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True but people also use this as an excuse to dismiss any research they disagree with which is idiotic.
Most research is legit. It just might not be interpreted correctly, or it might not be the whole picture. But it shouldn’t be ignored because you don’t like it.
People are especially prone to this with Econ research in my experience.
- For sure, but it’s important to keep in mind in fields with large financial interests.
  Medicine especially. Most studies claiming Cealiac disease (gluten allergy) was not real before it was conclusively proven to be legitimate were funded by bread companies. You won’t believe the number of studies funded by insurance companies trying to show that certain diseases aren’t really disabling, (even though they really are).
  
  And sugar probably kills as many people as smoking, but... yup.
  Then again, we all are okay with killing children too, so long as it is with a gun and unwillingly rather than safely in a doctor's office and medically necessary or at least expedient.
  
  That seems like a crazy low estimate for deaths caused by sugar...
  
  Sugar or HFCS? I'm actually asking because I don't know, not to be snotty.
  
  Both, but the studies were literally prevented from happening or those that were done anyway then the results shared with Americans - the USA threatened to boycott the WHO iirc if it did not remove language to the effect that sugar could be dangerous, in excess.
  HFCS lowers your metabolism, so makes every additional calorie count for a greater effect.
  Stores sell what they want to sell, in part based on what people will purchase (e.g. fast food companies like McDonald's tried offering healthier options such as salads - people wouldn't buy them), and things with higher shelf life. They aim for profits, not service for its own sake.
- The entire thing is an edgy strawman. Honest practitioners obviously take seriously the need to understand and articulate the limits of empiricism, and are hostile towards those who abuse the public trust placed in scientific authority. It would honestlt be great if we could do the same with our critiques of capitalism.
- Isn't there a replication crisis. I am not sure you can really claim "most" research is legit.
  
  I wouldn't call it a broad crisis, and it isn't universal. More theoretical sciences or social sciences are more prone to it because the experiments are more expensive and you can't really control the environment the way you can with e.g. mice or specific chemicals. But most biology, chemistry, etc that isn't bleeding edge or incredibly niche will be validated dozens to hundreds of times as people build on the work and true retractions are rare
  
  That's just not true, false research gets posted alot in biology and can go for years without getting caught
  For example, the whole Alzheimer's research thing. A paper that was published in nature faked data and sent everybody down the wrong path for Alzheimer's cure for 20 years. They claimed to have found that a certain protein causes Alzheimer's, therefore all new research went towards making drugs that strip that protein.
  This was a landmark paper that was in a "hard science" field and still fooled alot of people
  
  Sure, there will be examples of problems in any field that has hundreds of thousands to millions of humans working in it. That doesn't mean there's a broad crisis, and it doesn't mean that most research is faked or fallible. In your 2004 example, all of the data wasn't faked, some images for publication were doctored. There's been potential links between alzheimer's and aBeta amyloids since at least 1991 (1), long before this paper that posited a specific aB variant as a causal target. Additionally, other Alzheimer's causes and treatments are also under investigation, including gut microbiome studies since at leasg 2017 (2). Finally, drugs targeting aB proteins to remove brain plaques work in preclinical trials, indicating that the 2004 paper was at least on the right track even if they cheated to get their paper published. This showcases science working well: bad-faith actors behaved unethically, but the core parts of their work were replicated and found to be effective, so some groups followed that to clinical trials which are still ongoing, and others followed other leads for a more holistic understanding of the disease.
  Also, I'd very much argue that human neurological diseases are both bleeding edge and niche, which inherently means that recognizing problems in studies will take more time than something that is cheaper or faster to test and validate, but problems will eventually be recognized as this one was.
  Cras P, Kawai M, Lowery D, Gonzalez-DeWhitt P, Greenberg B, Perry G. Senile plaque neurites in Alzheimer disease accumulate amyloid precursor protein. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 1991;88:7552–6.
  Cattaneo, A. et al. Association of brain amyloidosis with pro-inflammatory gut bacterial taxa and peripheral inflammation markers in cognitively impaired elderly. Neurobiol. Aging 49, 60–68 (2017).
  
  There's a replication crisis in a handful of more recent fields that use human subjects and didn't have hard rules and restrictions on how to treat human subjects in the early 20th century. Psychology is the field that has had the biggest issue, with many old studies having what we now see as serious methodology issues. It doesn't inherently mean all of those studies are wrong, just that they need to be revised with updated methodology to confirm if their results are accurate.
  There's also about 1500 years of scientific study aside from that which doesn't relate to human subjects at all, and by this point has been replicated numerous times, so I would not doubt the claim that most research is replicable and valid. I would expect about 80-90% of our collective scientific knowledge to be accurate.

165 comments