Good science is good. Poorly designed science is bad.
Last edited Thu Mar 6, 2014, 05:28 AM - Edit history (4)
Three points to keep in mind:
The practice of science is subject to confirmation bias.
Science funded by corporations or others with a vested interest in the results must be examined especially carefully. (And even then, you might not be getting the full picture. For example, some corporations make paid scientific consultants sign secrecy agreements. The results only get released if the corporation chooses to release them.)
Science decoupled from morality leads to things like the atomic bomb. And even to global warming.
Here's an interesting essay about confirmation bias:
SCIENTIFIC PRIDE AND PREJUDICE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/opinion/sunday/scientific-pride-and-prejudice.html?_r=0
SCIENCE is in crisis, just when we need it most. Two years ago, C. Glenn Begley and Lee M. Ellis reported in Nature that they were able to replicate only six out of 53 “landmark” cancer studies. Scientists now worry that many published scientific results are simply not true. The natural sciences often offer themselves as a model to other disciplines. But this time science might look for help to the humanities, and to literary criticism in particular.
A major root of the crisis is selective use of data. Scientists, eager to make striking new claims, focus only on evidence that supports their preconceptions. Psychologists call this “confirmation bias”: We seek out information that confirms what we already believe. “We each begin probably with a little bias,” as Jane Austen writes in “Persuasion,” “and upon that bias build every circumstance in favor of it.”
SNIP
But it would be wrong to say that the ideal scholar is somehow unbiased or dispassionate. In my freshman physics class at Caltech, David Goodstein, who later became vice provost of the university, showed us Robert Millikan’s lab notebooks for his famed 1909 oil drop experiment with Harvey Fletcher, which first established the electric charge of the electron.
The notebooks showed many fits and starts and many “results” that were obviously wrong, but as they progressed, the results got cleaner, and Millikan could not help but include comments such as “Best yet — Beauty — Publish.” In other words, Millikan excluded the data that seemed erroneous and included data that he liked, embracing his own confirmation bias.
Mr. Goodstein’s point was that the textbook “scientific method” of dispassionately testing a hypothesis is not how science really works. We often have a clear idea of what we want the results to be before we run an experiment. We freshman physics students found this a bit hard to take. What Mr. Goodstein was trying to teach us was that science as a lived, human process is different from our preconception of it. He was trying to give us a glimpse of self-understanding, a moment of self-doubt.
SNIP
ON EDIT:
Here is a Scientific American article related to the second point. Most people know that corporations fund research, either through in-house studies or studies conducted by paid consultants. What is less known is that corporations can also prevent truly independent researchers from publishing studies using their patented products (e.g., GMO seeds).
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-seed-companies-control-gm-crop-research/
Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.
To purchase genetically modified seeds, a customer must sign an agreement that limits what can be done with them. (If you have installed software recently, you will recognize the concept of the end-user agreement.) Agreements are considered necessary to protect a company’s intellectual property, and they justifiably preclude the replication of the genetic enhancements that make the seeds unique. But agritech companies such as Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta go further. For a decade their user agreements have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research. Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails. They cannot compare seeds from one company against those from another company. And perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side effects.
Research on genetically modified seeds is still published, of course. But only studies that the seed companies have approved ever see the light of a peer-reviewed journal. In a number of cases, experiments that had the implicit go-ahead from the seed company were later blocked from publication because the results were not flattering. “It is important to understand that it is not always simply a matter of blanket denial of all research requests, which is bad enough,” wrote Elson J. Shields, an entomologist at Cornell University, in a letter to an official at the Environmental Protection Agency (the body tasked with regulating the environmental consequences of genetically modified crops), “but selective denials and permissions based on industry perceptions of how ‘friendly’ or ‘hostile’ a particular scientist may be toward [seed-enhancement] technology.”
= new reply since forum marked as read
who sign secrecy agreements, and don't publish without permission of Monsanto.
What could possibly be wrong with that?
someone disagrees. How DARE we. 
One sees that in play at DU, quite frequently. A study which supports a popular preconceived notion will get massive play, and tons of "likes." The story that shows the study to be off base will mostly be ignored.
I know it happens everywhere else, too. But...
You do think you're smarter than others.
Unfortunately, even basic science is sometimes subject to poor interpretation by bad actors, depending on the context. Like, for example, a study on the brain activity of mice just before death was used by so-called "skeptic" materialists to claim that this was solid, undeniable proof that all near-death experiences in humans were nothing more than chemical misfires.
And let's not get started on the bullshit that climate deniers, and doomers, too, try to pull whenever climate scientists admit that their calculations were incorrect on something, particularly if something turns out not to be quite as bad as they thought(doomers will claim that they're softpedaling or "minimizing" climate change, deniers will claim that it's proof of a supposed "hoax"
.
