I don’t know about you? But I can’t tell you how many times I have read in the general news media articles that state that we should (paraphrasing) “trust science because it knows what it is talking about and ignore all the idiots that disagree with it” about *fill in your subject here*.
Anyone who regularly reads this blog knows I am a BIG fan of science, however I have NEVER been a fan of following any science blindly. Science always changes. It’s just part of the process and I’m sorry but any dolt that comes out and says (again, paraphrasing) “The science is %100 percent certain of this” *fill in your subject here*, I just sit back and wait for time to refute the ‘consensus’ on their findings and it usually does…
And not-surprisingly, without much media fan-fair.
When it comes to scientific “facts”: It’s only the truth until it isn’t.
And here, in THIS article, others are finally beginning to come to the same understanding as well.
About darn time:
Jonah Lehrer has an interesting article in the New Yorker reporting that all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings in science have started to look increasingly uncertain as they cannot be replicated.
This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology and in the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only anti-psychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants. ‘One of my mentors told me that my real mistake was trying to replicate my work,’ says researcher Jonathon Schooler. ‘He told me doing that was just setting myself up for disappointment.’ For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. ‘If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved?’ writes Lehrer. ‘Which results should we believe?‘ Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to ‘put nature to the question’ but it now appears that nature often gives us different answers. According to John Ioannidis, author of Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls ‘significance chasing,’ or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance— [thus they get the result they WANT and not the truth behind what is THERE] the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher. ‘The scientists are so eager to pass this magical test that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy,’” [Read More]
I can’t help but find that horribly troublesome…
Especially if one considers all of the monstrous things we have done in the name of ‘science’.
[Click here for a frightening list of 25 of the scariest scientific experiments conducted]
