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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.'"
I don't know if I should believe him or not, couldn't his paper be wrong too? What if textbooks were wrong too? Movies? What if the dinosaurs didn't even exist? I can't handle it anymore!
How certain are we that this guy isn't part of the other 50%?
... that this paper falls in the wrong 50%.
73% of all stats are made up on the spot...
22% of all people know that.
"But just because these two scientists were wrong about the precise mechanics of evolution doesn't mean that they were wrong about how the data should be interpreted."
If you don't understand the foundational mechanics, you dont undetstand the process and if you dont understand the process you won't have any actual idea if your ideas of how such things came to be are correct or how to interpret them. A stone tied to a stick is a hammer, you would interpret such a structure much differently then the stone and stick seperately. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Most of darwins ideas about how evolution worked were totally wrong, with the amount we know now about the body's repair systems and bacterial communication his views of evolution look extremely naive and childlike, it wasn't hard for evolution to gain any momentum simply because the facts of geology and cosmology were irrefutable, life was easy to mold into the ideas that life was just an extension of geological and cosmological processes. Natural selection has had its day, but we've discovered it's not the primary driving force of evolution, only someone naive would think that, or was educated a long time ago.
Evolution didn't have truly rough time its only competition were myths, not exactly hard to piggy back on geologic and cosmological time and say 'it was the environment that caused all this'. When your only competition are error ridden mythological works.
It doesn't take a genius, such theories have been around long before darwin.
They're all wrong.
A scientific paper is just the description of an experiment. An experiment tests a hypothesis, which is "guess" based on a theory, or model. The model is never, and I mean NEVER, completely accurate. It can't be, because it's only a mental representation of the physical phenomenon, and is not equal to the phenomenon.
So, by the very definition of empiricism and the scientific method, all scientific papers are "wrong." They're just different degrees of wrong.
Get over it.