Science

Not to be confused with rigged science, which is the corrupted counterpart; or scientism, an exaggerated belief in science

Science link
Ideally, the scientific method is a powerful tool. However, it is often corrupted to rigged science

Science is the study of the natural world through experiment and observation. Scientific research involves using the scientific method, which seeks to objectively explain the events of nature in a reproducible way.

After World War 2, science entered a period of unprecedented growth, having gone from being a scattered, amateur pursuit of wealthy gentleman to a career profession, where publishing articles became the measure of success, able to shape a scientist’s career and the direction of science itself.

Problematic notions

Full article: Science/Problematic notions

all subpages of this page

Scientific publishing

It is difficult to overstate how much power a journal editor now had to shape a scientist’s career and the direction of science itself. “Young people tell me all the time, ‘If I don’t publish in CNS [a common acronym for Cell/Nature/Science, the most prestigious journals in biology], I won’t get a job,” says Nobel prize winner Rany Schekman. He compared the pursuit of high-impact publications to an incentive system as rotten as banking bonuses. “They have a very big influence on where science goes.”

The market for scientific journals is highly concentrated. In 2015, Elsevier owned 24% of the scientific journal market, while Springer and Wiley-Blackwell controlled about another 12% each. These three companies accounted for half the market.

Watch on YouTube

Perspectives on the Pandemic: The Illusion of Evidence Based Medicine — "As much of the world rushes to receive a lightly-tested pharmaceutical product, we thought it was high time to look again at the (very) big business of medicine. Leemon McHenry, PhD, guides us to the fraudulent core of ghostwritten studies, captured legislators, revolving-door regulatory agencies, pay-to-play medical journals, and the "key opinion leaders" who lend their academic credentials to giant corporations...for a price."

Few people did more to shape the way science is conducted today than Robert Maxwell (1923-1991), who turned scientific journals into a spectacular money-making machine that bankrolled his rise in British society, by taking publishing out of the hands of scientists and expanding the business on a previously unimaginable scale. By 1959, Maxwell's Pergamon was publishing 40 journals; six years later it would publish 150. In 1991, shortly before his demise, Maxwell sold Pergamon to his quiet Dutch competitor Elsevier.

Sydney Brenner, Nobel laureate in medicine 2002, criticized the journal system:

I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system. It’s corrupt in many ways, in that scientists and academics have handed over to the editors of these journals the ability to make judgment on science and scientists. There are universities in America, and I’ve heard from many committees, that we won’t consider people’s publications in low impact factor journals.

Because publications have become a proxy for research quality, publications in high impact factor journals are the metric used by grant and promotion committees to assess individual researchers. The problem is that impact factor, which is based on the number of times papers are cited, does not necessarily correlate with good science. To maximize impact factor, journal editors seek out sensational papers, which boldly challenge norms or explore trendy topics, and ignore less spectacular, but equally important things like replication studies or negative results. As a consequence, academics are incentivised to produce research that caters to these demands.

Academics are slowly awakening to the fact that this dogged drive to publish rubbish has serious consequences on the quality of the science that they produce, which have far reaching consequences for public policy, costs, and human lives. One study found that only six out of 53 landmark studies in cancer research were replicable. In another study, researchers were only able to repeat a quarter of 67 influential papers in their field.

Scientific method

Scientific research involves using the scientific method, which seeks to objectively explain the events of nature in a reproducible way. An explanatory thought experiment or hypothesis is put forward as explanation using principles such as parsimony (also known as "Occam's Razor") and are generally expected to seek consilience – fitting well with other accepted facts related to the phenomena. This new explanation is used to make falsifiable predictions that are testable by experiment or observation. The predictions are to be posted before a confirming experiment or observation is sought, as proof that no tampering has occurred. Disproof of a prediction is evidence of progress.

When a hypothesis proves unsatisfactory, it is either modified or discarded. If the hypothesis survived testing, it may become adopted into the framework of a scientific theory, a logically reasoned, self-consistent model or framework for describing the behavior of certain natural phenomena.

While performing experiments to test hypotheses, scientists may have a preference for one outcome over another, and so it is important to ensure that science as a whole can eliminate this bias. This can be achieved by careful experimental design, transparency, and a thorough peer review process of the experimental results as well as any conclusions. After the results of an experiment are announced or published, it is normal practice for independent researchers to double-check how the research was performed, and to follow up by performing similar experiments to determine how dependable the results might be. Taken in its entirety, the scientific method allows for highly creative problem solving while minimizing any effects of subjective bias on the part of its users (especially the confirmation bias).