>“Academic scientists readily acknowledge that they often get things wrong,” The Economist states in its recent cover story “How Science Goes Wrong.” “But they

>“Academic scientists readily acknowledge that they often get things wrong,” The Economist states in its recent cover story “How Science Goes Wrong.” “But they also hold fast to the idea that these errors get corrected over time as other scientists try to take the work further. Evidence that many more dodgy results are published than are subsequently corrected or withdrawn calls that much-vaunted capacity for self-correction into question. There are errors in a lot more of the scientific papers being published, written about and acted on than anyone would normally suppose, or like to think.” I think the fact that people rarely retract can also be more of a practical issue than anything. Some guy wrote his master's thesis 3 years ago and it's in fact wrong? The author's too busy with his real life to have been keeping track of that. Or he's working on some other domain. Or the paper was written 30 years ago. I've also heard a lot of people say that a lot of research happens in the dark in many domains. People doing research in Haskell will gladly talk about their work on mailing lists it seems, but when it comes to chemistry, apparently it's a whole lotta silence. Pretty depressing.