Scientific studies are overrated

Diogenes of Sinope said:
No. but I was probably meant to die.
Also if it wasn't for science/technological advancements, I probably would have lung cancer in the first place
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probably meant to die- you realize SCIENCE has discovered that we have cells programmed to, and therefore we are MEANT to die right? Apoptosis caused by so-called death receptors 'Trail/Fas' etc.

I DON'T think that's in the bible but don't take my word for it....
 
BillytheFish said:
probably meant to die- you realize SCIENCE has discovered that we have cells programmed to, and therefore we are MEANT to die right? Apoptosis caused by so-called death receptors 'Trail/Fas' etc.

I DON'T think that's in the bible but don't take my word for it....
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We dont need science to know that death is natural lol.
 
Diogenes of Sinope said:
Not logical. In a world with no medicine. People would die from ailments, but the human race would continue. and even if it didn't, then another species would. Thats the natural way of things, medication has led to bacteria building immunities, instead of us
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do you see the irony in you trying to tell me about logic, in a thread where to seek to dispel science...
 
Diogenes of Sinope said:
We dont need science to know that death is natural lol.
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well you do- because if i was to punch the back of your fucking head really hard causing internal hemorrhage, and then left your body for someone to find.

Without science how would they know your death was natural versus me smashing your brain inside your skull? No swelling to the exterior, no caved in head...just good old internal bleeding. How do you determine whether you died of natural causes then, without science?
 
BillytheFish said:
do you see the irony in you trying to tell me about logic, in a thread where to seek to dispel science...
Click to expand...
its not logical in the sense that youre using an appearance to emotion, by putting me in a position where I have cancer, that has nothing to do with science. lol youre trying to make me biased by putting me in an emotional position, where I want science because I dont want to die
 
BillytheFish said:
well you do- because if i was to punch the back of your fucking head really hard causing internal hemorrhage, and then left your body for someone to find.

Without science how would they know your death was natural versus me smashing your brain inside your skull? No swelling to the exterior, no caved in head...just good old internal bleeding. How do you determine whether you died of natural causes then, without science?
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Imagine being this worked up over a thread lol.
 
Diogenes of Sinope said:
Newtonian physics, was thought to be yield extremely accurate results when studying large objects that are not extremely massive and speeds not approaching the speed of light, then when observed at the quantum level, all of it was useless and nonsensical.
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This agrees completely with my statement.
 
Yeah...the bible never contradicts itself and is uber useful to solve the challenges of the 21st century.

{<jordan}
 
Where is a cashier when you need one?




Nothing but those automated checkout machines. Goddamn scientists.
 
Well, I think it's by far the best mechanism we have for determining useful knowledge at this point. That being said there are some problems with it.

One of the biggest problems with it is the church of science mentality that the public has. This isn't a problem with the sciences per say, but it does affect how science operates in our society. It's people who, rather than treating scientific findings as the progressive (not politically so, but referring to linear progressive steps), falsifiable method which attempts to determine things through showing them to be consistently repeatable, instead treat it as if science "proves" or shows something to be outright truth. These are the people who will find a study that says something and post it to social media saying "Science proves ______" - and that's that. Then it gets spread around as some totally misguided appeal to authority which doesn't lead to much good for anyone. My response to this is if there is a scientific claim find the study making it, check its methodology, and if it seems reasonable file it away as "that's a reasonable claim" and wait for it to be falsified. Until then treat it like a reasonable, but not fully proven, claim. Not many people even enact even these imperfect checks and balances though and treat scientific studies as if they were the word of God from on high. I believe this is what the OP is frustrated with and, to an extent, he's right - just because "science says!" doesn't mean it's true. The onus is on you to be a good and critical reader of scientific studies rather than just a trusting consumer.

Another element of this is that publishing journals aren't always credible but they look credible, and with people treating science as gospel, bad studies enter the public mindspace as if they were good ones. For an example of this:

"In the latest ploy, reported Wednesday, a group of researchers at the University of Wroclaw, in Poland, tried to seat a fictional scholar onto the editorial boards of 360 academic publications.

The goal: to test whether, with just a CV — full of fake scientific degrees — and a profile on Academia.edu as well as a fake university, some would accept a scholar named “Anna O. Szust” (which translates to “Anna, a Fraud” in English) as a member of their editorial boards.


And many did. The sting, reported in Nature, netted 48 journals — nearly all of which were so-called “predatory” journals. Such journals accept manuscripts without reviewing them, print them without editing them, and otherwise make a mockery of the scientific literature by pumping out low-quality work.

Some offered Anna potentially lucrative profit-sharing. Others required payment from her.

Not one of the 120 legitimate publications included in the scheme fell for the ruse.

Although the operation was cute, those results weren’t surprising. After all, this isn’t the first such stunt; a top bovine excrement researcher, Hoss Cartwright, has ended up on boards, too. And at legitimate journals, editors are generally very wary of scientists who try to get themselves on editorial boards."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-sting-exposes-corrupt-journal-publishers/

The system has cracks and not all studies are good. For most of the public though, they will take any study as gospel if it serves their purposes because of, again, the "church of science" mentality. We often treat scientific findings as an appeal to authority rather than as the type of testing of falsifiable claims the method itself is built around.

The other side of it is a combination of money and corruption in peer review. Science isn't just a bunch of goofs in lab coats doing stuff because they love it and just really want the truth - there is a political apparatus around the processes of publication and funding which leaves very clear incentives to either abuse the system or conduct studies with the intent of finding a certain result.

A few more articles of interest:

"This human tendency is not limited to the media. Science, oft sold as the clear-headed, unbiased answer to confirmation bias, is open to the same human manipulations, purposeful and accidental — and significantly more often than we might guess.

Research scientists are under pressure to get published in the most prominent journals possible, and their chances increase considerably if they find positive (thus “impactful”) results. For journals, the appeal is clear, writes Philip Ball for Nautilus: they’ll make a bigger splash if they discover some new truth, rather than if they simply refuted old findings. The reality is that science rarely produces data so appealing.

The quest for publication has led some scientists to manipulate data, analysis, and even their original hypotheses. In 2014, John Ioannidis, a Stanford professor conducting researching on research (or ‘meta-research’), found that across the scientific field, “many new proposed associations and/or effects are false or grossly exaggerated.” Ioannidis, who estimates that 85 percent of research resources are wasted, claims that the frequency of positive results well exceeds how often one should expect to find them. He pleads with the academic world to put less emphasis on “positive” findings"

https://wilsonquarterly.com/stories/sciences-under-discussed-problem-with-confirmation-bias/
Another:

"A Wall Street Journal op-ed warning emphatically about problems with scientific peer review begins by summarizing an especially extensive case of scientific fraud (also outlined in a Physics Today Online News Pick):

Academic publishing was rocked by the news on July 8 that a company called Sage Publications is retracting 60 papers from its Journal of Vibration and Control, about the science of acoustics. The company said a researcher in Taiwan and others had exploited peer review so that certain papers were sure to get a positive review for placement in the journal. In one case, a paper's author gave glowing reviews to his own work using phony names.

The op-ed appeared a few days after the New York Times ran the commentary “Crack down on scientific fraudsters” by the cofounders of the blog Retraction Watch, which had broughtthe 60-retractions scandal into wide public view. Citing other cases, that piece argued that the penalties for scientific fraud are generally insufficient, with too little repayment of misused funding, with too little professional ostracism of offenders, and with resignations forced—and criminal charges filed—too rarely.

The WSJ op-ed’s author, Hank Campbell, condemns the “absence at many journals” of “sound peer-review practices” and cautions that some “errors can have serious consequences if bad science leads to bad policy.” Linking peer-review problems to the problem of irreproducibility (nonreplicability) of research results, he invokes the authority of National Institutes of Health leaders Francis Collins and Lawrence Tabak. They began a January Nature commentary by reporting that a “growing chorus of concern, from scientists and laypeople, contends that the complex system for ensuring the reproducibility of biomedical research is failing and is in need of restructuring.” They agree with that chorus and declare that recent evidence showing this “irreproducibility of significant numbers of biomedical-research publications demands immediate and substantive action.”"


https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.8057/full/

Then if you add in an external political sphere which oftentimes hugely influences the purse strings of science and you've added in moneyed incentives to provide politically expedient findings. What this means is if you want to pursue scientific truth in a politically unpopular area, good luck getting funded. If you want to conduct even trivial work in a popular area though? Funding would get a lot easier. The end result? Massive overrepresentations of "consensus science" in certain areas and and incentivizing supporting hypothesis which are popular and well funded with alternative scientific pursuits being exceedingly difficult to get funding for. Once again, the public will take this as sign that the God of science has cast its judgment, and we must all pray before its sanctified word.

Part of why I enjoy working in the humanities is that everyone knows we're kind of flim-flam men/women so they take us with a grain of salt and are likely to trust us when we have something really provocative to say. The hard sciences on the other hand? They're viewed as objective, unbiased strivings for the truth. People trust them outright because of that - trusting their authority rather than a skeptical trusting of sound methods. This can, unfortunately, be a mistake. Our job? Trust but verify.
 
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Not A Theist said:
Well, I think it's by far the best mechanism we have for determining useful knowledge at this point. That being said there are some problems with it.

One of the biggest problems with it is the church of science mentality that the public has. This isn't a problem with the sciences per say, but it does affect how science operates in our society. It's people who, rather than treating scientific findings as the progressive (not politically so, but referring to linear progressive steps), falsifiable method which attempts to determine things through showing them to be consistently repeatable, instead treat it as if science "proves" or shows something to be outright truth. These are the people who will find a study that says something and post it to social media saying "Science proves ______" - and that's that. Then it gets spread around as some totally misguided appeal to authority which doesn't lead to much good for anyone. My response to this is if there is a scientific claim find the study making it, check its methodology, and if it seems reasonable file it away as "that's a reasonable claim" and wait for it to be falsified. Until then treat it like a reasonable, but not fully proven, claim. Not many people even enact even these imperfect checks and balances though and treat scientific studies as if they were the word of God from on high. I believe this is what the OP is frustrated with and, to an extent, he's right - just because "science says!" doesn't mean it's true. The onus is on you to be a good and critical reader of scientific studies rather than just a trusting consumer.

Another element of this is that publishing journals aren't always credible but they look credible, and with people treating science as gospel, bad studies enter the public mindspace as if they were good ones. For an example of this:

"In the latest ploy, reported Wednesday, a group of researchers at the University of Wroclaw, in Poland, tried to seat a fictional scholar onto the editorial boards of 360 academic publications.

The goal: to test whether, with just a CV — full of fake scientific degrees — and a profile on Academia.edu as well as a fake university, some would accept a scholar named “Anna O. Szust” (which translates to “Anna, a Fraud” in English) as a member of their editorial boards.


And many did. The sting, reported in Nature, netted 48 journals — nearly all of which were so-called “predatory” journals. Such journals accept manuscripts without reviewing them, print them without editing them, and otherwise make a mockery of the scientific literature by pumping out low-quality work.

Some offered Anna potentially lucrative profit-sharing. Others required payment from her.

Not one of the 120 legitimate publications included in the scheme fell for the ruse.

Although the operation was cute, those results weren’t surprising. After all, this isn’t the first such stunt; a top bovine excrement researcher, Hoss Cartwright, has ended up on boards, too. And at legitimate journals, editors are generally very wary of scientists who try to get themselves on editorial boards."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-sting-exposes-corrupt-journal-publishers/

The system has cracks and not all studies are good. For most of the public though, they will take any study as gospel if it serves their purposes because of, again, the "church of science" mentality. We often treat scientific findings as an appeal to authority rather than as the type of testing of falsifiable claims the method itself is built around.

The other side of it is a combination of money and corruption in peer review. Science isn't just a bunch of goofs in lab coats doing stuff because they love it and just really want the truth - there is a political apparatus around the processes of publication and funding which leaves very clear incentives to either abuse the system or conduct studies with the intent of finding a certain result.

A few more articles of interest:

"This human tendency is not limited to the media. Science, oft sold as the clear-headed, unbiased answer to confirmation bias, is open to the same human manipulations, purposeful and accidental — and significantly more often than we might guess.

Research scientists are under pressure to get published in the most prominent journals possible, and their chances increase considerably if they find positive (thus “impactful”) results. For journals, the appeal is clear, writes Philip Ball for Nautilus: they’ll make a bigger splash if they discover some new truth, rather than if they simply refuted old findings. The reality is that science rarely produces data so appealing.

The quest for publication has led some scientists to manipulate data, analysis, and even their original hypotheses. In 2014, John Ioannidis, a Stanford professor conducting researching on research (or ‘meta-research’), found that across the scientific field, “many new proposed associations and/or effects are false or grossly exaggerated.” Ioannidis, who estimates that 85 percent of research resources are wasted, claims that the frequency of positive results well exceeds how often one should expect to find them. He pleads with the academic world to put less emphasis on “positive” findings"

https://wilsonquarterly.com/stories/sciences-under-discussed-problem-with-confirmation-bias/
Another:

"A Wall Street Journal op-ed warning emphatically about problems with scientific peer review begins by summarizing an especially extensive case of scientific fraud (also outlined in a Physics Today Online News Pick):

Academic publishing was rocked by the news on July 8 that a company called Sage Publications is retracting 60 papers from its Journal of Vibration and Control, about the science of acoustics. The company said a researcher in Taiwan and others had exploited peer review so that certain papers were sure to get a positive review for placement in the journal. In one case, a paper's author gave glowing reviews to his own work using phony names.

The op-ed appeared a few days after the New York Times ran the commentary “Crack down on scientific fraudsters” by the cofounders of the blog Retraction Watch, which had broughtthe 60-retractions scandal into wide public view. Citing other cases, that piece argued that the penalties for scientific fraud are generally insufficient, with too little repayment of misused funding, with too little professional ostracism of offenders, and with resignations forced—and criminal charges filed—too rarely.

The WSJ op-ed’s author, Hank Campbell, condemns the “absence at many journals” of “sound peer-review practices” and cautions that some “errors can have serious consequences if bad science leads to bad policy.” Linking peer-review problems to the problem of irreproducibility (nonreplicability) of research results, he invokes the authority of National Institutes of Health leaders Francis Collins and Lawrence Tabak. They began a January Nature commentary by reporting that a “growing chorus of concern, from scientists and laypeople, contends that the complex system for ensuring the reproducibility of biomedical research is failing and is in need of restructuring.” They agree with that chorus and declare that recent evidence showing this “irreproducibility of significant numbers of biomedical-research publications demands immediate and substantive action.”"


https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.8057/full/

Then if you add in an external political sphere which oftentimes hugely influences the purse strings of science and you've added in moneyed incentives to provide politically expedient findings. What this means is if you want to pursue scientific truth in a politically unpopular area, good luck getting funded. If you want to conduct even trivial work in a popular area though? Funding would get a lot easier. The end result? Massive overrepresentations of "consensus science" in certain areas and and incentivizing supporting hypothesis which are popular and well funded with alternative scientific pursuits being exceedingly difficult to get funding for. Once again, the public will take this as sign that the God of science has cast its judgment, and we must all pray before its sanctified word.

Part of why I enjoy working in the humanities is that everyone knows we're kind of flim-flam men/women so they take us with a grain of salt are more likely to trust us when we have something really provocative to say. The hard sciences on the other hand? They're viewed as objective, unbiased strivings for the truth. People trust them outright because of that - trusting their authority rather than a skeptical trusting of sound methods. This can, unfortunately, be a mistake. Our job? Trust but verify.
Click to expand...

Sir, while your response is rational and backed up with evidence, remember...you can lead a donkey to water...but you can't force the fucker to drink (quote from my friend in Galway).
 
I still don't get it how you discard scientific studies. Don't blame the tools, blame the person who used it. There will be always biases, doesn't mean it doesn't work as intended. Plus, research methods have always expanding and I can't say that is anything but a good thing for scientific progress.
 
Science is an investigative process, it's constantly revising itself. A lot of people seem to view "science" as dogma, they perceive it as immutable truth frozen in time, which is obviously incorrect. It's also very complex. We can conduct 100 studies on a very specific topic, for example a disease, and at the end we wouldn't even have fully grasped and understood the disease's complex mechanisms or be able create a cure for it. Another issue is that studies are not equal, in terms of whether they were well conducted or not. There are bunk studies and good studies, you can never assume one way or another until you read it yourself. Which leads us to the last issue, the population consumes "science" by reading 3 minute pop science editorials in the media, written by people who have no idea what they're about and are seeking to sensationalize as much as possible. To read and truly understand a complex study, you need about 3 to 4 hours. Even for people who work full-time in a specific field, it's completely impossible to keep on top of the thousands of studies who come out every month. That's why people specialize themselves into a tiny specific aspect of their field, so they can keep up on their corner and rely on others to do the same for other corners.

You can never use a mental shortcut for stuff like this. You just gotta skim or read the study and make your own mind about it, which is also why it's interesting. But yeah, it's effortful. Jesus isn't effortful.
 
I tend to agree. If I recall correctly from reading, scientific studies became a large industry in the 1960s. There were studies before then obviously, but it was in the 60s that large money could be made conducting studies. As with anything that makes big money, cheating and skewing results to fit desired outcomes is a problem many have noted.

What kind of makes me chuckle is how relative test results are often reported in the news. Relative test results though are largely meaningless. It is the absolute results that is wanted but rarely sees the light of day. In some ways kind of cleaver for companies to do that, but not the best for a public wanting helpful information.
 
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