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Scientist Says Most Scientific Papers Are Wrong
An anonymous reader writes "According to epidemiologist John Ioannidis, the majority of published scientific papers are wrong. If Ioannidis's own paper is right, a randomly chosen scientific paper has less than a 50% chance of being true. He also says that many papers may only be accurate measures of the prevailing bias among scientists. However, a senior editor of a scientific journal says that scientists are already aware of this: 'When I read the literature, I'm not reading it to find proof like a textbook. I'm reading to get ideas. So even if something is wrong with the paper, if they have the kernel of a novel idea, that's something to think about.'"
Then his probably is too! Let's just ignore this and wait for the next piece of news about Firefox or Penny Arcade.
Damn good thing truth is constantly changing. Now we can bask in the comfort that those who we've setup as gods are wrong about half the time. So there's a 50% chance Creationism is right? And since they reach each others writings to get ideas instead of facts, perhaps all those people suffering in the wake of Katrina simply had differing ideas about where it was landing. Hey, they had a 50% chance of being right.
Personally, I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Their scientific evidence linking global warming to the dwindling pirate population is rock-solid. (Unlike, evidently, the majority of other scientific papers.)
As if that weren't enough, they also have their own car emblem.
May you Twirl on His Noodly Fork Forever.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
If science can be wrong, then why trust it?
In other words, if the best a scientist can tell you today is that, he might be wrong tomorrow, why even bother listening to him?
So you can use science for real things, like physics and design of military weapons and consumer goods, but the rest of it is so much speculative nonsense.
The consequences of guessing wrong about the origin of humanity are completely immaterial to most people's lives. You can't show people evolving any more than someone else can show God making something. It's immaterial, unprovable, and so why fight over it?
Yeah you can roll out the eliptical argument that evolution is somehow necessary for medicine but most doctors are concerned with the human species, here and now, and now plants and people are related. To wit, you can get a Chem E degree and still get into Med School.
This is my sig.
...which just goes to show that you don't have to be stupid or uneducated to be willfully ignorant.
False. Science is a process of understanding and defining the finite rules which govern our universe. You cannot make a true statement stating that all models will always be incomplete forever as there is no evidence that there is such a limitation.