Current science; fraudulent thinking (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, May 11, 2015, 23:37 (3483 days ago)

This series of essays expresses my frustration with the reports I find to show here and why I make fun of a portion of them:-http://p2c.com/students/blogs/kirk-durston/2015/02/should-we-have-faith-science-part-i-"As a scientist, I am increasingly appalled and even, just this past week, shocked at what is passing as 21st century science. It has become a mix of good science, bad science, creative story-telling, science fiction, scientism (atheism dressed up as science), citation-bias, huge media announcements followed by quiet retractions, massaging the data, exaggeration for funding purposes, and outright fraud all rolled up into what I refer to as 21st century science. In some disciplines, the problem has become so rampant that the ‘good science' part is drowning in a mess of everything else."-http://p2c.com/students/blogs/kirk-durston/2015/02/should-we-have-faith-science-part-ii-peer-reviewed-science-papers-"The journal Nature, in a paper calling for increased standards in pre-clinical research, revealed that out of 53 papers presenting ‘landmark' published findings in the field of haematology and oncology, only 6 could be confirmed by subsequent laboratory teams. ....Worse still, some of the papers that could not be experimentally reproduced, launched ‘an entire field, with hundreds of secondary publications that expanded on elements of the original observation, but did not actually seek to confirm or falsify its fundamental basis'.
Hundreds of other peer-reviewed, published science papers based on faulty initial papers!"-http://p2c.com/students/blogs/kirk-durston/2015/03/should-we-have-faith-science-part-iii-citation-bias-
"Citation bias: Greenberg discovered the tendency to ignore the results in the six papers that weakened or falsified the hypothesis had the effect of making the four positive papers, and the hypothesis they supported, reach authoritative status.
Citation Diversion: Some papers cited the original, primary papers, but distorted them, an effect Greenberg describes as citation diversion. One of the primary papers that weakened the claim was cited as confirming the claim by three papers.
Amplification: Amplification occurs when a belief is propagated by citing papers that lack any data that actually support it. Over a period of 10 years, the quantity of positive citations increased to 636 and 220,553 citation paths. It was not the results that established the scientific belief as ‘fact' but a phenomenon described as an information cascade of citations. Remarkably none of the papers refuted or discussed the data in the six primary papers that provided data negative to the belief!"-http://p2c.com/students/blogs/kirk-durston/2015/03/should-we-have-faith-science-part-iv-confusing-fantasy-science-"So the multiverse has become atheism's ‘god of the gaps' but some scientists are pointing out that multiverse ‘science' is not science at all. Mathematician George Ellis wrote of multiverse models, ‘they are not observationally or experimentally testable—and never will be.'[4]-"Responding to the testability issue, Physicist Sean Carroll proposes that we put less scientific emphasis on testable, falsifiable predictions, suggesting that a theory should be evaluated by how well it explains the data.... ‘In the end, this isn't science so much as philosophy using the language of science. -" To state that a theory is so good that its existence supplants the need for data and testing in our opinion risks misleading students and the public as to how science should be done.."-http://p2c.com/students/blogs/kirk-durston/2015/03/should-we-have-faith-science-part-v-corrupting-influence-scientism-"First, distinguished philosopher of science, Philip Kitcher, argues that the notion of a scientific “theory of everything' ‘is an absurd fantasy'. The claim that science is the best and only trustworthy way to discover truth is, itself, not a scientific claim, but a philosophical claim. Thus, scientism is self-refuting from the outset, as the Skeptic's Dictionary and many others have pointed out.-"Nevertheless, motivated by scientism/atheism, Darwinism is the only game in town so the lack of empirical data and an increasing number of serious problems with the Darwinian account are compensated for by creative story-telling and a profound lack of critical thinking,-"To avoid the circular fallacy, logic dictates that the cause of nature must be supernatural. That, right there, logically falsifies scientism but it also establishes the requirement that the supernatural must be taken into account in humanity's pursuit of answers, not just with respect to the origin of the cosmos and of life, but discussions of justice, beauty, morality, love and honour. Knowledge is an interconnected latticework of information and understanding, each facet of which influences and sheds light on other aspects. Scientism lobotomizes the quest for knowledge by turning a blind eye to God and the supernatural, and corrupts science with fantasy, countless just-so stories and promissory notes of what we ‘may' discover to make up for the absence of real data. Unfortunately, most people fail to distinguish between good science, bad science, science fiction, and scientism; in their minds it is all rolled into 'science', the result of which is the increasing corruption of 21st century science." (my bold)