| - Incorrect use of statistics tools. - Cherry-picking of data. - Flawed or missing controls. - Lack of replication, and in the few cases where it's attempted, failure to replicate. - Non-publication of failures. - Publish-or-perish providing huge incentives to publish junk. - Peer review being an old boys club that enforces the party line. - All funding coming from few sources that tacitly use their funding power to fund only those that toe the party line. - So much basic science having been done by now that the remaining science to do is generally expensive to do, thus inviting the above funding / control problem. - Dogmatism. - Media attention. These are the problems that plague science today. Some of these have been there for a long time, like dogmatism. There are people alive today who were taught that the continents don't move, and that noticing that South America and Africa fit together and concluding that they must have moved is nonsense of the highest order. There are people alive today whose treatment for Polio was not physical therapy but immobilization. The list of dogma, old and new, is long. The malign ways in which some lords of science fiefdoms defend their dogmas have not gone away in spite of Popper's method. |