How Big is Science's Fake-Paper Problem? 127
The scientific literature is polluted with fake manuscripts churned out by paper mills -- businesses that sell bogus work and authorships to researchers who need journal publications for their CVs. But just how large is this paper-mill problem? From a report: An unpublished analysis shared with Nature suggests that over the past two decades, more than 400,000 research articles have been published that show strong textual similarities to known studies produced by paper mills. Around 70,000 of these were published last year alone. The analysis estimates that 1.5-2% of all scientific papers published in 2022 closely resemble paper-mill works. Among biology and medicine papers, the rate rises to 3%.
Without individual investigations, it is impossible to know whether all of these papers are in fact products of paper mills. But the proportion -- a few per cent -- is a reasonable conservative estimate, says Adam Day, director of scholarly data-services company Clear Skies in London, who conducted the analysis using machine-learning software he developed called the Papermill Alarm. In September, a cross-publisher initiative called the STM Integrity Hub, which aims to help publishers combat fraudulent science, licensed a version of Day's software for its set of tools to detect potentially fabricated manuscripts.
Paper-mill studies are produced in large batches at speed, and they often follow specific templates, with the occasional word or image swapped. Day set his software to analyse the titles and abstracts of more than 48 million papers published since 2000, as listed in OpenAlex, a giant open index of research papers that launched last year, and to flag manuscripts with text that very closely matched known paper-mill works. These include both retracted articles and suspected paper-mill products spotted by research-integrity sleuths such as Elisabeth Bik, in California, and David Bimler (also known by the pseudonym Smut Clyde), in New Zealand.
Without individual investigations, it is impossible to know whether all of these papers are in fact products of paper mills. But the proportion -- a few per cent -- is a reasonable conservative estimate, says Adam Day, director of scholarly data-services company Clear Skies in London, who conducted the analysis using machine-learning software he developed called the Papermill Alarm. In September, a cross-publisher initiative called the STM Integrity Hub, which aims to help publishers combat fraudulent science, licensed a version of Day's software for its set of tools to detect potentially fabricated manuscripts.
Paper-mill studies are produced in large batches at speed, and they often follow specific templates, with the occasional word or image swapped. Day set his software to analyse the titles and abstracts of more than 48 million papers published since 2000, as listed in OpenAlex, a giant open index of research papers that launched last year, and to flag manuscripts with text that very closely matched known paper-mill works. These include both retracted articles and suspected paper-mill products spotted by research-integrity sleuths such as Elisabeth Bik, in California, and David Bimler (also known by the pseudonym Smut Clyde), in New Zealand.
Doesn't help (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't help that top science journals repeatedly accept papers from known frauds, who then raise millions of dollars based on it. For example they retracted false superconductivity claims from the same author multiple times.
2022: https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
AND THEN yesterday:
2023: https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
Note ..in 2017, the same dude also made a claim that they made metallic hydrogen and "lost the sample" and still got published in Science .. that paper is NOT retracted.
Re:Doesn't help (Score:5, Funny)
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(Q.V. the mathematician's "P=not(P)" conjecture - which I think is still awaiting proof, or disproof. Nothing "personal".)
Re:Doesn't help (Score:4, Insightful)
Would this not be some evidence that the system does work itself out though? Like these papers were reviewed and then rejected and retracted, isn't that what is supposed to happen without a central authority system, which is not something we would want?
Re:Doesn't help (Score:5, Insightful)
Honest mistakes are made all the time. The Wright Brothers were set back significantly due to some wrong airflow equations that they trusted because DaVinci came up with them and was very confident in the results.
If the academic journals are going to be flooded with fake papers, it makes any further progress in those fields very difficult.
Re:Doesn't help (Score:4, Informative)
Academic journals aren't supposed to be oracles of truth. If you're trying to learn about a subject, get a (reputable) textbook. Once you get beyond that you need to read the literature. Not a paper or two, but the literature. If you find a result in one paper without any confirmation, it's suspicious. The rate of fraud is minuscule compared to the rate of just being wrong.
Journals are supposed to disseminate interesting stuff in a timely manner, and it's critical they do so that people actually working in the field can keep up. When stuff gets nailed down enough that it's pretty reliable, it makes it into a textbook.
Different sources for different purposes.
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Yes, and it's a problem. Science relies on efficient communication, and the public getting all excitable about things they don't understand is almost always detrimental to that. The replies here range from the death penalty for anyone who turns out to be wrong on down to a mere beating.
Most of the paper mill papers are confined to paper mill journals. Scientists know which ones those are, and you're never going to get rid of them because anybody can set up a web page that serves PDFs.
Unfortunately, the publ
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No, that's correct. Science is about trying things and reporting your results, so other people can test them. It's not about being right. Publishing should be an important part of assessment in science.
Unfortunately, administrators rarely have the time or knowledge to assess the quality of those articles so they usually just count them. That introduces quite a bit of incentive to try and publish things you know are crap. At the same time, the push for "open" journals has led to thousands of predatory operat
Re: Doesn't help (Score:2)
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Ah, the paper mills have that figured. They cite each other like mad.
Metrics are pretty much all gameable, especially the easy cheap ones.
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Sure, but you're just back at peer review. You can review the profs or you can review the journals, but if you want to do it right you need reviewers who know what they're doing, will take the time to do it right, and who's motivations align with yours.
I saw a post a while ago pointing out that science used to be community, but now it's an industry. And it has all of the perverse incentives that come when you confuse those two things.
Journal impact factors are actually based on how many citations the papers
Re:Doesn't help (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Doesn't help (Score:2)
Youâ(TM)re not even supposed to get to publishing stage with peer review supposedly happening before/during publication. The reality is however that it is a who knows who and both credentialing (eg. content from Harvard vs some public college, only one is getting pushed with minimal review) and the informal social credit score (what is your level of perceived oppression) is the only thing that counts these days. I have been in academia going on 20 years, and the content across the board is getting wors
Re:Doesn't help (Score:5, Interesting)
There are basically 2 "top science" journals: Science and Nature. They are not specialty journals, but rather cherry pick the most "impactful" results. Maybe, maybe, Nature can be trusted with abstruse biology results. Other than that, I would trust neither journal, as the choice of what to publish is essentially political, not scientific.
Actual top specialty journals do not have this kind of problem at anywhere near the same level. When was the last time a paper in JACM had to be retracted for example?
Re:Doesn't help (Score:4, Interesting)
Science is not a top science journal. If you want to see top science journals, you have to go to journals that specialize in a particular field, such as physics or chemistry and even then you must go to specialized subareas. Getting a paper in Science is not going to impress anyone in the actual sciences.
Re:Doesn't help (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not really true. A "Science" or "Nature" paper is still considered to be an extremely good thing. There are a few areas where this isn't true -- I think that neither of them publish mathematics, per se. But, most people would consider these journals to be a "better" publication than most subject specific publications. In this sense, nature and science remain fairly unique.
Whether this is a good thing or not is a different question.
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Calling these companies journals is a stretch. They exist solely to make a buck on papers that researchers will often send you for free.
This is what happens.. (Score:5, Insightful)
.. when quotas or something like quotas are used
If a researcher is required by the system to produce papers, they produce papers. There seems to be no requirement to produce quality papers.
It reminds me of a story I once read about the USSR. Steel mills were required to meet a quota that was measured in tons of steel, so they made heavy steel. Not good steel, not strong steel, heavy steel
it's all about grants (Score:2)
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Who determines which science is "fake, clickbait" and what is valid? Who is the science authority figure in this scenario?
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Paper mills are not the problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Paper mills are not the core issue. The problem is our current academic model where the number of papers published is important.
Even without paper mills, colleagues of mine publish nearly exactly the same paper, with permuted author list, across multiple journals. It poisons the literature.
I have higher standards, and don't publish that sort of regurgitation. Although my career has suffered as a result, my reputation in the field is strong, and stronger than theirs.
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I was part of a large collaboration. The bosses required that all the rest of the bosses be "invited" to be authors on every paper. The answers gave an instant reflection of the quality of scientist. One PI I respect a lot would always say "no thanks, I didn't contribute." Another would always insist on being an author.
The latter was in a meeting one time with a visiting researcher and hyping up his work, telling us all we should be implementing his technique right away. The visitor looked a little confused
Base reputation on quality, not quantity (Score:5, Interesting)
The quality of the papers you publish should matter, not the quantity. I could see some kind of ELO rating for science, where papers that get referenced and republished give you a positive standing while papers that get refuted and that you had to retract will cause a serious hit to your "science rating".
I'd guess that would clear this up pretty fucking quickly.
Re:Base reputation on quality, not quantity (Score:5, Insightful)
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Disagree with me, I got Karma to burn.
The problem with "unpopular" opinions doesn't really apply with science, because you would probably not even get the grant money for your research to take off if nobody is interested in your research.
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Disagree with me, I got Karma to burn.
Same here. But that's because I generally don't make a lot of waves on here, and try (sometimes successfully) to not be an asshole.
The problem with "unpopular" opinions doesn't really apply with science
This I disagree with. Take any controversial topic and you can find valid credible science coming to differing conclusions. Or new science that "goes against" the current best knowledge. Or just valid science that some entrenched interest with power to wield doesn't like it. I'd hate to see those opinions "silenced" just because someone doesn't like what they discovered. As f
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The US political system has created massive division. Science is much less divided.
We can have written critiques with reasoning. Moderators would need to be scientists. I think something would have to stop Bad Pharma dominating -- maybe just exclude anyone working for a pharmaceutical company.
Could run the system in parallel, see if it works.
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The quality of the papers you publish should matter, not the quantity. I could see some kind of ELO rating for science, where papers that get referenced and republished give you a positive standing
That's the publication citation index.
A slightly more sophisticated rating method is the H index. A H of, say, 9, means that you have published 9 papers that have each been cited 9 (or more) times.
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The problem with this is that there is no tracking of reasons for citation, like +1,-1 here. If you get a junk paper published, it will often be highly cited, all saying you're an idiot... Some fields in the social sciences use a "for/against" style in their citations, but the h-index does not capture those. A lot of very highly cited papers are also "method" papers. If ASTM/IEEE standards had an h-index, it would be huge and meaningless. And then there's the issue of missing citations (very convenient
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> That's the publication citation index.
That is a terrible system because it is easily gamed. A group of researchers get together, agreeing to cite (for no particular reason) a certain amount of papers from the other members, and they in turn will cite your paper, inflating everyone's citation index by a large number. H-index suffers from the same problem.
It's infectious (Score:2)
Now I kind of want to publish a vanity research paper, in which I'd make some ridiculous physics claims that sound just good enough to fool the lay person, and then cite my published paper in random arguments. /The arguments wouldn't even be about physics.
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Go ahead. It will cost you a few thousand dollars to guarantee acceptance in a paper mill journal though.
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At that price... I might just do it someday.
Publish or Perish (Score:2)
That's been the mantra of university since forever.
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And, to be honest, you can see why the alternative is unacceptable. No one will ever be willing to pay you to do a job with no expectation of ever having any work output.
That effectively means that "scientist" would not be a career and science would only ever be performed by amateurs in other job, say, patent clerk.
paper mill:a factory in which paper is made (Score:2)
I wish language was less confusing or that people would specify things more clearly.
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Perverted incentives (Score:2)
Do "publish or perish", get tons of crappy papers and some outright fakes. What do you expect? I would expect frigging scientists to understand that. But apparently not.
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I think this phenomenon shows that they understand it perfectly. They know that "perish" puts them at a McDonalds drive-through asking if you want fries with that.
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Potboiler papers are mainly a problem for the institutions that judge researchers by a crude publication quantity metric. They break an already broken evaluation scheme for researcher productivity. But otherwise, they sink quietly into obscurity doing little harm. Dishonest papers are a different kettle of fish.
It's probably worth keeping in mind that many perfectly honest papers are wrong for completely innocuous reasons. Researcher fallibility is always the first thing everyone assumes when someone ann
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Goodhart's Law (Score:5, Insightful)
Quantity of publication and reputation of journals have become targets which researchers are forced to aim at.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Honest researchers are outcompeted by frauds (or at least less honest researchers) when it comes to these measures.
Blacklist the authors (Score:3)
Can journals not create a shared blacklist of authors who've been proven to do this?
Seems to me that would be a pretty effective deterrent.
(at least the corresponding authors; co-authors may not have even known their names were used)
Publish or perish - logical consequence (Score:3)
Publish-or-perish at its best. I'm a prof for a state teaching college. If we do "research", it is almost always a practical project with industry, usually as a basis for student projects.
A few years ago, upper management decided we needed to be accredited (beyond the state accreditation that we have to maintain). One of the main requirements is...you guessed it, publications. Idiotic for us.
Cynically, the accreditation did achieve an important goal: the massive expansion of the school administration required to manage it.
a nasty blacklist (Score:2)
An unpublished analysis (Score:2)
Yeah. Right.
AI will solve this (Score:2)
Oh wait, these journals are already run by a bunch of AI bots.
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This is just corruption. Corruption exists everywhere. People are dishonest when they feel they can get away with it.
Blind faith in anything is foolish. Always verify.
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Perhaps verification involves reading other work in the same field. Also, fields vary. Some fields like CS don't allow much latitude for ambiguous results or opinion. If you can divine the maths, there's not a whole hell of a lot to argue about. Compare that with a social science or the humanities. Lots of room for the layman to do their own verification without trying to replicate study results, for instance.
The impact of expertise is quite limited when you consider that doctoral work is intensely foc
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They don't trust, they verify. that process is called peer review.
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No. Peer review is a sniff test. Is the paper understandable, somewhat interesting, and not obviously wrong or fraudulent.
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Or just look at peer reviewed papers, and when someone makes a claim that sounds extraordinary, question it. There is no trust in science. It doesn't need it.
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The process of science is: don't trust a result until the result is replicated. If it's not replicable, it's not science.
So, yes: "Trust the science" is absolutely consistent with "don't trust this particular paper." Don't believe any one paper.
The popular press likes to hype results that aren't yet replicated, because they're after "news", and the second group to reproduce a result isn't news.
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Except, in science the second group to reproduce a result is the news. I wish the media would understand that.
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Re:Trust the science! (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it kinda makes the "Don't trust the science!" crowd look like they're grasping for straws.
If you disagree, feel free to list some established scientific theories that we need to abandon on account of this.
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Ok, care to point out why masks or lockdowns are useless? Because even without any study I can tell you that someone who has no contact to any human beings has a zero chance of getting infected.
Refute it please. Unless you believe in the spontaneous generation of germs, I think you'll have a hard time.
Re:Trust the science! (Score:4, Insightful)
And since it's not a 100% panacea, let's forgo it. Hey, I have another tip for you. Antivirus doesn't keep 100% of all threats away, turn it off. Firewalls don't either, so that one has to go, too. Backups don't prevent data loss to 100% perfection, so let's forget about that too. Same for seatbelts and airbags, they don't keep 100% of all accident victims alive, so out goes that shit. And how about the reverse, I didn't see 100% of all smokers die of lung cancer, so I'll have to assume it's safe. Same goes for drinking alcohol and liver cirrhosis, I know people how died in their 80s who drank heavily all their lives, so that can't be the reason.
Do I need to go on or do you feel stupid already?
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You are aware that the population density in Japan is like a person per square inch? Of course you will have infection numbers that are through the roof. What's next, mask usage in Montana being low and there are few cases?
Did I mention why lockdowns work because people have no chance of meeting and infecting each other? You'll find a similar correlation in the middle of deserts. Guess what, few people per square mile means few infections. I hope I don't have to explain why that's the case.
The mask was not
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Just believe anything said by someone who speaks authoritatively and with a sense of humor.
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How do you discover truth whatsoever? I'm not saying you have to use science for this but do share your methodology here.
I love that! People seem not to understand that even deciding whether and when it's safe to cross the street is a primitive scientific process. And like all scientists in all branches of science, sometimes we're wrong on even the basic stuff. That's why people still get hurt or killed crossing the street, and why many more people died of Covid than was necessary.
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Quit feeding the AC's, they contribute nothing.
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Kinda disagree, I think if anything over the last say 7 years has shown me is that ignoring peoples ignorant statements does not in fact make them go away and if it does get amplified with no counters then that just makes them feel and look correct.
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I'm sorry, did I come to your house and shit in your mother cereal? I tried to not call you anything close to a "retard". I also don't want to derail this into censorship, that is a gigantic pivot and an entirely separate issue.
None of that answers my question though, just saying "the scientific method" doesn't answer the questions of what you use to source truth.
If your answer is "i only trust science i can do myself" that's fair. I think it's a bit silly in the modern age, I probably wouldn't drive a c
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Don't just insult me, elaborate on that please.
Define them both and establish how you differentiate.
Re:Trust the science! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not the person you're responding to, but I've seen enough of the world to get the gist.
"The Science" is a semi-religious belief in whatever supposed authorities are saying is scientifically correct in any given moment with no further thought. "Science" (which can be lower case if not at the beginning of a sentence) is a process involving data, research, testing outcomes and revising theories until tests show the theories to be correct for all currently understood and known aspects of the given subject. "The Science" is propaganda. "Science" is a methodology.
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Sure but how do you differentiate between the two, is there a common methodology, let us even say, "a method" for distinguishing the two.
What seems to happen is that anything coming from an "authority" is deemed "The Science" and can be disregarded because of *who* it's coming from, not what it actually says.
Famous case in point is the vaccines. It comes from an authority (the FDA, other countries medical authorities) but there is data, research and testing that is all published along with it. If i suppo
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Propaganda also isn't necessarily bad, it's neutral, it's just information coming from a government or other influential organization.
Propaganda is always bad. The fact that you made this statement tells me you're drinking to much of the Kool-Aid.
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But I can say anything and everyone has an agenda, i need something more specific than that. I have an agenda talking to you right now technically. The line between persuasion and manipulation is so blurry as to almost not exist because we cannot actually read each others minds. You are talking good faith versus bad faith and that is very subjective.
I notice you left off the last part of my statement. Is your thinking every statement from the government is propaganda and therefore bad? If it's bad becau
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[...] there are no more "laws" in science, just theories that best explain observations.
Excuse me? That's not at all how scientists use those terms. How are /you/ meaning these things?
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I maybe have been mixing things up, I was speaking more in the sense of there are not as I can tell much in the way of "laws" of nature developed anymore outside of pure math formulas for things
I could definitely be wrong, i was trying to speak more to the idea that science today ever claims that it can explain *all* aspects of a given subject, much like the "laws of physics" in the Newtonian aspect aren't really applicable to what we now know as quantum mechanics, those are "laws" but they cannot explain a
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Jack's smirking reven observed:
[...] there are no more "laws" in science, just theories that best explain observations.
Leading gardyloo to respond:
Excuse me? That's not at all how scientists use those terms. How are /you/ meaning these things?
Not to speak for jsr - who's doing a perfectly adequate and well-modulated job of that by himself, but what I took him to mean is, "There are no more new laws in science." Because he's correct. There aren't.
The scientific community stopped employing the term "law" to describe theories that have withstood significant testing early in the 20th century, because it had become outdated. You know, much like the term "natural philosopher" is no longer used to identify scientific researc
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Probably a poor choice of words on my part but it also was not the focus of my point.
Understood. And I do like the tack you're taking with your posts on here. I didn't mean to derail it by picking you up on this one thing.
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The scientific community stopped employing the term "law" to describe theories that have withstood significant testing early in the 20th century, because it had become outdated.
Do you think that scientists have /ever/ used "law" to mean "a theory which has kinda ripened over time and we really really believe it now"?
That's not what is meant by a "law" OR "theory" in science.
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I guess you can assume that any authority is wrong if you want to remain a dunder-head your entire life. Or you could learn how to reason, and how to research beyond the authority itself. Trying to explain *HOW* to think is really difficult when the other end of the conversation is trying to pretend that they've never been acquainted with the practice.
Re:Trust the science!" (Score:2)
"If you can't distinguish between the two, you're drinking too much of the kool-aid."
Well, one has quotes, a definite article and capitalization, and the other doesn't. If you've made up in your mind that this difference means something more, you're going to have to enlighten me.
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see, when you hear "Trust the science" you think "Oh, that means, I don't have to read anything" or "this disagrees with my preconceived notions so i can discard the science"
at this point i am pretty sure the phrase "trust the science" actually originated as a way for the anti-science crowd to deingarate, who actually said "blindly trust the science!" like you are alleging here?
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see, when you hear "Trust the science" you think "Oh, that means, I don't have to read anything" or "this disagrees with my preconceived notions so i can discard the science"
Or what's worse, "this agrees with my preconceived notions so I needn't give any more thought to the matter". THAT is the really insidious one. Ask me how I know... :-(
Confirmation bias is a nasty sword - it cuts in all directions.
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Very true, both are essentially horseshoe theory for science denial. Science has skepticism designed into it, it's critical.
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You didn't even rewrite history here, you just made up some claims and ad-homs.
Can you answer my question?
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It cannot answer your questions because answers would clarify. This is not the desire of the poster. The poster invokes a "we" and how this we is watching and knowing stuff about "you". The pronoun in english is indefinite, so YOU don't know who (how many) is/are being spoken to.
It's all meant to invoke fear. It's sad and redundant. Like a little kid trying to tell you a ghost story you've heard a million times before. The icing on the cake is the onion-headed hat proclamation of the holy hand grena
Re:Trust the science! (Score:5, Insightful)
Who wants to trust the science? The beauty about science, unlike religion, is that you're not only allowed but actually invited to test it.
That people are too fucking lazy is not the fault of science.
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I want to trust in science! I can't and don't want to test it; I hope others can do that for me... competent others... scientists or at least engineers. What else can I trust more than science?? Math...
Only simpletons think all competent people (scientists/engineers/etc) are in a global conspiracy to validate each other's "lies."
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I can't test everything myself either. Then again, if it was important enough to me and I questioned the results, I'd get the required knowledge to question and test it.
There are things that are important enough to me that I went and learned enough that I can actually gauge whether or not the information presented is sufficiently likely to be correct that I can accept it as true. That does not require you to invest a few millions in equipment. It only requires you to learn something.
I know, knowing somethin
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Then learn something if you don't want to trust them. Yes, it's that easy.
But noooo, that would require me to actually DO something. It's far easier to just bitch and moan.
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You happen to know of a doctor that was "silenced" who wasn't just peddling some batshit insane bullshit, and that "silencing" was actually people slapping them left and right with facts?
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What doctors "questioning" things were right? The one's recommending Ivermectin?
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No, it means trust the science in respected actual science journals, which are usually narrowly tailored within a specific field. The "trust the science" isn't a call to go read these pop science journals, it is a call to rely upon qualified scientists publishing is respected science journals, and then you must query several scientists in the specialty to get a sense for the actual science, its results as well as its limitations. Most people do not have the background to read these papers.
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No, it means trust the science in respected actual science journals, which are usually narrowly tailored within a specific field.
And even then, remain somewhat skeptical until the result has been replicated.
The "trust the science" isn't a call to go read these pop science journals, it is a call to rely upon qualified scientists publishing is respected science journals, and then you must query several scientists in the specialty to get a sense for the actual science, its results as well as its limitations. Most people do not have the background to read these papers.
Exactly. The pop science journals are after "exciting". The actual science is after "is it right?" That takes many researchers looking at a question.
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Well. I mean the job of Peer Review is to weed out the junk. If you are trusting non reviewed papers then I think we know where the problem lies.
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Confirmation will weed them out. Nature is the ultimate judge.