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Comment by AshamedCaptain | Hacker News Reader

Oh no don't try to throw in "reproducibility crisis" here. The fact that some studies in some areas are hard to reproduce (which is not news to anyone) does not suddenly mean that we should go back to cheap armchair philosophy as the main source of "knowledge". This is the equivalent of saying that the fossil record is slightly incomplete therefore Christian creationism.

"Science" in general is one of those things that you can safely rally behind, because there is nothing more accurate by definition.

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>The reproducibility crisis is real and affects more than "some studies in some areas".

>"Peer review" rarely means more than "JSTOR search for something that supports my claim, quick skim for obvious errors, cite and publish"

>"Science" is only "accurate by definition" when it's done correctly. Buying scientists is cheaper than buying politicians, in practice.

>Buying scientists is cheaper than buying politicians, in practice.

Heads up I'm not gonna be able to cite a peer reviewed journal on that so you should just [flag] me now <3

And obviously all this means we should fallback to armchair philosophy.

(fyi jstor does not even fully cover one single area of knowledge)

If it means we can start applying critical thinking again, maybe

And of course by that you mean your critical thinking which is pure and thoughtful and sublime, while their critical thinking is biased and full of crisis and smells foul because it contradicts you.

Because that is what armchair discussions actually are. No real critical thinking, just scratching one's own ass.

By definition, critical thinking is questioning what you are told. I am questioning what I am told, by assessing

* Who is telling me this information?

Pfizer, the FDA

* Who stands to benefit from this?

Pfizer, the maker of the drug, and the downstream finances from them - namely the FDA (who gets most of their funding from drug makers), lobbied politicians in DC, as well as the nightly news, which sure does seem to show a lot of ads for Pfizer products.

So, from those questions, I have become skeptical. I am completely open to other lines of critical thinking, but so far I have just met resistance for questioning things at all.

So who is doing critical thikning? Am I actually denigrating someone elses critical thinking? Because there seems to be relatively little of it in this thread.

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