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Friday, February 9, 2018

Vox Popoli: Trusting science

Are you placing your faith in scientistry or scientody? Because if you believe in the reliability of the latter, you need to understand that the former, on average, no longer practices it:

More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research. The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards reproducibility. Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant 'crisis' of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature.

This is absolutely incredible. Even Hollywood accounting is not this slipshod! In how many other fields does the failure of the numbers to add up correctly not mean that the result is wrong?

What this means is that nearly 7 in 10 so-called scientists are not utilizing the scientific method at all. What now passes for "science" is now little more than a modern spin on the logical fallacy of argumentum ad verecundiam, the appeal to credentialed authority.