? the incentives of publishing and funding systems are similar across most fields (publish papers in the cool journals, get as many citations as possible, leverage that for more funding), I would be astonished if there were fields substantially exempt from bad science. I feel like my position is fair for any field publishing papers with falsifiable claims based on evidence?
- WhitneyLand 3y agoPossibly you and the OP would be better served to say “I wouldn’t be surprised if some claim about x%” is true. Or, “I would guess it’s true that”. Back to the main subject Vertasium has a related video: Is Most Published Research Wrong https://youtu.be/42QuXLucH3Q?si=p9M0ZOAdHuowD30n https://youtu.be/42QuXLucH3Q?si=p9M0ZOAdHuowD30n