> If we cannot trust that results of research are true, then how can we justify using them to make any kind of decisions in society?
Well, don't.
Make your decisions based on replicated results. Stop hyping single studies.
Well, don't.
Make your decisions based on replicated results. Stop hyping single studies.
This right here really. The reason people go "oh well science changes every week" is because what happens is the media writes this headline: "<Thing> shown to do <effect> in brand new study!" and then includes a bunch of text which implies it works great...and one or two sentences, out of context, from the lead research behind it saying "yes I think this is a very interesting result".
They omit all the actual important details like sample sizes, demographics, history of the field or where the result sits in terms of the field.
Gell-Mann amnesia is in full effect. "Science" "Journalists" are rarely even one of those things.
The damage has already long since been done. It's great that people are starting to realize the mistake, but it's going to take a lot more work than just saying “stop hyping single studies” in this comments thread to radically alter the status quo.
I once knew a guy who ended his friendship of many years with me over an argument about “safe drug use sites”, or whatever they're called—those places where drug addicts can go to “safely” do drugs with medical staff nearby in case they inadvertently overdose. Dude was of the belief that these initiatives were unequivocally good, and that any common-sense thinking along the lines of, “hey, isn't that only going to encourage further self-destructive behavior in vulnerable members of the populace?” could be countered by pointing to a handful of studies that supposedly showed that these “safe shoot-up sites” had been Proven To Be Unequivocally Good, Actually.
I took a look at one of these published academic research “studies”—said research was conducted by finding local drug dealers and asking them, before and after a “safe shoot-up site” was constructed, how their business was doing. The answer they got was, “more or less the same”—so the paper concluded (by means of a rather remarkable extrapolation, if I do say so myself) that these “safe shoot-up sites” were Provably Objectively Good For Society.
After pointing this out to my friend of many years, he informed me that I had apparently become some flavor of far-right Nazi or whatever, and blocked me on all social media platforms, never speaking to me again.
You're not going to get people like him to see reason by just saying “stop hyping single studies” and calling it a day. Our entire culture revolves around placing a rather unreasonable amount of completely blind faith in the veracity of published academic research findings.
But admitting to the existence of a problem is the first step toward fixing it, and, judging by the downvotes on various comments on this story here, we still have a ways to go before the existence of the problem is commonly-accepted.
The difficulty or risk of using drugs does not appear to be a bottleneck on the amount of it people use. This probably does not hold all over the world, but I'm not aware of anybody actually finding an exception.
As ye sow, so shall ye reap, IRL maybe.
I’m not doubting your claim but I’m wondering how that very weird paper you’re citing bubbles up to the top, when there’s some very middle of the road meta analyses that don’t make outsized claims like access to objective truth.
What do you use to advance your agendas?
I see that you "knew a guy" and apply "common-sense thinking" (that goes against mountains of lived experience, never mind research studies)
I think I have to accuse you of bigotry. Look it up.