Considering that most of these studies are by people with an interest in getting a certain result, it's likely experimental errors/not publishing some results will bias the published numbers in a certain direction.<p>The scientific method has never been proof against people that lie by omission.
Is there any non-paywall way to view the article? This looks like it might be interesting but I can only see the first couple paragraphs. The title makes me think of three things: Paul Feyerabend, Bayesian inference, and the increasing effectiveness of placebos. I'd be curious to see if any of them are in the article.
A rather sensationalist headline given that the scientific method already recognises the problems of human researchers and not only offers some mechanisms to counter those problems, but is eager for more.
This is not so much a problem with the scientific method as a problem with self-interested applications of statistics. F still equals m*a hundreds of years later, and that's not about to change.
The scientific method is fine. Note that this is about certain psychiatric pharmaceuticals being found not to have the efficacy that was earlier claimed, in studies done by pharmaceutical companies who doctored results and played statistics games and selectively hid results that didn't support profitability.<p>It's fascinating to see the level of hubris in the corporate pharmaceutical industry, that after cornered and confronted with the fact that for decades their self-serving fabricated so called research is fraudulent, they would now have a conference to announce that the scientific method has failed.