OK, I have to be fair here. Yes, I’m a big fan of science and the scientific method, and I’m certainly very upset about the war on science being waged by the GOP and the Trump administration, but when people say that there are problems with science that make it hard to trust…….THIS is the kind of crap that does the damage.
We must be honest: there is a crapload of really badly done research out there. Part of it is simply fraudulent, by people who are fundamentally dishonest and don’t care. Some of it is indeed motivated by money, but it’s also nowhere close to what people think it is when they scream “shill” or “Big Ag” or “Big Pharma.” Extremely few people ever get rich by working the system of grant money.
A lot of it, though, is because there are so many people trying to do so much research, and not all of them know how to do it well, but the pressure to publish is intense (especially for doctoral students, postdocs, and tenure-track professors, #amirite Mommy, PhD???), and coming up with new ideas isn’t easy, etc.
Gideon Rosenblatt, a very thoughtful guy I follow, shared an article last week that is kind of relevant, and it also addresses the possible role that AI might play in decreasing the amount of bad research: https://aeon.co/ideas/science-has-outgrown-the-human-mind-and-its-limited-capacities
But simply put, it’s botched, dishonest, and even fraudulent research along these lines that hurts the cause of science a lot. It’s not that “SCIENCE” is bad; it’s that “this kind of science” is bad, but people don’t understand that nuance, and they wonder how they can trust SCIENCE.
Especially when this crap was published in a HIGHLY reputable journal like Science.
https://gizmodo.com/widely-reported-study-on-fish-and-microbeads-might-have-1794800598/amp