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"Responsible" or "irresponsible" is not a valid criticism of a scientific paper. Those words have no part to play in the search for facts. The biggest way that
by weebull 2y ago
"Responsible" or "irresponsible" is not a valid criticism of a scientific paper. Those words have no part to play in the search for facts.
The biggest way that I think the reputation of the science community is being harmed is that it's not holding true to it's own tenets. The only way to discredit a paper is to falsify it's claims. Not to call it "irresponsible" or "immoral", label it "disinformation" or "pants-on--fire".
Bad science gets proved wrong, but nobody is interested in reproducing results. As a result our journals are full of accepted papers documenting unreproducible crap. They have been for a long time. When COVID hit and we needed science to be clean and authoritive, it was already in disarray. Unable to tell us what actually worked, we just got a bunch of folklore from all sides some of which got "blessed" by the high priests and some which was "sacrilegious", but very little of it was backed up with any data beyond modelling (which is just predictions).
Nobody should be claiming the high ground w.r.t. COVID IMHO. The science community failed us by acting in response to politics and not science.
- tim333 2y ago> The only way to discredit a paper is to falsify it's claims. The issue with the paper in question is stuff like: >six patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine had been dropped from the study—one of whom had died, and three of whom had transferred to intensive care—which potentially skewed the results in the drug’s favor. So you can point out their research is crap without actually falsifying the claim that hydroxychloroquine helps with covid. It's hard to prove a negative experimentally but easy to show stuff like the above is iffy.