Does science always get things right? What happens when something published is wrong? Sometimes it's never corrected because it has the weight of authority of being published which grounds it into the scientific community.
The scientific community is facing a "replication crisis" from an inability to replicate certain experimental findings which indicates a likelihood of them being false. Unless enough negative results are published, false claims can frequently become "canonized" as fact and remain hardened in the scientific community. Some disciplines of study are more affected than others.
Science Tackles Science
Silas Boye Nissen of the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and colleagues from the US, wanted to explore the process through which a claim becomes a fact. They carried out research and the results were published in eLife Sciences today under the title "Research: Publication bias and the canonization of false facts"
Experiments will give positive results to confirm a hypothesis, or negative results that do not confirm a hypothesis. However, scientific journals tend to prefer to publish positive results from new research. False claims, either knowingly or unknowingly made, can persist as a result of them being regarded as true facts simply because they are published.
The scientific methodology can be generally understand as a process where you ask a question or make a statement that something will happen or is true, figure out a way to test it and find an answer that validates or invalidates what you suggested, carry out the experiment and observe what happens as results, and then develop theories or conclusions about what happened in order to get a better understanding of the natural world.
All of this can then get submitted to a scientific journal for publication. Experiments are often not 100% definitive, as they report results of observations and form conclusions from those observations. It's possible that running the experiment again would have slightly different results or observations. A hypothesis can be most likely true, most likely false, and also have a certain percentage of false positive or false negative results.
Canonization
Normally in scientific research, certain claims that are significant are further verified through experimentation which determines their stability and veracity. This leads to widespread acceptance of the claim as being true. It ceases to be a claim and becomes a fact. But this process of canonization does not always function so well.
Canonization can have the following characteristics:
- a canonized fact can be taken for granted rather than treated as an open hypothesis in the subsequent primary literature
- tests that do no more than to confirm previously canonized facts are seldom considered publication-worthy
- and canonized facts begin to appear in review papers and textbooks without the company of alternative hypotheses
Facts Revised
Purported facts can always be reviewed and verified further, but for the time being the issue is considered settled once it reaches the phase of canonized fact in the scientific community.
The authors of the paper make an interesting remark: that we consider facts as facts because of their acceptance by the relevant community that establishes them as such, not necessarily because it accurately represents and reflects objective reality as it is.
This is a problem not only for the scientific community, but also for the community of humanity. Our deep desire for unity, harmony, getting along and having people to trust in for survival by not upsetting them, can get in the way of an honest assessment of reality. Groupthink is extremely powerful. Dan recently covered some of the issues with consensus forming.
Positive Preference
Part of the research done in this study included an analysis of 74 studies for 12 antidepressants, where 37 out of 38 submitted positive results were published. Only 3 of the 24 submitted negative results were published. And get this, 8 of the submitted negative results were reformulated as positives. This means that studies with a negative result were only published at 10% of the rate of positive results being published.
Publishing negative outcomes is essential for rejecting false claims
Bring on the Negative
In our efforts to determine the truth of reality, the negative is a welcome and necessary factor to provide a contrast and method of comparison to distinguish a false hypothesis or claim from true facts. According to the research, increasing the amount of negative results published about a claim by 20 to 30% will allow such a contrast and comparison to be made.
Without enough negative results published, as a result of scientific journals largely preferring to publish positive results and reject more negative results, it may lead to believing a hypothesis is true every time a positive result is published as it will eventually become declared as a fact. Negative results need to be published at a certain rate in order to detect false hypothesis is and prevent them from being considered as a true fact.
Closing Remarks
How people blindly accept published data reflects our current hyped up state of fakenews and "post-truth" the media is trying to condition people into accepting as a worldview. But we have long had publications being spread around websites as "facts", when they are not. It's not something new.
What is new, is the media creating a mind virus meme to propagate through society and convince people that only their (the mainstream news') information is the "real news". The media propagates false news all the time, and has been for decades, often knowingly.
The battle for information access is going to rev up as more mainstream pressure is put onto public consensus formation to censor information sources that are not "verified" or "authorized".
Alternative media and platforms to ensure viability of data have never been in more need to exist than now. Steemit has arrived at the right time.
Thank you for your time and attention! I appreciate the knowledge reaching more people. Take care. Peace.
References:
If you appreciate and value the content, please consider:
Upvoting, Sharing, and Resteeming below.
2016-12-20, 4:03pm