| Science is a long game, it's not about sales where you need to sell right now. Extreme results will be attempted to be replicated, which in turn costs a lot of funding. That is money and time, sometimes a whole persons career. This money and time is taken directly away from funding other, potentially more worthy or more likely to be correct studies. There is no point of looking at every (flawed) study in the most positive way, unless you have unlimited time and money to pursue every avenue of research. Often (not always), the studies that are most heavily promoted among the news and in business or politics are really not the best research and other, less visible but more solid research gets ignored in favor of whats popular or what has had good marketing. This is very frustrating for people doing solid good research, because every so often someone else will come along with wild, exaggerated claims and very little data to back it up, and then gets funding for it. It takes literal years away from good science just because someone markets and speaks well. Which is fine in business, but in science this is not something "the market" can or will correct for well, simply because the timespans are so long. |
This line epitomizes the nonsense in the discussion. I didn't say every study, you can't know it's flawed without seriously examining it, and I didn't say in the most positive way at all.
By using these exaggerations, you damage any serious discussion - you give people nothing to respond to except your emotional state.
What I said was, the point is to build knowledge, and so the way to examine research is to find the valuable knowledge - which includes evaluating the accuracy, etc. of that knowledge. There's no other point to it - we're not awarding tenure here, so there's point in keeping some overall score. We just want to learn what we can.