Science, Now Under Scrutiny Itself

The rise of &#x27;scientism&#x27; - until a few years ago I considered myself a &#x27;science type&#x27; (excuse the phrase), immersed in logic all my life.<p>Recently the depth of negative influence, corrupt findings, blind faith and religious-style zeal within the scientific community and pseudo scientific communities (like Reddit) has become absurd and embarrassing.<p>Science is a method, not a conclusion. I hope it becomes &#x27;open&#x27;, and fast.

I wonder whether a &#x27;GitHub&#x27; for Science wouldn&#x27;t help things along, just as it&#x27;s helped the open source software community.<p>Scientist could have repos with full version control, so you could go back and look at their experiments from day one. All their data would be accessible, as well as their statistical analysis, and you could see the evolution of their written paper.<p>The repos could start off private, and then opened on the day of publishing, so others couldn&#x27;t take credit for their work.<p>Just a thought.

While I think increased accountability is a good thing for the world of science, I&#x27;m concerned this will fan the anti-intellectual, anti-science rhetoric.<p>Science, like every human institution, is flawed. That&#x27;s not a reason to reject everything about it.

The internet is eating the world. People perhaps aren&#x27;t realising that yet. Everything has changed.<p>Just a Google search can reveal plagiarism (by accident even).<p>A bot can find issues with made up numbers (Benford&#x27;s law for starters)<p>It&#x27;s all pretty cool stuff for science.

The outstanding line from the article (quoting Mina Bissell)...<p>&gt; But it is sometimes much easier not to replicate than to replicate studies<p>I wonder in what cases its easier to replicate studies. Probably when the study involves doing nothing...

This all seems to be &#x27;as it should be.&#x27;Science is after all a human endeavor with all the frailties that implies. Errors and fraud are to be expected. What matters is that the process is reasonably efficient at catching such things.<p>And the push for open data repositories and open science to increase accountability has to be a good thing.

Many of those journals charge very high prices, 4 figures per year IIRC. Perhaps they could earn some of that by verifying and vouching for the integrity of what they sell.

Is there any chance that there will be some sort of google-books-style centralization of experimental datasets from researchers which will then be subject to scrutiny from machine learning models trained to suss out faked data, at which point we&#x27;ll uncover lots of shenanigans from our scientific past?

&gt; It also includes moving the goal posts: that is, mining the data for results first, and then writing the paper as if the experiment had been an attempt to find just those effects. “You have exploratory findings, and you’re pitching them as ‘I knew this all along,’ as confirmatory,” Dr. Nosek said.<p>Why is this a problem? If the experiment&#x27;s design is not in conflict with the new findings, why complain?

Love the article, hate the headline :( What the is wrong with these editors?