Mar 22, 2024 04:18 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 22, 2024 06:42 PM by C C.)
The credibility crisis in science
https://www.irishtimes.com/science/2024/...n-science/
EXCERPTS (William Reville): I could scarcely believe my eyes reading the headline to Robin McKie’s recent article in the Guardian...
[...] I already knew that average standards of scientific publications have declined in recent years as numbers of science journals proliferated enormously, standards of peer review of submitted papers declined and some journals adopted woke ideology. However, I didn’t know the problem was escalating so rapidly. The watchdog group Retraction Watch tracks this problem. In 2013, just over 1,000 papers were retracted internationally, more than 4,000 in 2022 and, in 2023, more than 10,000.
[...] Chinese medicine has a particularly bad reputation for faking research because clinicians must publish to scale the hospital hierarchy, forcing overworked doctors to outsource their “research” to dark organisations called “paper mills”.
Paper mills produce and sell fraudulent manuscripts that resemble legitimate research manuscripts. This paper mill industry has spread to India, Russia and former USSR states, Iran and eastern Europe... (MORE - details)
How logic and reasoning can fail as scientific tools
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/...fic-tools/
INTRO: Throughout history, there have been two main ways humanity has attempted to gain knowledge about the world: top-down, where we start with certain principles and demand logical self-consistency, and bottom-up, where we obtain empirical information about the Universe and then synthesize it together into a larger, self-consistent framework. The top-down approach is often credited to Plato and is known as a priori reasoning, with everything being derivable as long as you have an accurate set of postulates. The bottom-up approach, contrariwise, is attributed to Plato’s successor and great rival, Aristotle, and is known as a posteriori reasoning: starting from known facts and building up your model of reality from that foundation, rather than deriving them from overarching postulates.
In science, these two approaches go hand-in-hand. Measurements, observations, and experimental outcomes help us build a larger theoretical framework to explain what occurs in the Universe, while our theoretical understanding enables us to make new predictions, even about physical situations we haven’t encountered before. However, no amount of sound, logical reasoning can ever substitute for empirical knowledge. Time and time again, science has demonstrated that nature often defies logic, as its rules are more arcane than we’d ever intuit without performing the critical experiments ourselves. Here are three examples that illustrate how logic and reasoning are simply not enough when it comes to science... (MORE - details)
COVERED:
1.) The nature of light.
2.) Darwin, Kelvin, and the age of the Earth.
3.) Einstein’s greatest blunder.
https://www.irishtimes.com/science/2024/...n-science/
EXCERPTS (William Reville): I could scarcely believe my eyes reading the headline to Robin McKie’s recent article in the Guardian...
[...] I already knew that average standards of scientific publications have declined in recent years as numbers of science journals proliferated enormously, standards of peer review of submitted papers declined and some journals adopted woke ideology. However, I didn’t know the problem was escalating so rapidly. The watchdog group Retraction Watch tracks this problem. In 2013, just over 1,000 papers were retracted internationally, more than 4,000 in 2022 and, in 2023, more than 10,000.
[...] Chinese medicine has a particularly bad reputation for faking research because clinicians must publish to scale the hospital hierarchy, forcing overworked doctors to outsource their “research” to dark organisations called “paper mills”.
Paper mills produce and sell fraudulent manuscripts that resemble legitimate research manuscripts. This paper mill industry has spread to India, Russia and former USSR states, Iran and eastern Europe... (MORE - details)
How logic and reasoning can fail as scientific tools
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/...fic-tools/
INTRO: Throughout history, there have been two main ways humanity has attempted to gain knowledge about the world: top-down, where we start with certain principles and demand logical self-consistency, and bottom-up, where we obtain empirical information about the Universe and then synthesize it together into a larger, self-consistent framework. The top-down approach is often credited to Plato and is known as a priori reasoning, with everything being derivable as long as you have an accurate set of postulates. The bottom-up approach, contrariwise, is attributed to Plato’s successor and great rival, Aristotle, and is known as a posteriori reasoning: starting from known facts and building up your model of reality from that foundation, rather than deriving them from overarching postulates.
In science, these two approaches go hand-in-hand. Measurements, observations, and experimental outcomes help us build a larger theoretical framework to explain what occurs in the Universe, while our theoretical understanding enables us to make new predictions, even about physical situations we haven’t encountered before. However, no amount of sound, logical reasoning can ever substitute for empirical knowledge. Time and time again, science has demonstrated that nature often defies logic, as its rules are more arcane than we’d ever intuit without performing the critical experiments ourselves. Here are three examples that illustrate how logic and reasoning are simply not enough when it comes to science... (MORE - details)
COVERED:
1.) The nature of light.
2.) Darwin, Kelvin, and the age of the Earth.
3.) Einstein’s greatest blunder.