To get an idea of how scientific science actually is you need to look no further than Retraction Watch. That logs science papers that have had to be retracted for one reason or another. They list 345 COVID papers, for instance. I hope we did not trust that science before it was withdrawn!
Scientists have always been less than scrupulous. Millikan won the Nobel Prize for measuring the charge on the electron. Others tried to replicate his value and managed to get quite close but not quite close enough. As more results accumulated the results diverged increasingly.
it turned out that Millikan actually got the wrong answer. He wanted an answer that proved his theory right and not that of a rival. However, the people that repeated Milikan's work "adjusted" their results to get an answer nearer to the Nobel Prizewinner. Over time that result drifted towards the real answer.
Eddington measured a gravitational lensing effect that would confirm Einstein. Apparently, his results were somewhere between confirming Newton and confirming Einstein but he said they confirmed Einstein. Later experiments by others also confirmed that - luckily!
Then there was Mendel with his genetics of peas. No-one was really interested in genetics at the time and Mendel "massaged" his data to get the data that confirmed his hypothesis.
This is such an excellent video about fakery in academia. The narrator is clear, organized, talks fast, hits many aspects of the problem. Some takeaways: once you've gotten a reputation in research, people trust you, use your research, create reality based on it. And if the researcher is then tempted to massage the data to get more notable results, they can get away with it, at least for a while, because it will take a lot of research by equally skilled people to catch the errors. The most ironic thing about this is that the dishonesty was perpetrated by people studying dishonesty.
Well, it is a study in the research culture. Even the vid narrator, though he knows this is very very bad, can't help being empathetic (toward the end).
To get an idea of how scientific science actually is you need to look no further than Retraction Watch. That logs science papers that have had to be retracted for one reason or another. They list 345 COVID papers, for instance. I hope we did not trust that science before it was withdrawn!
Scientists have always been less than scrupulous. Millikan won the Nobel Prize for measuring the charge on the electron. Others tried to replicate his value and managed to get quite close but not quite close enough. As more results accumulated the results diverged increasingly.
it turned out that Millikan actually got the wrong answer. He wanted an answer that proved his theory right and not that of a rival. However, the people that repeated Milikan's work "adjusted" their results to get an answer nearer to the Nobel Prizewinner. Over time that result drifted towards the real answer.
Eddington measured a gravitational lensing effect that would confirm Einstein. Apparently, his results were somewhere between confirming Newton and confirming Einstein but he said they confirmed Einstein. Later experiments by others also confirmed that - luckily!
Then there was Mendel with his genetics of peas. No-one was really interested in genetics at the time and Mendel "massaged" his data to get the data that confirmed his hypothesis.
Nothing is real. Especially in Academia.
This is such an excellent video about fakery in academia. The narrator is clear, organized, talks fast, hits many aspects of the problem. Some takeaways: once you've gotten a reputation in research, people trust you, use your research, create reality based on it. And if the researcher is then tempted to massage the data to get more notable results, they can get away with it, at least for a while, because it will take a lot of research by equally skilled people to catch the errors. The most ironic thing about this is that the dishonesty was perpetrated by people studying dishonesty.
Brings to mind fraudchicom. And his merry band of clotshotters.
Well, it is a study in the research culture. Even the vid narrator, though he knows this is very very bad, can't help being empathetic (toward the end).