The pretense of scientism is that science is the supreme means of discerning an absolute and objective truth. But the truth is that science, as it's practiced in this time when the popular reputation of science is at its most unrealistic height is a mess. That so many of the true believers actually know so little about science that they don't understand that when a huge percentage of published studies can't be replicated, that, alone, constitutes a total breakdown of science. Replication of results, that results reported can be tested through replication is an absolute requirement for what is called "science" by scientists to be reliable. And the discovery that large numbers of experiments and observations can't be replicated points out to other, equally bad aspects of science as it is practiced in the 21st century. The failure of replicability crisis points out to other crises in peer review which has been verified in the exposure of fraud which went undetected for years in some of the more highly promoted and popularized fields of science. The situation in that most PR driven of sciences, psychology is way past crisis point with fewer than 40% of studies even passing the agreed to standards of psychology (which I wouldn't trust to start with).
Don’t trust everything you read in the psychology literature. In fact, two thirds of it should probably be distrusted.
In the biggest project of its kind, Brian Nosek, a social psychologist and head of the Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, and 269 co-authors repeated work reported in 98 original papers from three psychology journals, to see if they independently came up with the same results.
The studies they took on ranged from whether expressing insecurities perpetuates them to differences in how children and adults respond to fear stimuli, to effective ways to teach arithmetic.
According to the replicators' qualitative assessments, as previously reported by Nature, only 39 of the 100 replication attempts were successful. (There were 100 completed replication attempts on the 98 papers, as in two cases replication efforts were duplicated by separate teams.) But whether a replication attempt is considered successful is not straightforward. Today in Science, the team report the multiple different measures they used to answer this question.
And this report gives a succinct reason that this does constitute a true crisis in science.
There is no way of knowing whether any individual paper is true or false from this work, says Nosek. Either the original or the replication work could be flawed, or crucial differences between the two might be unappreciated. Overall, however, the project points to widespread publication of work that does not stand up to scrutiny.
Once you discover that there is this level of failure of peer review, of the process of publication, you don't know what is trustworthy. And the bigger problem is that for the years and decades before the recent exposure of the problem, you don't know how much of what was presented as science deserved the trust that was insisted it deserved. You don't know how much of anything which isn't subjected to a real and rigorous and MANDATORY replication and review process is reliable. The fact that very little testing through replication is done because journals won't publish replication studies is a fatal failure of that scientific method we were all sold in the early high school years.
In sciences where this hasn't, yet been done with suffient rigor to really test the claims made, you don't know if the situation isn't as bad as it has been discovered to be in the fields it has been discovered in. The situation discovered existed for years, undetected as the irreproducable results were sold as science. Perhaps most alarming of all are the failures in pharmaceutical science, the drugs and treatments sold by conventional medicine, what doctors rely on to have been rigorously tested. Our medical care shouldn't be allowed to continue to be trusted to a process that's reminiscent of the marketing of Microsoft products, release it and try to fix it as problems are reported.
Scientists have obviously not been doing what they have told us they do, they have been misrepresenting the reliability of science and the rigor with which they have not been following their own rules. That is a failure of morality, of doing what is advantageous for the scientists, for those who employ them, for the departments and institutions they work for. Considering the political and other issues surrounding materialistic atheism and its inherent amorality and the claim often made by atheists that a large majority of scientists are atheists, I've got to ask if the amorality of their world view doesn't make it reasonable to expect that this kind of thing would be rationally expected to arise in such a materialistic milieu.
We put much too much faith in the genteel manners of the scientist class. It's not a faith unlike that sold in businessmen and financial professionals, a skim coat covering a rather vicious bunch but one which will always break the rules if they know they can get away with it and who will come to gentlemen's agreements to break them to their mutual advantage. I think it would be a lot more realistic to view science as being like every other profession, not trustworthy to police itself. That is especially true due to the complex and esoteric aspects of science, in which any specialty will have its own body of founding facts which even other scientists will not know because no one can know everything. Even scientists have to take what other scientists in another field say on faith. Though the fact that bad science can harm a scientist, their family and friends has certainly has not kept a lot of scientists from protecting the community of scientists and keeping up the pose of the integrity of SCIENCE.
Well, now we know and science will have to prove that it will live up to its pretensions or it will suffer a loss of confidence that other institutions found to be corrupt and hypocritical have suffered. Frankly, with the disasters that science has wrought, global warming, the creation of the most horrific of weapons, dangerous pharmaceuticals, food ingredients, etc. I don't see how it can't avoid getting taken down any number of pegs. It's high priesthood will not be able to maintain the pose of omnipotence for science, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the skepticsim that annoys them isn't a result of past failures. People have certainly noticed that the claims of nutritionists, their reliable, reported, reviewed science seems to change in the most contradictory of ways, at times depending on who payed the scientists. The same is true all over, science has certainly not avoided turning into the paid shills and liars of industry and financial and military industrial power. And they just absolutely hate it that the common folk, the plebs seem to have noticed that something's not as sold.
And the failure of replication is only one of a number of crucial failures of science that are becoming undeniable. The entire animal testing industry has, as well, been being tested and many of its most basic assumptions, made in the 19th century and relied upon, untested since then, are also being found to be false or not as claimed. I suspect entire sciences which have sprung up are based on sand that could turn into quicksand very fast as more testing of basic assumptions is done, forced by the building demand to test them.
I'm ceaselessly bemused (though not perplexed, so perhaps I'm not yet a tedious elitist) by the sociology reporting on NPR. What is presented as "science" is simply common sense subjected to some kind of scrutiny which is supposedly "scientific" and therefore "truthy," and the outcome is something we all already know (i.e., agree on, which is all that "common sense" is).
ReplyDeleteAnd yet because it is "science" it is established as fact! It is true and can be trusted! And yet it's about as scientific as saying the earth is 5000 years old because the Bible tells me so (which, of course, it doesn't).
There is, as Hume pointed out (and Quine didn't really refute; not to my satisfaction, anyway) only a few things empiricism/science call tell us, and most of those things are unimportant. The rest is unprovable (by empiricism), and therefore the reach of our knowledge (measured by the empirical yardstick) is short, indeed.
But that doesn't keep science from being treated like the religion shibboleth the on-line atheist class claims to abhor with a religious (!) fervor.