Science isn’t broken, nor is it
untrustworthy. It’s just more difficult than most of us realize. We can
apply more scrutiny to study designs and require more careful statistics
and analytic methods, but that’s only a partial solution. To make
science more reliable, we need to adjust our expectations of it.
Science is not a magic wand that turns
everything it touches to truth. Instead, “science operates as a
procedure of uncertainty reduction,” said [Brian] Nosek, of the Center for Open Science.
“The goal is to get less wrong over time.” This concept is fundamental —
whatever we know now is only our best approximation of the truth. We
can never presume to have everything right.
Christie Aschwanden, "
Science Isn't Broken," FiveThirtyEightScience, Aug. 19, 2015.
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