3 ms·

Yeah, when you try new things, you often get them wrong. Why do we expect most published results to be true?

• ekianjo 2y ago
  because people believe that peer review improve things but in fact not really. its more of a stamping process
  • elashri 2y ago
    Yes that a misconception that many people think that peer-review involves some sort of verification or replication which is not true. I would blame mainstream media in part for this and how they report on research and don't emphasize this nature. Mainstream media also is not interested in reporting on progress but likes catchy headlines/findings.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• bluefirebrand 2y ago
  Because people use published results to justify all sorts of government policy, business activity, social programs, and such. If we cannot trust that results of research are true, then how can we justify using them to make any kind of decisions in society? "Believe the science", "Trust the experts" etc sort of falls flat if this stuff is all based on shaky research
  • marcosdumay 2y ago
    > If we cannot trust that results of research are true, then how can we justify using them to make any kind of decisions in society? Well, don't. Make your decisions based on replicated results. Stop hyping single studies.
    • XorNot 2y ago
      > Stop hyping single studies. This right here really. The reason people go "oh well science changes every week" is because what happens is the media writes this headline: "<Thing> shown to do <effect> in brand new study!" and then includes a bunch of text which implies it works great...and one or two sentences, out of context, from the lead research behind it saying "yes I think this is a very interesting result". They omit all the actual important details like sample sizes, demographics, history of the field or where the result sits in terms of the field.
      • mrguyorama 2y ago
        Scientists do not read science journalism, for a very good reason. Gell-Mann amnesia is in full effect. "Science" "Journalists" are rarely even one of those things.
    • adamrezich 2y ago
      After decades upon decades of teaching Western society to “Trust The Science”—where “Science” means “published academic research papers”—you can't unteach society from thinking this way with a simple four-word appeal to logic. The damage has already long since been done. It's great that people are starting to realize the mistake, but it's going to take a lot more work than just saying “stop hyping single studies” in this comments thread to radically alter the status quo. I once knew a guy who ended his friendship of many years with me over an argument about “safe drug use sites”, or whatever they're called—those places where drug addicts can go to “safely” do drugs with medical staff nearby in case they inadvertently overdose. Dude was of the belief that these initiatives were unequivocally good, and that any common-sense thinking along the lines of, “hey, isn't that only going to encourage further self-destructive behavior in vulnerable members of the populace?” could be countered by pointing to a handful of studies that supposedly showed that these “safe shoot-up sites” had been Proven To Be Unequivocally Good, Actually. I took a look at one of these published academic research “studies”—said research was conducted by finding local drug dealers and asking them, before and after a “safe shoot-up site” was constructed, how their business was doing. The answer they got was, “more or less the same”—so the paper concluded (by means of a rather remarkable extrapolation, if I do say so myself) that these “safe shoot-up sites” were Provably Objectively Good For Society. After pointing this out to my friend of many years, he informed me that I had apparently become some flavor of far-right Nazi or whatever, and blocked me on all social media platforms, never speaking to me again. You're not going to get people like him to see reason by just saying “stop hyping single studies” and calling it a day. Our entire culture revolves around placing a rather unreasonable amount of completely blind faith in the veracity of published academic research findings.
  • thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > people use published results to justify all sorts of government policy, business activity, social programs, and such. That would be a reason to expect those results to be false, not a reason to expect them to be true.
  • wredue 2y ago
    If government used science to back up policy, we would most definitely not be having a huge portion of the problems we currently have.