Jun 5, 2023 01:31 PM
https://iai.tv/articles/auid-2489-auid-2489?_auid=2020
EXCERPTS: If we were naïve observers, we might think of scientists as earnest detectives—carefully sifting through the evidence, pursuing all reasonable leads, and updating their beliefs as needed. We might imagine that scientists get together, exchange notes, form brilliant and empirically accurate beliefs, and then share these state-of-the-science ideas with the public. These ideas usually would be true and thus form a reliable basis for designing effective interventions and policies.
To be sure, science has accomplished remarkable feats, from vaccines to spacecrafts. But science is far from the idealistic version portrayed above. Science is the single most effective mode of knowledge formation to date. But, it can also be inefficient, hostile, petty, unreliable, and invalid...
[...] Over the past decade or so, many scholars have accepted that much of science suffers a “replication crisis”. When a group of scholars tries to conduct the exact same methodological procedures as an earlier set of scholars, they often find different (and usually much less impressive) results. This means that a great deal of science is unreliable—very similar studies do not consistently produce very similar results.
But things are a bit worse than that. A great deal of science is also invalid, meaning it is simply not true. Even highly replicable findings can be wildly misleading, such as when a highly replicable association between two variables (say, ice cream sales and shark attacks) is accompanied by a highly inaccurate causal story (purchasing ice cream causes sharks to attack). Scholars had to work very hard to detect and demonstrate the replication crisis. The validity crisis is much simpler to detect: There are countless contradictory claims in the published literature.
Such claims, at least taken at face value, cannot all be true. Either someone is horrifically wrong, or at least someone is exaggerating. Although science purports to pursue truth, science actually incentivizes such contradictions...(MORE - missing details)
COVERED: Be New ..... Be Big ..... Be Right ..... A Better Way ..... Calling All One-Issue Renegades
EXCERPTS: If we were naïve observers, we might think of scientists as earnest detectives—carefully sifting through the evidence, pursuing all reasonable leads, and updating their beliefs as needed. We might imagine that scientists get together, exchange notes, form brilliant and empirically accurate beliefs, and then share these state-of-the-science ideas with the public. These ideas usually would be true and thus form a reliable basis for designing effective interventions and policies.
To be sure, science has accomplished remarkable feats, from vaccines to spacecrafts. But science is far from the idealistic version portrayed above. Science is the single most effective mode of knowledge formation to date. But, it can also be inefficient, hostile, petty, unreliable, and invalid...
[...] Over the past decade or so, many scholars have accepted that much of science suffers a “replication crisis”. When a group of scholars tries to conduct the exact same methodological procedures as an earlier set of scholars, they often find different (and usually much less impressive) results. This means that a great deal of science is unreliable—very similar studies do not consistently produce very similar results.
But things are a bit worse than that. A great deal of science is also invalid, meaning it is simply not true. Even highly replicable findings can be wildly misleading, such as when a highly replicable association between two variables (say, ice cream sales and shark attacks) is accompanied by a highly inaccurate causal story (purchasing ice cream causes sharks to attack). Scholars had to work very hard to detect and demonstrate the replication crisis. The validity crisis is much simpler to detect: There are countless contradictory claims in the published literature.
Such claims, at least taken at face value, cannot all be true. Either someone is horrifically wrong, or at least someone is exaggerating. Although science purports to pursue truth, science actually incentivizes such contradictions...(MORE - missing details)
COVERED: Be New ..... Be Big ..... Be Right ..... A Better Way ..... Calling All One-Issue Renegades
