Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by SkyBelow 2003 days ago
No surprise. Even among scientists there is an issue where the level of critical review a paper gets is largely dependent upon how agreeable the findings are to the person reviewing it. This is a reason that even science isn't fully trustable in areas where personal beliefs are very strongly held.

For one fun field, look at the level of criticism papers in parapsychology (the study of the paranormal) and compare it to if they get more criticism or not than the average paper in psychology. There is a particularly fun study (which I do not recall the name of) where two scientists teamed up, one who thought parapsychology was a true field and one who thought it was fake. They worked together on the same experiment and each produced results that agreed with them, but neither could find a flaw in the other's methodology or results (other than they disagree with their own results).