The National Academies of Science is wading into the longstanding mess over the validity of research findings. It doesn’t, of course, agree that there is a “crisis.”
That said, the report also notes that the American public’s confidence in science hasn’t wavered at all in recent years, despite major news articles discussing the “crisis” in psychology and elsewhere. And it found that even scientists who have criticized the current state of things aren’t completely on-board with calling science broken.
“How extensive is the lack of reproducibility in research results in science and engineering in general? The easy answer is that we don’t know,” Brain Nosek, co-founder and director of the Center for Open Science, told the report committee during a panel last year. “I don’t like the term ‘crisis’ because it implies a lot of things that we don’t know are true.” Ed Cara, “Is Science Broken? Major New Report Outlines Problems in Research” at Gizmodo
Interesting approach, that: We don’t know how extensive the problem is but we are sure it can’t be a crisis?
That’s too bad. The term “crisis” means “turning point” or point at which decisions get made. Not to be confused with “apocalypse” (or, these days, mostly a-crock-a-lypse… )
The NAS report blames science journalists, which is a hoot:
The report also singles out journalists, citing a survey showing that 73 percent of Americans agree that the “biggest problem with news about scientific research findings is the way news reporters cover it.” Ed Cara, “Is Science Broken? Major New Report Outlines Problems in Research” at Gizmodo
Anyone familiar with the situation will know that most of the hype originates with media releases prepared by or for the researchers themselves.
Some of us think it’s the baggage caused by the built-in assumptions of naturalism (nature is all there is), often called “materialism.”
Note: The report is free if you register online, paywalled if you need paper.
Follow UD News at Twitter!
See also: Sabine Hossenfelder: Science publishing is too much like Facebook She introduces SciMeter.org where you can “Create your own custom metric and apply it to a list of authors.” And it is none of Mark Zuckerberg’s business or any science boffin’s either.