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by Cthulhu_
544 days ago
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The biggest issue, I think, is what happens after a paper is released; it gets spread, reinterpreted, diluted, popularised, editorialised, etc through three or four layers of media (university press room -> serious news/science outlets -> popular news/science outlets, going from "these numbers indicate with 89.1346% certainty that this exoplanet may contain traces of h2o" to "EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE FOUND PACK YOUR STUFF WE'RE GONNA COLONISE IT"), then onto social media. The Wakefield paper linking autism to vaccines has become so mainstream in certain communities it's impossible to undo the damage even though it was (finally) retracted in 2010 and Wakefield himself was struck off the register. At this point only through a very long, slow and arduous process can you get this idea out of people's heads, thanks to constant repetition, reinterpretation, scaremongering, and a whole community forming. It's going to be the same with this paper and the idea that dewormer is effective against the 'rona, or any quack 'rona countermeasures for that matter. |
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For the progress of science everyone should be able to share their results so that others can try to reproduce them.
This IS the real question: whether it's reproducible or not. By adding more barriers to publishing (like stricter peer reviews) you're not actually getting closer to the answer. The opposite can be true because there's a chance of censoring reproducible results that don't fit the current consensus.