[autoexec]

For all the problems that Nature (and science in general) has, and while I'm sure this incident will be used by some as "evidence" that we shouldn't trust in science, ultimately this incident was another win for science. It should have happened much much sooner, but in the end, the truth was found and the record corrected. That's exactly the result we want.

I appreciate that Nature's news team is willing to publish information about Nature's massively embarrassing failure to do their job reviewing the paper, and I hope they mean it when they say “We are looking at this case carefully to see what lessons can be learnt for the future.”

[dudeinjapan]

It's a "win" for science in the sense that the truth was finally revealed.

It's "loss" in the sense that our truth determining apparatus (e.g. peer review) appears to be highly unreliable, and a massive, unquantified amount of bullshit research has already passed it and is actively being used as a foundation for subsequent research.

[trogdor]

Peer review is supposed to review the quality of the research. It is not supposed to validate the findings, let alone detect fraud.

[dudeinjapan]

So umm... I'm glad that peer review determined this room temperature superconductor paper was excellently researched. Also, it was a complete lie.

[dekhn]

Realistically, we can't reduce false positives to absolutely zero without giving up on some True Positives (sensitivity/specificity tradeoff).

Nature intentionally plays loose with potentially world-changing discoveries. It probably makes sense to have some journals that publish with fairly high rates of (post-hoc determined) false positives, simply to move the fields forward more quickly.

[dudeinjapan]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (and validation!)

[worik]

> and while I'm sure this incident will be used by some as "evidence" that we shouldn't trust in science

How else can it be interpreted?

Most fraud uncovered has been careless. So the fastidious fraudsters are flying high?

That would be the logical conclusion

Science needs to win its credibility back, not claim this is "...[a] win for science."

Science needs to be realistic about its decaying social license

[autoexec]

> How else can it be interpreted?

That although scientists are people and so there will always be some who try to cheat and lie, those lies will eventually be found out and when that happens the record will be put right. It shows that science is not only non-dogmatic in the sense that new information which challenges or improves on our previous best understanding of a given topic will be used to update or replace the old, but that even when there is no new evidence, new research is still being openly challenged and tested by other scientists.

Scientific journals have their problems, but finding and correcting mistakes, and being transparent about the correction and about how those mistakes were made, are all indications of credibility. Even better, in this case, the alarms were sounded very very early and yeah Nature really fucked up by ignoring them for as long as they did, but there were people who cared about the truth who were persistent and in the end Nature did the right thing. That's says something really good about science.

The replication crisis is still a big problem. Lots of less dramatic results are probably false and will likely go unchallenged for a longer time, but that's just something we have to consider when deciding how confident we are in those results. Results which have been independently verified multiple times are those we can be more confident in, results which haven't been verified should be taken with a much larger grain of salt. It'd be silly to take examples like this as a sign that science as a whole shouldn't be trusted.

[lyu07282]

> truth was found and the record corrected. That's exactly the result we want.

I hope science can one day overcome people like you and actually address the systemic issues it is facing. Denial that there is anything really wrong, that ultimately everything works fine so nothing has to fundamentally change, is exactly the problem that causes those systemic failures we are seeing in science and academia all the time.

This is exactly why Nature can write about their own failure, because there are no expectations beyond "hoping" and trusting they change. But of course nothing will ever actually change.