It's possible for just about any scientific field to get stuck in an error cascade and take a while to climb out of it. Medicine has pretty much the same proble

It's possible for just about any scientific field to get stuck in an error cascade and take a while to climb out of it. Medicine has pretty much the same problem as climate - lots of scientists are doing good work but some are finding bogus results and we have very poor mechanisms for making sure the good work is what bubbles to the top. Even if many of the individual studies are fine, politically organized summaries of those study results are problematic - they can rather trivially be manipulated to show any result desired by controlling the timing of the inputs. Good discussion of "error cascades" here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1642 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1642 This research study finds that most research findings are false: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...