Friday, August 28, 2015

More Bogus Science

Study delivers bleak verdict on validity of psychology experiment results
"Bleak" is too generous.
"In the investigation, a whopping 75% of the social psychology experiments were not replicated, meaning that the originally reported findings vanished when other scientists repeated the experiments. Half of the cognitive psychology studies failed the same test. Details are published in the journal Science.

Even when scientists could replicate original findings, the sizes of the effects they found were on average half as big as reported first time around. That could be due to scientists leaving out data that undermined their hypotheses, and by journals accepting only the strongest claims for publication."
Every finding should be replicated before publication. And falsifications should be published as well: a falsified experiment is as valuable a piece of knowledge as a supportive experiment.

Peer review and professional journals are still being found to be rife with bogus science. Dependence upon science for use as a source of Truth for use in a worldview is irrational. Scientism can never produce a true view of all reality. Moreover, this problem is already well known, and there is no sign of its abatement. Science is money driven and is always suspect, at least until it is too well empirically validated to warrant further questioning. Even then it is subject to further knowledge becoming available which negates the most trusted principles.

1 comment:

Russell said...

"Bleak" should be changed to "Smoking crater where credibility once stood".