What is wrong with science?

The ongoing replication crisis. Recommended reading: https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-Thomas-Kuhn/dp/0226458083

I understand the replication crisis. At the least, science does what it does.

But this Melton thing should have never gotten off the ground by the so-called scientist Melton himself. And the so-called scientists in the rest of the process of publishing Melton's work failed to practice their science. Seven mice!

I know the five Sigma requisite has been attacked. But seven mice does not require advanced mathematics to understand and evaluate. It's basic statistical sampling. The size is too small to consider any result scientifically credible. It's anecdotal. Neither Melton nor the rest of the scientists questioned the low sampling size before publication.

Slightly an aside:

The Omega Man (1971), Charlton Heston, became immune to an infectious virus. He treats ONE patient with his antibodies and effectively cures him.

Without further testing, his antibodies in serum is bottled and ends the movie as salvation for Earth's humanity.

Forty-five years later, we're up to SEVEN.









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Is it the Devil in the whiskey, or is it the Devil in him? -- ???

What's your point then? That researchers are sometimes naively idealistic and hurry to publish results? Or that journals will publish anything? Or both?

Both!







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Is it the Devil in the whiskey, or is it the Devil in him? -- ???

And that surprises you? You think science is above that?

Seriously, this doesn't surprise me at all. I'm cynical to the point where I expect that. Just one example: many colleagues ostracized me in 2014, when the results from the BICEP2 made the headlines about gravitational waves and I said it was all hype, that it was wrong, because they were disregarding the upper limits earlier established by the Planck probe. Six months later they confirmed what I said, that the signal was just noise and the fit they published violated the Planck upper limit on the tensor to scalar ratio. I saw no headlines about that, and nobody apologized. 😀

Science is made by humans. Humans love headlines and hate being proven wrong.

The Omega Man (1971), Charlton Heston, became immune to an infectious virus. He treats ONE patient with his antibodies and effectively cures him.

Without further testing, his antibodies in serum is bottled and ends the movie as salvation for Earth's humanity.


Big difference than what's going on. Going back to the story "The Omega Man"
is based on, "I Am Legend", and which the Vincent Price movie "The Last Man On Earth", a mysterious plague wipes out most of humanity, turning the victims into vampires. While Price duplicated the efforts of Heston, there existed a group that hadn't fully turned and found a way to manage the disease with injections, like a diabetic. But in the Omega Man, no such group existed,
some just took longer to succumb, and eventually the whole human race would cease to exist without the serum. Or another way to look at it, if you had a incurable terminal disease, wouldn't you volunteer to have a cure tested on you?

I, too, am cynical about many aspects of life. I'm desperately holding on to science because it offers the objective amidst the subjective opinions bandied about.








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Is it the Devil in the whiskey, or is it the Devil in him? -- ???

You might want to scrutinize your own opinions with the scientific method -- if you think that's important -- but to believe others are being objective just because they present something dressed in scientific garb or because they're personally involved in scientific research? I think that's the same naive idealism I mentioned before.