We rely on science. Why is it letting us down when we need it most?

[rangerrebew]

We rely on science. Why is it letting us down when we need it most?

by Stuart Ritchie, Los Angeles Times
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Science is suffering from a replication crisis. Too many landmark studies can't be repeated in independent labs, a process crucial to separating flukes and errors from solid results. The consequences are hard to overstate: Public policy, medical treatments and the way we see the world may have been built on the shakiest of foundations.

In June, the latest chapter in the replication saga featured a highly influential study on memory. In 2010, in a blockbuster article in the journal Nature, New York University researchers found that it was possible—without the use of drugs, brain stimulation or anything invasive—to "rewrite" a person's memory so they're less afraid when shown a reminder of something that had scared them in the past.

Such results could have groundbreaking implications for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Accordingly, the Nature paper has been cited more than 1,100 times, often in trials of new PTSD therapies. The finding also has received generous attention in the popular media, including articles such as "How to Erase Fear in Humans" and an influential New Yorker profile of the lead author.

https://phys.org/news/2020-08-science.html

[Joe Wooten]

That's easy. The left wing lunatics have infiltrated and taken over the universities. Their indoctrination methods leave people incapable of thinking straight.

[Bigun]

That's easy. The left wing lunatics have infiltrated and taken over the universities. Their indoctrination methods leave people incapable of thinking straight.

 

[Smokin Joe]

Seriously? Desensitization toward violence, gore, bloodshed, and even unnatural behaviours via media disguised as "entertainment" has been going on since the sixties. There was a time when movies would be rated X for violence: A Clockwork Orange, I Am Curious Yellow, even Warhol's Frankenstein were all X rated, as I believe was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Not any more, that stuff would play on television today.

[The_Reader_David]

That's easy. The left wing lunatics have infiltrated and taken over the universities. Their indoctrination methods leave people incapable of thinking straight.

Actually, the corruption of behavioral science has far less to do with the academic left, and far more to do with the fact that studies which support their null-hypothesis (the boring one, that nothing is happening) are almost impossible to get published, while papers that reject the null-hypothesis and "find something" are readily accepted for publication (which in the behavioral sciences by standards established long before the Left started its long march through the institutions will happen about 1 in 20 times when there really is nothing to be found), combined with the need to publish to get tenure and get grant funding (which is given out by people who have the same incentives and like "finding things".)

Yes, the Left loves tabula rasa (their entire program falls to dust as a viable program by which to organize society once it is admitted that there really is an inborn human nature that is not infinitely maleable -- and it matters not for this-wordly purposes whether understanding of that nature is better informed by Darwin or by Genesis, the social good for the ape that looks to the heavens and manages to create art, religion, and science is very much the same as the social good for the fallen pinnacle of creation who unites in himself the spiritual and material realms but is given over to his animal passions) and there is a resulting bias toward nurture over nature papers, suspicion toward neuroscience, and of late anything that reminds us of human sexual dimorphism (whether as a simple fact of mammalian evolution or a reflection of "male and female He created them").  But the foundation of the replication crisis is not that, but the need to publish papers with findings "significant at the p<.05 level".

[Slide Rule]

Much of what is called Science by the media and politicians is no such thing. You don't approach science with the conclusion and then build all the intermediate steps, like they flowed smoothly together logically. Fabrication has infiltrated much and it is holding back real science and the advancements that real science brings.

They think there is a shortcut. There is no shortcut. There is only a fuller understanding of principles. The sooner we fire such people the sooner our nation will advance and provide an even higher standard of learning and economy.

Slide Rule

[Smokin Joe]

Much of what is called Science by the media and politicians is no such thing. You don't approach science with the conclusion and then build all the intermediate steps, like they flowed smoothly together logically. Fabrication has infiltrated much and it is holding back real science and the advancements that real science brings.

They think there is a shortcut. There is no shortcut. There is only a fuller understanding of principles. The sooner we fire such people the sooner our nation will advance and provide an even higher standard of learning and economy.

Slide Rule

Precisely.

Much of what passes for scientific investigation now does begin with a conclusion and seeks evidence which supports that, discarding all else, instead of following the evidence to an accurate (or at least more accurate) conclusion.

The idea of the scientific method, to generate a testable hypothesis, to definitively test that hypothesis with a repeatable experiment, to observe and take in the data (all of it) which either confirm or refute that hypothesis, and to incorporate that information in the next iteration of trying to understand the matter at hand, the new hypothesis, experiment, observations, conclusions, all advance our understanding of God's Creation little by little.
 
Those hypotheses which seem to be supported by all the data advance to the level of theory, and with time and multitudes of tests, may even be considered a quantifiable "Law" of nature.

Sadly, some of the most egregious nonsense in the past few decades has been passed off on a scientifically illiterate and innumerate public as gospel, when, in fact, it is charlatanry wrapped in a cloak woven of grant money and institutional prestige, supported by redacted and doctored ("adjusted") data, and cult fiction. Unfortunately, that, with its accompanying arm-waving and bright crescendos of impending doom, has captured the fertile imaginations of those unrestrained by scientific principles and unfettered by mere knowledge, and become basis for policy and control.

It distresses me to see an honorable profession blighted thus, especially because I am a scientist.

[Absalom]

The blame is owned by "scientists" and not science.

[Smokin Joe]

The blame is owned by "scientists" and not science.

By some "scientists", and I hesitate to allow them to pervert that designation so.