A colleague sent me an email titled “Science has more bs than marketing, it seems” with a link to an X post that says:
In one famous 2012 paper that attempted to reproduce 53 “landmark” studies in cancer biology: Only 6 papers’ findings could be successfully replicated, or just 11% of the top papers in the field. 89% of the top papers were not independently reproducible.
I replied:
Yes.
I’ve always felt scientists are more prone to drink their own pink koolaid than marketers. Probably because marketers know they’re marketing and scientists assume they’re dealing with fundamental truths. When in fact most of what most people think of as “science” is really marketing.
Chemist Steve Benner once said to me that you are either doing science = disproving a hypothesis, OR advocacy = advancing your hypothesis = marketing.
100%. All scientific papers are marketing documents, which hopefully follow a rigorous set of rules for presenting evidence (BTW bona fide proof of most things is impossible, the closest you can get is mathematical proofs) and narrow strictures on style.
You’re allowed to be evasive and emotionally manipulative in science papers, as long as you say it in passive voice. E.g. “It was observed that…. it was concluded that….”
That allows you to say almost anything you want without acknowledging that someone had a point of view and a subjective opinion. It allows you to obscure cause and effect, not name the person offering the opinion, and sound more authoritative than you really are.
(Also, as any English teacher or magazine editor will tell you, passive voice is terrible writing.)
But there’s a much deeper problem: biology has agency and therefore by definition is not deterministic or repeatable like algorithms; and furthermore, biology is driven by quantum effects, so in biology (and perhaps physics as well – I’m not certain) the experiment is entangled with the beliefs and expectations of the experimenter.
People SORT OF know this (e.g. requirements of placebo tests in clinical trials). But on other levels, many are still in denial.
I have a hunch placebo effect not only applies to our internal experiences of taking medications etc, but also to our interactions with external events, people and organisms. Your beliefs literally affect the outcome of your external experiment. The extent to which this is true is unknown.
~
Where Did Life And The Genetic Code Come From? Can The Answer Build Superior AI? The #1 Mystery In Science Now Has A $10 Million Prize. Learn More About It, Here – https://www.herox.com/evolution2.0
