Bias in science

 

Image courtesy of Michelle D’urbano.

Joel Kontinen 

When we look what happened a hundred years in the past,  

Scientists. were sure of many truths: .

“The greatest experts were certain that the universe had always existed and was always the size it is now. Most biologists were sure that proteins, not DNA, were responsible for heredity. “

Yes, one of the truths of science is the failure of medicine, the thought that Covid- 19 can be gabbed away by an injection,  

Source: 

 Levitt , Dan. 2023, How even the greatest scientists can fall for cognitive bias,, New Scientist 2 August

Time to Kill a Science Myth?

Image courtesy of Becker1999, Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0).





Joel Kontinen

The war on science is a leftist slogan that has little or any bearing on reality, but rather serves as a warning example of Orwellian newspeak.

It has nevertheless brought thousands of people on the streets, but they might actually not know how science works.

Writing in Nature, Daniel Sarewitz takes on the myth that basic research is a “miracle machine” that would benefit all citizens:

“But the myth of the miracle machine harms science and society because it shields scientists from accountability, governance and being responsive to human needs. A major reason that pervasive problems such as poor quality publications, hyper-competition and hype have been allowed to fester is the miracle-machine ideology: give us money, leave us alone and we’ll solve the world’s problems.”

It is not difficult to agree with him that ideology plays a major role in today’s naturalistic science. This might be a good thing for the researchers who get paid, but not so much for society.

Perhaps it would indeed be best to “kill the myth of the miracle machine,” as Dr. Sarewitz puts it.

Source:

Sarewitz, Daniel. 2017. Kill the myth of the miracle machine. Nature 547, 139.

New Scientist Admits: Liberals Are Biased And Deluded

Image courtesy of Becker1999, Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0).



Joel Kontinen

New Scientist has admitted that liberals are “just as deluded as everybody else.”

Reporting on several recent studies, NS concludes that liberals are anything but open-minded.

Research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that like anybody else they were so “averse to listening to opposing viewpoints on hot-button issues, such as same-sex marriage [that]…they were willing to give up the chance to win money just to avoid the unpleasantness of hearing an opinion they disliked.”

The NS article uses expressions like 'the Regressive Left' and admits that American university culture is toxic and intolerant, thanks to "liberals".

NS also discloses that people who regard themselves as progressives and vote for Democrats, do not necessarily embrace science – even though they might march for it:

“Consider Seattle, a city that voted 87 per cent for Hillary Clinton and is proudly one of the most progressive … in the US. A warm embrace of scientific reality doesn’t come with the territory: Seattle isn’t terribly fond of biotechnology, rejecting GMOs and even vaccines. Rwanda’s childhood polio vaccination rate is higher than Seattle’s. As for other vaccines, including MMR, only five US states have higher exemption rates than Washington State.”

We welcome the opportunity to agree with NS’ conclusions, as this doesn’t happen too often. (Here’s one noticeable exception.)

Recent weeks have provided us with empirical proof of how closed-minded liberals really are.

Bill Nye, for instance, would rather suck than explore the merits in alternatives to his godless worldview.

This is probably also true of men like Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins.

Source:

Berezow, Alex. 2017. Liberals are no strangers to confirmation bias after all. New Scientist (28 April).

Nature: “Bias Poses a Threat to the Heart of Research”

Does a systematic bias cause researchers to fit their results into a Darwinian framework? Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

Writing in the journal Nature, Daniel Sarewitz of Arizona State University takes up a topic that has a bearing on origins issues. While he mostly discusses bias in biomedical research, it would be naïve to believe that the subject of evolution is a bias-free zone.

Sarewitz writes:

“Early signs of trouble were appearing by the mid-1990s, when researchers began to document systematic positive bias in clinical trials funded by the pharmaceutical industry.”

He suggests that the problem did not merely have to do with “the profit motive” but it was a much more serious phenomenon:

“Closer examination showed that the trouble ran deeper. Science's internal controls on bias were failing, and bias and error were trending in the same direction — towards the pervasive over-selection and over-reporting of false positive results.”

When it comes to origins issues, researchers reporting their finds in the mainstream science journals seldom if ever think critically about their basic assumptions. Instead, as they already “know” that evolution must have happened, they merely try to fit the evidence into an existing framework without asking whether the framework actually corresponds to reality.


Source:

Sarewitz, Daniel. 2012. Beware the creeping cracks of bias. Nature 485 (7397), 149.