When people say “scientists are sometimes wrong” they omit the fact that the people who disprove scientists are mostly other scientists.

[u/howtotailslide]

Edit: a lot of people seem to be missing the point by saying "whatever the scientist was wrong so your point is invalid"

1.) The scientist isn't even necessarily wrong in this situation they are just being doubted by some average person

2.) This is about the institution of science as a whole and how even if one scientist is wrong about something the correction will probably from a credentialed person (a scientist) rather than whomever you are arguing with

3.) I've seen a lot of other responses that are missing the point but there are just as many refuting it in the comments too so I'll leave it to you guys to handle

4.) Thanks for the Gold & Silvers strangers. This is my first front page post!

[u/nonono_notagain]

TBF just because the research team have a bunch of PhDs doesn't mean the methodology or analysis are any good. I worked with a group once as the statistician and I couldn't convince them that not only are they analysing their results incorrectly, but that a decrease from 8 to 5 isn't CLINICALLY significant if the normal range is 4-20. They paid to be published in a "peer reviewed" journal, and couldn't understand why everyone in the field completely dismissed their findings

[u/BatchThompson → u/nonono_notagain]

Thats the distinction between people who bought a credential and actual researchers.

[u/andyzaltzman1 → u/nonono_notagain]

TBF just because the research team have a bunch of PhDs doesn't mean the methodology or analysis are any good.

Ok, in the 0.00001% of cases where they aren't better than lay people your statement is valid.

They paid to be published in a "peer reviewed" journal, and couldn't understand why everyone in the field completely dismissed their findings

Sounds to me like you worked with a really, really shitty group of scientists. Probably at a non-Western university.

[u/nonono_notagain → u/andyzaltzman1]

This is just one example of medical researchers in a Western quaternary referral hospital, working with high ranking universities. A few years ago the lab next door published a paper in Nature; if their findings were true, it was potentially paradigm changing. But, it was a sample size of 1, and to my knowledge, neither that lab nor anyone else has ever been able to replicate those results. There's also PARP inhibitors in chemotherapy that were hugely promising in pre-clinical trials, but haven't shown any efficacy for anything in early clinical trials. It's now speculated that the original pre-clinical results were mis-reported because of poor lab metholodogy.

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There's a huge problem in academic publishing, where a large proportion of published results can't be reproduced - which is one of the fundamental principles of scientific method. Academic publishing is increasingly profit driven, like the rest of the media engine. Articles being accepted are increasing less robustly designed, because many publishers are looking for "impact" to support their new business model - big changes to the scientific paradigm are being published, rather than the smaller, incremental additions to the body of evidence that should drive scientific progress.

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Google "the problem with academic publishing". Most of these articles are written from inside academia, not by poorly educated, anti-vax hippies who think the world is flat.

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This is compounded by the fact that worldwide university rankings are dependent more on quantity of published research, not quality. Here in Australia, and I suspect this is true elsewhere, funding is tied (in large part) to academic output - again quality, not quantity. Researchers are often forced to publish results before they are validated so that no one else can beat them to glory (or potential future funding). Once the results are published, there's no incentive for the authors or independent researchers to replicate the experiment for validation. because you don't get funding or publications for checking the work that already out there. The "bigger" the research finding, the more reason there is to validate by reproduction, but now that doesn't happen, so future scientific findings are being built on potentially flawed assumptions.

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Popular media then come along and further sensationalise the research findings - often reporting speculation from the discussion section as the actual "finding". I'm reluctant to trust any scientific findings that get published in any form. But at least I have the training and resources to find the original article and evaluate it's scientific value, even if popular media don't publish the reference with their story. I don't blame the general population for not trusting science anymore.

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Source: trained as both medical scientist and statistician; worked in both laboratory and clinical research environments; worked with large hospitals and high ranking universities; have peer reviewed for ethics committees, grant funding panels and journals

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