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Re:30k medical studies may be invalid due to contaminated ce... by GarrisonPrime on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @09:01PM (#15504629)
Of cource, science itself isn't failing, and hopefully it isn't science itself that people are losing faith in.

Rather, performing proper science is despressingly difficult. So much that we would like to believe is unbiased can so easily be biased without us knowing it.

Actually, I'm glad for this lack of trust in ourselves. Self-doubt is the beginning of wisdom, so they say.

Re:30k medical studies may be invalid due to contaminated ce... by mdpopescu on Thursday October 19, 2017 @02:15AM (#15505802)
Just like communism, real science is infallible.

Seriously, is there a threshold? If this continues for, say, a hundred years, will science have failed then? A thousand?

Re:30k medical studies may be invalid due to contaminated ce... by derefr on Thursday October 19, 2017 @06:49AM (#15506835)
What would it even mean for “science” to have failed? Science is just testing your assumptions against reality to gain knowledge.

If you mean the academic institution of, uh, Big Science or whatever you’d call it—sure, it has failed in its current incarnation to impose the rigour for reproducibility, and incentive toward reproduction. But academic institutional cultures evolve in response to noticing problems like that. Like software evolves in response to discovering vulnerabilities. A given institutional culture (like a given piece of software) won’t have the same vulnerability twice; if Big Science is still having crises 1000 years from now, they will be new and different crises.

Re:30k medical studies may be invalid due to contaminated ce... by antris on Thursday October 19, 2017 @09:47AM (#15507811)
The thing is, even fallible science is better than non-science. The only thing that has consistently put understanding of the universe forward is science. I mean, if we don't trust the scientific method, what's the alternative? Bible?