For years people have developed almost a blind faith in science and the results that scientific research produce. I have a tendency to listen to reports and evaluate them based on whether they make sense with what I know. You could call it the Common Sense Test. Some call it using a Baloney Detector. Either way, I question contemporary science almost as much as I question the claims I hear in advertisements.
It seems that I have been on the right track. There is concern about what is being called a research “crisis of reproducibility.” You can see it addressed at “Science is in a reproducibility crisis: How do we resolve it?”
The article starts off by stating, “Over the past few years, there has been a growing awareness that many experimentally established ‘facts’ don't seem to hold up to repeated investigation.”
What does that mean? It means that when researchers try to duplicate the results of research, it does not work. The end result is that was reported in the journal cannot be repeated. Yet it has been accepted and published as if it is the truth.
There are three qualities that are required for something to be accepted as a scientific fact: It must be observable, measurable and repeatable. Obviously if it can’t be repeated, something is wrong.
Why is this happening? Another article at Prospect starts off this way,
“Think science always knows the whole truth? Errors are surprisingly common and many go undiscovered because they just aren’t seen as important enough, or because people take pains to hide them...”So when you hear about how global warming is going to kill us all, salt is going to kill us all, guns are going to kill us all, etc., put on your thinking cap and take another look. I know enough about history to know that the earth was much warming in A.D. 1000 than it is now. I eat enough salt that if salt was deadly I must be a cat because I am on my ninth life. If guns are that deadly, how come employees of gun stores are not the victims of random rounds?
Don’t let someone do your thinking for you because they have a test tube in their hand. Even scientists make things up.
homo unius libri
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Comments are welcome. Feel free to agree or disagree but keep it clean, courteous and short. I heard some shorthand on a podcast: TLDR, Too long, didn't read.