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So in a nutshell, one of the greatest failings of science in history comes down to, researchers were under pressure so they caved and compromise their ethics an

So in a nutshell, one of the greatest failings of science in history comes down to, researchers were under pressure so they caved and compromise their ethics and morals. Even worse, the replication crisis is only one reason that the public has continued to lose faith in science in the post truth era. It’s also the disinformation campaigns that set out to attack whatever’s in a groups interest whether it be politics or the environment. Maybe the coup de grâce will be social media which encapsulates people into bubbles seemingly impenetrable to the truth.

nyrikki 2y ago
This result could happen without any intentional conduct, so ironically you may have made a similar error as the original researchers. While there are very real issues about reproducibility and motivation, rarely do studies actually claim what pop science puts in the headlines. Popper has a better approach with the idea that evidence cannot establish a scientific hypothesis, it can only “falsify” it. It is actually how we write computer programs in the modern era too. The Scientific realism camp is committed to a literal interpretation of scientific claims about the world, but others like myself consider it confusing the map for the territory. But that is the realm of philosophy and not science. While the time scale and wasted effort from the flawed original paper is regrettable, this is the process working in the long run. This paper's falsification is the process working, irrespective of some claims of 'ethics and morals' Studies about humans will always be subject to problems, exactly because of ethics and morals, e.g the tuskegee experiments.
- WhitneyLand 2y ago
  Of course it’s not all intentional. And it may not even be unethical by their standards as far as certain kinds of p-value hacking are allowed and journals are sometimes are hesitant to call out problems. But there’s been a huge amount of questionable behavior and there has to be personal responsibility with that. It’s not an overstatement to call this part of one of the biggest failures of science in history, and you can’t just sweep that under the rug as unintentional. As far as pop science I’m not addressing that but those sins don’t exonerate everything else. I don’t get what you mean about Popper either, he likely would’ve been all over the reproduceability crisis and calling out integrity as a key issue. Yes, science is self-correcting and things have definitely started to improve after learning from all of this. But the damage has been done. at the time when we need science, the most it’s been discarded by a significant part of the population.

nyrikki 2y ago

This result could happen without any intentional conduct, so ironically you may have made a similar error as the original researchers. While there are very real issues about reproducibility and motivation, rarely do studies actually claim what pop science puts in the headlines. Popper has a better approach with the idea that evidence cannot establish a scientific hypothesis, it can only “falsify” it. It is actually how we write computer programs in the modern era too. The Scientific realism camp is committed to a literal interpretation of scientific claims about the world, but others like myself consider it confusing the map for the territory. But that is the realm of philosophy and not science. While the time scale and wasted effort from the flawed original paper is regrettable, this is the process working in the long run. This paper's falsification is the process working, irrespective of some claims of 'ethics and morals' Studies about humans will always be subject to problems, exactly because of ethics and morals, e.g the tuskegee experiments.

WhitneyLand 2y ago
Of course it’s not all intentional. And it may not even be unethical by their standards as far as certain kinds of p-value hacking are allowed and journals are sometimes are hesitant to call out problems. But there’s been a huge amount of questionable behavior and there has to be personal responsibility with that. It’s not an overstatement to call this part of one of the biggest failures of science in history, and you can’t just sweep that under the rug as unintentional. As far as pop science I’m not addressing that but those sins don’t exonerate everything else. I don’t get what you mean about Popper either, he likely would’ve been all over the reproduceability crisis and calling out integrity as a key issue. Yes, science is self-correcting and things have definitely started to improve after learning from all of this. But the damage has been done. at the time when we need science, the most it’s been discarded by a significant part of the population.