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.
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.