Limits of the scientific method

[firecat]

"The Truth Wears Off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method?" by Jonah Lehrer

...all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.

Comments

[eagle]

That's an excellent article. Thank you for the link! It manages to take on a very important subject that undermines a lot of reported scientific research without being anti-science, which is difficult to do and very well-handled.

It's also very kind, which is a good thing since hopefully that will make it more persuasive. It goes to great length to not assume malice. But it left me with the desire to say, somewhere for the record, that I firmly believe many of the problems with reproducibility of medical studies in particular is not due primarily to subtle effects of selective reporting, confirmation bias, or inappropriate handling of randomness. It's due to widespread, outright, pre-meditated fraud by the pharmaceutical companies, including falsification of results, intentional selective screening of results, bribing of journals, construction of fake journals, and similar sadly straightforward basic tactics of corruption.

[firecat]

Well, yeah. I completely agree.

I posted a while back about an article focusing on Dr. Ioannidis (mentioned in the New Yorker article). It discusses some of the less subtle pressures that skew data, although doesn't discuss fraud so much.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/