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The number of scientific papers retracted annually rose from just 40 in 2000 to almost 5,500 in 2022, representing a whopping 13,650% change over the past 22 years, with researchers estimating an astonishing 100,000 would have to be withdrawn every year with more thorough vetting. Delivering a blow to the “trust the science” cheerleaders, Retraction Watch’s co-founders Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus detail the alarming issues with modern science for the left-wing Guardian newspaper. The surge in bogus papers is driven in part by the fact that scientists are often “required… to publish papers in order to earn and keep...

A growing number of people, including prominent scientists, are calling for a full retraction of a high-profile study published in the journal Nature in March 2020 that explored the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The paper, whose authors included immunology and microbiology professor Kristian G. Andersen, declared that evidence clearly showed that SARS-CoV-2 did not originate from a laboratory. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors wrote in February. Yet a trove of recently published documents reveal that Andersen and his co-authors believed that the lab leak scenario was not just...

By definition, few things represent the pinnacle of human achievement. Among them are science, great art, free markets, great literature, philosophy, music, and American football. On that list, only science and football are modern inventions, and of those two only football is getting better. Science, unfortunately, is in crisis. I’ve written other pieces on science and academia, and no doubt will write hundreds more. But after having read two pieces today that touch on this topic, I thought I would share some thoughts with you. I often refer to Vinay Prasad in my writing because he is clear-thinking and an...

Skip Science should not be trusted in general, but we need to be especially diligent in acknowledging science as suspect when the science of the matter concerns the possibility that scientists, health science funders, and managers overseeing science in labs in Wuhan, played a role in killing 18 million people. Such an investigation is ripe with conflicts of interest and reputational risks, as prior to a science-caused accident there will be many coteries of scientists who played some role in encouraging, conducting, funding, and/or overseeing the research that caused harm. Yet, despite the massive body of evidence making a spillover-scientist...

There’s a great article in Bari Weiss’ The Free Press that has great bearing on why consensus in science is often a bad thing, and how the consensus is enforced. Called "The Reason There’s Been No Cure for Alzheimer’s," it was written by Joanne Silberner, a former NPR reporter. What I loved about the article was its insightful reporting about how the scientific process works in practice, rather than how it should in theory. Most people have little idea how academic science works, what the incentives are, how peer review works, how money gets distributed, and all the minutia that...

The National Institutes of Health is directing people to an absolutely absurd paper published in the journal Advances in Health Sciences Education. I have no idea how prominent the journal is, but I have a decent idea of the prominence of the NIH. A government agency under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, they essentially determine medical education in this country. The NIH actually invited these authors to lay out their theories of medical education. The paper is scary as hell. Not quite Canadian medical murder scary, but very very scary nonetheless. Why so frightening? Well, our NIH...

The “Stochastic Terror” LieThe Left’s latest gambit for suppressing speech is built on preposterous grounds.I browsed the news recently only to discover that, according to a popular science magazine, I was responsible for the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi, husband to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.In an opinion piece for Scientific American, writer Bryn Nelson insinuated that my factual reporting on Drag Queen Story Hour was an example of “stochastic terrorism,” which he defines as “ideologically driven hate speech” that increases the likelihood of unpredictable acts of violence. On the night of the attack, Nelson argued, I had appeared on Tucker...

I’ve been meaning to do a post about the self-destruction of the STEM fields (actually many, many posts), but I haven’t gotten around to it because there is just so darn much other idiocy to write about. As Ferris Bueller says, “life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around for a minute you could miss it.” I didn’t miss this tidbit, via the invaluable College Fix. ‘We advocate for speech that empowers the next generation of scientists to create a more just and equitable ─ and hence more excellent ─ scientific community’ Ten scientists holding faculty positions...

Royal Society: Don’t Censor Misinformation; It Makes Things WorseEditor’s note: See also, “The Rise of Totalitarian Science, 2022 Edition.”A leading science organization, the Royal Society (Britain’s equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences), has put out a report discouraging social media censorship, with special reference to the COVID-19 pandemic:The Royal Society, the U.K.’s academy of sciences, published a study of online scientific and health misinformation Wednesday, investigating its root causes and brainstorming possible solutions. The scientists concluded that censoring content deemed to be misinformation is often harmful and antithetical to the principles of scientific inquiry…The report found that online censorship...

In Defense of “Misinformation”Restrictions of scientific free speech will inevitably lead to restriction of any speech deemed detrimental to freedom.American sociologist Robert K. Merton once defined four norms that guide scientific research: communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. Communalism holds that science should be done publicly, universalism that everyone should be held to the same scientific standards, disinterestedness that there should be no biases, and organized skepticism that scientific claims should be evaluated based on objectivity and rigor. For all four norms, open inquiry is fundamental. To practice the scientific method, we must have the freedom to discuss ideas. No...

Of all the platform firms, Google is singular. Its near-monopoly on search (around 90%) puts it in a position to steer thought. And increasingly, it avows the steering of thought as its unique responsibility. In an important article titled “Google.gov”, law professor Adam J. White details both the personnel flows and deep intellectual affini­ties between Google and the Obama White House. Hundreds of people switched jobs back and forth, some of them multiple times, between this one firm and the administration over eight years – an unprecedented alignment of corporate power and the executive branch. White writes that both aspired...

I work on a small team of researchers who do what one might call “forensic peer review.” In the standard process for scientific publishing, peer reviewers take a manuscript mostly at face value: They ensure that the study makes sense as it’s described. We do something else: We check everything, and try to ferret out any potential biases in reported patterns of digits, statistical impossibilities, inconsistencies between what researchers said they’d do and what they actually did, and plagiarized sentences or paragraphs. And we often find fatal flaws hidden behind a veil of two-dollar words and statistical jargon. The ivermectin...

Charles A. Murray ’65 spoke to Harvard affiliates at a Friday webinar about his new book, which criticizes the idea that race and gender are social constructs. Faculty in attendance criticized his work, saying it makes unfounded claims and is rooted in flawed methodology. Government preceptor David D. Kane invited Murray — whose work the Southern Poverty Law Center terms “racist pseudoscience” – to speak about his 2020 book “Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class” as part of a lecture series entitled “Data Scientists, Data Professionals, Data Dissidents.” Murray said during the talk that many of Harvard’s...

... Ariely’s 2012 paper found that people were more honest when they signed a promise to be honest at the beginning of a transaction than when they signed the same promise at the end. ... The only problem is, it’s not true. Other scientists found that his work couldn’t be replicated. And a deep dive into the data Ariely used determined that it couldn’t possibly be correct. Even Ariely agrees that the criticisms are “damning” and “clear beyond doubt.”... Meanwhile, leading names in the field of social psychology turn out to have committed research fraud to an extent that it...

A trope of contemporary social commentary is that “science” has somehow become “politicized,” such that people no longer trust or believe what is presented as the scientific consensus on important social, political, and economic issues. The most salient example until recently was climate change, where various scientific professionals, associations, interest groups, and the like were portrayed as purely disinterested seekers of truth while disfavored outsiders were described as self-interested, ideological, or worse. The idea of scientists as a priestly caste, criticism of whom constitutes “science denial” or “spreading misinformation,” is of course central to the conventional narrative about of Covid-19....

Trusting Science Is Not the Same as Critical Thinking Experiments with participants given fake science Shows that those who “trust science” can be gullible July 27, 2021 | David F. Coppedge Like most psychologists in academia, those at the University of Pennsylvania tend to promote the consensus on matters like vaccination and mask-wearing. But they also realize that trusting science is not enough. Without critical thinking, people who claim to “trust science” can be gullible. And if they repeat stories that are false, their too-trusting nature can spread pseudoscience. Three psychologists at UPenn decided to test this by feeding fake...

Fraud may be rampant in biomedical research. My 2016 article "Broken Science" pointed to a variety of factors as explanations for why the results of a huge proportion of scientific studies were apparently generating false-positive results that could not be replicated by other researchers. A false positive in scientific research occurs when there is statistically significant evidence for something that isn't real (e.g., a drug cures an illness when it actually does not). The factors considered included issues like publication bias, and statistical chicanery associated with p-hacking, HARKing, and underpowered studies. My article did not address the possibility that the...

“Follow the Science” has become a frequently heard rallying cry from the Left and their media in recent months. An even newer phenomenon is the bumper sticker asking “Got Science?” which is often spotted adorning a Prius or Subaru, between the drivers’ other decals pleading “Feel the Bern” and “Resist.” Anyone paying attention understands that those of us who disagree with our friends on the Left on matters of science tend to do so not based on any aversion to science, but rather the political nature and behavior of individuals within the scientific community. The issue isn’t science at all....

His research work was also groundbreaking. In 1973, Rosenhan published the paper “On Being Sane in Insane Places” in the prestigious journal Science, and it was a sensation. The study, in which eight healthy volunteers went undercover as “pseudopatients” in 12 psychiatric hospitals across the country, discovered harrowing conditions that led to national outrage. His findings helped expedite the widespread closure of psychiatric institutions across the country, changing mental health care in the US forever... ...Had Rosenhan been more measured in his treatment of the hospitals, had he included Lando’s data, there’s a chance a different dialogue, less extreme in...

Stanford professor David Rosenhan wanted to prove that psychiatric hospitals of his day would instantly label and mistreat even the mildest of symptoms, so he convinced a group of students to go undercover at various hospitals and then wrote an influential study about the results. Rosenhan’s paper “On Being Sane in Insane Places” was published in the journal Science in 1973 and had a big impact at the time. Rosenhan’s eight healthy pseudopatients allegedly each followed the same script to gain admittance to psychiatric hospitals around the country. They each told doctors that they heard voices that said, “Thud, empty,...