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by worik
837 days ago
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> 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 |
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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.