Korean Job Discussion Forums

[huffdaddy]

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7915

[gang ah jee]

[daskalos]

Voracity? Does science really eat that much? It should be ashamed of itself for such gluttony, but you know science -- it's probably not.

[huffdaddy]

[daskalos]

Oh. Damnit I hate ignorance. Especially when it's mine.

[mindmetoo]

Humans make mistakes and are capable of fraud. If it was so bad, rockets would blow up on launch pads, nuclear power plants would explode, computers wouldn't turn on. When research is based on previous research, if a study is really flawed, it becomes obvious. We could not get from scientific paper to space station.

It's telling the study is published in a widely read science magazine. I'm just curious how many other organizations publish such self criticism so widely? Does the Mormon church quickly distribute a study that says, despite a core tenant of its faith, its Indian members, in fact, have no genes that can be traced back to the Middle East?

[atlhockey]

As mindmetoo pointed out, science is often enough wrong or "off" a bit, but it is also self-correcting. That's why no study is taken as valid until it's been not only peer-reviewed but replicated several times by independent researchers. And often not even until the original idea has been expanded upon in research as well.

That "50%" number is sort of telling too. In chemistry and physics research, when you describe a phenomenon, it should occur pretty much every time under the conditions you define, because particles are predictable. When you get into life science and especially social science, even if you find a significant effect, with variability between humans it's hardly going to be "true" all the time. The threshhold for significance in psychology is much lower than in chemistry. I'm not sure if this study looked at differences between fields, but it's going to be grossly inaccurate if it didn't.

[laogaiguk]

[gang ah jee]

[Thunndarr]

[RACETRAITOR]

Science is not wrong. Scientific theories and hypotheses are sometimes wrong at certain stages, but there is a very simple method of correcting them.

I was just thinking the other day, two of the most cherished names in science over the last century or so, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, have both nearly been totally disproven out of existence.

[huffdaddy]

Found the original article. Looks like it's more of a theoretical statistical analysis of biomedical research. So yes, his findings probably have a good chance of being wrong. Although he's definitely on the right track.


http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1182327

[yodanole]

The only way to get new ideas out in the public eye academically, is to take a chance. Darwin waited several years, but his ideas were so radical he didn't really have to worry about being pre-empted by ongoing research.

[n3ptne]

It is admittedly true that Science is only relevant, or true, under the paticular variables that are defined...

However, the aim of Science is to subjugate all aspects of everything, be they social or technical, into underlying and fundamental concepts that include all variables and under which all things are always "true".

The fact Science is not there yet, in fact not even close to being there yet, is moot. A scientist simply acknowledges that "there" exists, and that the level of scientific knowledge is steadily progressing towards it.

Theories and hypothesis are all self-admittedly flawed, and constantly adjusting to compensate for new experimentally verified data. This doesn't suggest that Science is wrong or even unreliable.

[on_me_head_son]