Is it a bad idea to broadly tell people to just "trust the science"? I think so.
The reason stems from my thinking that all of the following are important and true (and too often overlooked) regarding science:
1) A lot of science is real AND valuable to society.
2) A lot of "science" is actually fake - see, for instance, a decent percentage of papers in psychology 15 years ago.
3) "Science" (as an approach to knowledge discovery) is one of humanity's greatest inventions - but in pra...
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importance hacking
Importance Hacking: a major (yet rarely-discussed) problem in science
I first published this post on the Clearer Thinking blog on December 19, 2022, and first cross-posted it to this site on January 21, 2023.
You have probably heard the phrase "replication crisis." It refers to the grim fact that, in a number of fields of science, when researchers attempt to replicate previously published studies, they fairly often don't get the same results. The magnitude of the problem depends on the field, but in psychology, it seems that something like 40% of studies i...
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