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Most science findings wrong or useless?

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From Ronald Bailey at Reason:

“Science, the pride of modernity, our one source of objective knowledge, is in deep trouble.” So begins “Saving Science,” an incisive and deeply disturbing essay by Daniel Sarewitz at The New Atlantis.

…

And then there is the huge problem of epidemiology, which manufactures false positives by the hundreds of thousands. In the last decade of the 20th century, some 80,000 observational studies were published, but the numbers more than tripled to nearly 264,000 between 2001 and 2011. S. Stanley Young of the U.S. National Institute of Statistical Sciences has estimated that only 5 to 10 percent of those observational studies can be replicated. “Within a culture that pressures scientists to produce rather than discover, the outcome is a biased and impoverished science in which most published results are either unconfirmed genuine discoveries or unchallenged fallacies,” four British neuroscientists bleakly concluded in a 2014 editorial for the journal AIMS Neuroscience.More.

The good news is that we can get past the cheerleading for science and discuss this stuff now. We can’t fix what w e can’t discuss, and I remember when we couldn’t, not really.

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2 Replies to “Most science findings wrong or useless?”

  1. 1
    tjguy says:
    August 28, 2016 at 3:07 am

    WOW!

    Quote from the following article:

    http://crev.info/2016/05/science-is-biased/

    “Only the Christian worldview, with its Ten Commandments, can provide a moral foundation for science. That’s not to say Christians in science will always perform better. But they can account for the requirements of honesty and integrity (1/16/16) in science and in every area of investigation. People view science incorrectly if they think it has a superior path to knowledge, or the only reliable way to know things. That’s scientism, not science. Real science is mediated by fallible humans who need a moral compass.

    If one’s moral compass is produced by natural selection, it has no guarantees about finding the truth. For a revealing piece on the failures of “evolutionary epistemology,” read Sarah Chaffee’s piece at Evolution News & Views. Contrary to simple intuition, she shows how natural selection tends to obscure reality, not help creatures discover it. With a self-refuting worldview like “evolutionary epistemology,” science is doomed. The only rescue is a worldview that accounts for the orderliness and purposefulness of nature, from a Creator who commands, “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” That goes for historians and preachers as well as for scientists and laymen.

    The hopeful side of that moral dictate is that humans are indeed capable of obeying it. We can, by logical inference, know what is true and what is false. And we must.”

  2. 2
    Robert Byers says:
    August 28, 2016 at 9:28 pm

    I think it just shows what happened in the past too. Including origin subjects.
    People published ideas and who could really question them?!
    Science ideas was never well done. its poor sampling. There was just less in the past and thev winners are remember, including ones wrongly considered winners.
    I question there is any more problem then the past.
    They just don’t see the old problems.
    Darwin said his ideas were settled fact before a dozen other people could seriously think about it.

    These complainers of modern science are getting the whole point wrong. ITS JUST humans thinking about things. There is not much control. THERE NEVER WAS.
    Evolutionism is case in point.

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