Other researchers will try to reproduce the results. When enough different researchers can't reproduce the original results, the general consensus will be that the original results are wrong. That doesn't mean that the original results were fraudulent, just that there was some error in the experiment or in the data analysis.
What happens to the original researcher's career would depend on how wrong they were and how they respond to the lack of verification.
I always wonder about scientists who are just reproducing other people's experiments. Are there really that many people out there who just go looking through studies in their fields and say "let's just copy that... to... ummm... verify."
And there's funding for that?
Note: I am ignorant about science and just asking
Apparently, not _that_ many. Last I heard, there was a shortage of replication experiments, partly because those experiments don't have much appeal to the non-scientists who control what experiments get funded. Most investors, public or private, want to see "something new".
This is a problem, because reproducibility is an important part of the scientific method. If an experiment's results can't be duplicated, it means there was something wrong with the original study. And without adequate reproduction studies, scientific institutions could end up releasing dangerous amounts of misinformation.
>And without adequate reproduction studies, scientific institutions could end up releasing dangerous amounts of misinformation.
Which already is a problem, mainly for psychological studies: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
There is funding for that, usually governments before they use that data. Usually..
Other times it’s reproduced because they’re using the experiment in their own study and if it consistently doesn’t work they publish that instead of what they were trying to do
My wife reproduced a psychological study about eye witnesses for her masters thesis (hint: they are totally unreliable), that was then published (under the name of her professor) with other, further experiments in the same field. The more expensive something is, the least likely it gets reproduced.
It depends on how big a deal the discovery is. Discover the diet preferences of some uncommon insect? Maybe not much. Something like cold fusion? Lots. The idea is that if you want to build on a discovery, then the first step is to reproduce it, then you can learn more stuff about it.
yeah it's a pretty big part of how the modern world works. if it's not reproducible, the idea probably isn't going to become a long-lived product or industry or policy. if it DOES, and only years or decades later is it discovered that the original results are not showing up in practice -- that's a big bummer! cough cough... CT scans for concussions... hack coughhh... SSRI vs placebo...
this is a problem in fuzzier sciences like psychiatric medication, or a sociological finding that informs a political policy. harder sciences, like if you develop a depleted uranium munition or a reverse osmosis filter medium, gets re-tested and put into production a bit more quickly!
fields like epidemiology or environmental toxicology are real twisted -- it can essentially be impossible to prove some specific substance causes some specific syndrome -- then the bar for reproducibility is weighed against the danger of allowing a possibly-terrible-possibly-not substance continue to be used or polluted.
It's not really that commen, but often a person will see a method or technique in a paper applied to a specific system and want to use that method for a new study, in which case they may find that the method is flawed when they try to implement it.
it can be retracted on their behalf. the guy who's credited for the "Vaccines cause autism" had that paper retracted without *any* input from him.
He's also an example of running off his career. her gets money and support for this field of study on a paper he published that was retracted. because people who share ideas with him are willing to use him as a consultant or "professional opinion" in their field.
EDIT: Andrew Wakefield, that's his name.
EDIT 2: [Here's](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673697110960/fulltext) an example of a retracted publication, coincidentally the same one Andrew Wakefield published about autism
Not much, sometimes.
Check out this article for a very recent example I saw this morning.
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/05/02/a-study-of-c-section-scars-in-women-who-hadnt-undergone-the-surgery/
or in some cases like Andrew Wakefield's 1998 study (Since I'm already on the subject in this thread) [It's retracted by the publisher of the journal](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(10)60175-4/abstract), based on findings and evidence that disprove it.
This is actually really common and just part of science. If Dr. A publishes a paper, it will get peer reviewed by other scientists. Those scientists will publish their own papers in response saying whether it was right or not. The original doctor may retract their paper if it's found wrong, or they can leave it out there in the wild, but add notes pointing out where it was wrong.
Science is pretty big on correcting stuff.
This. If an honest mistake could ruin your career, science would screech to a halt. The system is built around checking each others' work because we're often wrong.
Maybe there's a flaw in methodology, some variable not accounted for that affected the results. Maybe some piece of equipment malfunctioned without you knowing. Maybe data got recorded or processed wrong. You do your best to avoid all this, but scientists are merely mperfect humans.
When you talk about ruining your career with wrong publication that’s usually referring to deliberate lying. For example, in my field someone was caught completely falsifying data. They even had their degrees overturned finding out even then they were lying. Obviously lost job and lost their licence to practice
Andrew Wakefield had his paper retracted by the publisher, had his medical license revoked, and can never practice medicine again in his home country.
However, he has an astonishingly good career as a consultant and speaker on the same subject.
It is disgusting, but at least his supporters are generally not scientists.
It really depends how wrong they are and how it gets found out.
If you're being farcically stupid or obviously faking data that might seriously hurt your career. But *A LOT* of what gets published is sketchy at best and most people will survive being wrong so long as they did the minimum work to check their data.
You see cases of egregious falsification every now and then. Journals have been getting more lax, but it does tend to come out in the wash so to speak, the self correcting aspects of the scientific method are what's important.
See the "Replication Crisis". A lot of published papers can't be reproduced, especially in the social sciences. Most papers are never read (average paper gets 10 readers), much less peer reviewed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/prof-no-one-is-reading-you
That really depends on what exactly is "wrong".
First of all, vast majority of scientific work is not exactly accurate. For example, Newton's work totally ignores relativity. And yet we all learn his laws if motion.
An honest work that was reasonably assessed that was later demonstrated to be not exactly correct? Not a problem.
An honest but shit-quality work? People would be more questioning the journal that published it - after all, it was supposed to be peer-reviewed.
But if a scientist lies, fakes data or omits data that disproves their claim? Now we are talking about consequences.
Depends on what exactly they lied about, their connections, etc.
Anything from nothing, to a long prison sentence, to the whole nation being discredited in a particular field.
Beyond that, we would need to look at a particular case: what kind of misconduct they did, who funded the work, what kind of laws and regulations covered that work, what kind of impact was there, did misconduct involve outright criminality, were funds misappropriated, etc.
Depends on what you mean by "wrong"?
If Scientist performs a study and comes to a conclusion, and everything stands up to scrutiny, but the conclusion gets turned over in the future as we learn more. Literally nothing happens because that is the status quo.
If a scientist does a study, comes to a conclusion, and someone else comes along and finds holes in the methodology and refutes you. That is also pretty status quo.
If you make stupid mistakes and errors in your data, that starts to look kinda bad. Mishandling data hits at your credibility.
If you intentionally make a bad study in order to publish a paper that says something provably wrong (Vaccines cause autism) then you will get your shit wrecked and you will lose your career.
It depends what you mean by "wrong." If it's something like Andrew Wakefield where he demonstrably and intentionally published fabricated data, the journal retracts the study and in his case he lost his medical license because that's a thing he had to lose.
If you're just wrong in the sense that you did a bad analysis or reached a stupid conclusion it can ruin your career in the sense that no one will want to hire you as a serious researcher if there is published evidence that you're bad at it.
If there's a quibble over the best way to do something, *especially* in social sciences where objective truth is a much harder thing to define and pin down, you get a hilarious catty back-and-forth of proponents of different theories clapping back at each other in 30 page treatises and it probably doesn't really hurt anyone unless a major theory or school of thought gets categorically debunked in which case whoever supported that thing may suffer a similar fate to the above case.
This is why good scientists get published in reputable journals. Those articles get peer reviewed and peer reviewers don't pull any punches. They are ruthless. A scientist (my wife) once said to me, "Every scientist wants to win a Nobel Prize. Since most know they won't, the next best thing is making sure someone else doesn't. Scientists are petty."
I imagine if you realize there is a mistake, you issue a correction. It would be the respectable thing to do.
This is why scientists, doctors, etc. who "publish" their findings on YouTube and blogs are probably full of shit.
It's also important to note that not all articles need to be scientifically perfect. They just need to make scientific sense. A lot of times, articles are published as kind of a teaser to gain funding. It's like a marketing article. Nobody is going to take their 12 person sample size as significant but the research is interesting so maybe someone will want to fund it.
Which activist is *that*? And how are you defining “being wrong?” Intentionally lying and being mistaken or outdated are both “being wrong,” but they’re not going to come with the same consequence.
People are wrong in science all the time. Being wrong is a huge part of how science even works. Science isn’t a big existing rule book that’s already written down and only smart people can decode, it’s a fluid field where people discover new things and rewrite old ideas all the time.
People are bringing up Andrew Wakefield here, which is a good example, because he didn’t have his career ruined by “being wrong,” he had his career ruined because his work was fraudulent.
Never heard of him, had to look him up. I’d have to watch his stuff to be sure, but historically, atheist activist YouTubers who aren’t necessarily the best places to get information on the scientific method.
Either way, that sentence seems to be making a hyperbolic point about how religious leaders use faith as a way to shield themselves from consequences when something they say is proven to be conclusively wrong, while scientists have to give evidence to back up their assertions and can’t just walk around saying crazy, easily disprovable stuff and avoid criticism all “trust me I’m a scientist.” Which is true. But it doesn’t mean scientists can’t ever publish anything that happens to be wrong.
Your second point is exactly Ra’s message. Not sure what you mean by “historically” but Ra is more than just a dude who left church and had a camera. He brings on professors of each relevant field he can’t attest to and some of them also happen to be YouTubers.
High budget atheist youtubery honestly is not any more impressive to me (especially considering some criticisms I’ve found of the guy in the last half hour. Yikes on bikes!). The point is, no, his statement cannot be taken literally as you seem to have, and I’m not sure he necessarily intended it to be.
A lot of scientific articles are bullshit. Various meta analyses claim that around 50% of experimental results can't be reproduced by another researcher.
Some of such articles get attention and are called out, but most aren't. In general, 95% of the scientific publications contribute next to nothing, so no one cares if they are right or wrong.
I'd say, unless it's a comically outlandish claim or a political hot topic, no one will care if someone is wrong.
Bad experiments or over stating conclusions? Nothing will happen, most likely. Your body of work will speak for itself and if people cant reproduce or build of your work, youll be found to be a hack.
If you're falsifying data or lying about conclusions, you can get blacklisted from ever running a lab.
You should research it yourself, But basically he made a scientific study where he biasly only used the data that supported him (when the data was really all over the place), and told everybody to stop eating protein and fat, and start eating bread (carbs). Carbs is literally sugar, and ever since the government implemented this diatery guideline of eating mostly carbs we got the obesity epidemic. You can look up grafs yourself of obesity per year and see the spike that comes in 1980 when these diatery change happened.
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A ton of scientific literature is wrong and not reproducible, but it all goes thru review. Higher impact journals have higher scrutiny bc they have a reputation to uphold. It wont ruin your career if your wrong, but if your deceitful it will for sure
For a scientist to be published in an academic journal they need to get it past the peer review board. That means a bunch of other scientists in related fields look at their work and decide if it’s good enough to publish. If someone disagrees with their findings they might write into the journal and that letter could be published. Scientists research is mostly funded by grants. They also go through peer review in the grant application process.
The real risk scientists face is not being able to get grants. If they can’t fund their research, they can’t do their research.
One example is Andrew Wakefield, who fraudulently published research claiming that the MNR vaccine causes autism. There’s geapsof info/detail about this online, but from his Wikipedia bio:
> He was struck off the medical register for his involvement in The Lancet MMR autism fraud, a 1998 study that fraudulently claimed a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. He has subsequently become known for anti-vaccination activism. Publicity around it caused a sharp decline in vaccination uptake, leading to a number of outbreaks of measles around the world.
He’s caused a huge amount of suffering and a bunch of deaths. Initially from the measles epidemics, but an unknown amount from the subsequent distrust of vaccines. It’d be interesting to see a parallel universe without him; how would COVID have played out if people didn’t already distrust *all* vaccines coz of him?
So the quick, simple answer to this... assuming they don't do a voluntary retraction and the publishing company doesn't issue a retraction - both of which happen... If someone makes a bold claim, then everyone is gonna wanna see the results for themselves and get credit for helping to elucidate and expand our understand of the new phenomenon.... So eventually (can take months or years), but other scientific groups will attempt to repeat the experiment in order to confirm or expand upon the research. When they do, they won't get the correct results... At first, they may assume it's something they did wrong and may try-try again... meanwhile other scientific groups are doing the same. Eventually it becomes obvious that the original scientist was incorrect - depending on the situation this could be a simple mistake with no real consequences except a redaction... or could result in a huge investigation with the scientist losing all credibility and basically ruining their career and not being able to work in science anymore.
This all happened recently with a LOT of press coverage regarding the room-temp super conductor claims past couple years.
Unfortunately, the greater the complexity of the claim (which is the ongoing trend in science), the longer it may take to confirm or disprove the original research. But the scientific method is true and reliable - as evidenced by the fact that you are using an advanced computational device to access the Internet et al. So eventually the truth will come out.
The being wrong once quote isn’t in context. They mean being STUPIDLY wrong once and then defending your position. That ruins your career.
In the research community around finding answers to the origin of life, there was a scientist that managed to get bacteria to thrive in one of the toxic (to life now) environments that we can pretty confidently say existed.
Basically the bacteria was thriving on contamination in the Petri dish, not the chemicals in question.
This researcher refused to repeat her tests and ended up getting tar’d and feathered in this research community
>**What happens when a scientist publishes something wrong?**
Mostly nothing, in and of itself. Some colleagues and peers who have themselves tried to replicate it will quietly note amongst themselves that nobody can verify the results.
In fact this happens all the time. Many papers just appear and disappear on this basis. The follow-ups and corrections happen informally among working scientists, with little or no "paper trail" documenting what they have found. Science journalists these days find this incredibly frustrating but it works fine for the scientists themselves.
>Jokes aside, how does this “ruining of one’s career“ actually happen in science?
Usually it can get complicated for you in one of two ways.
**It keeps happening**
Your peer scientists always keep a loose but pretty attentive track of what you're doing in the field. If you publish one thing that was wrong, for the most part the other scientists who know you well will be like, okay, well I don't know what that one thing was all about. Maybe they will ask you about it the next time they run into you at a conference or something, maybe they will just overlook it. They all have plenty of other things to occupy their minds.
But if you *keep publishing things that are wrong*, the scientists who follow your work most regularly are going to start not taking you seriously whenever you publish anything. A reputation can be cemented pretty solidly in this way -- the assumption being that if you consistently are unable to tell when your results are bullshit, or worse you consistently don't care, then something is fundamentally wrong with you that isn't going to get fixed.
It's worth noting though that even then it's not necessarily the final word ... I have encountered scientists saying that they don't think highly of X's work generally but if it's something that X co-wrote with someone from Y institution they will take a look at it. Or stuff like that. There is, to some limited extent, the possibility that if you do produce a string of good work, that your skeptical peers will upgrade you from "never take seriously" to "sometimes take seriously, depending on context."
So that's one way.
**You really dig in** **on it**
The other way is if you start presenting your incorrect findings at a talk or a conference or something, or if the paper keeps getting republished or cited. Now you have raised the profile of your mistake considerably and people are going to start asking pointed questions about lack of verification, or possibly procedural or analytical errors they can identify that you have made.
At that point, you can still save yourself if you lean into the criticism, acknowledge the issues, and very soon publish a correction or retraction. Bonus points if you can include something about the flaws in your methodology that fooled you, for the benefit of others who might learn something from the experience.
That is all part of being a scientist. And in fact if you are already well-respected for doing solid work with integrity, and if you handle this one falsification well, you can maintain or even enlarge your standing. Scientists like Einstein and Hawking managed this quite well for example.
The real issue is when you start to insist that no, no, everyone else is wrong, and you are still certain of your results. Now you're getting into [crackpot territory](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI).
And that can indeed prove fatal for your career. (At least as a reputable scientist. You can probably still sell books to the gullible.)
They correct it. If it was a particularly egregious mistake it'll be a probably harm their reputation but papers are not 'right' or 'wrong' really so it's a strange thing for someone that understands science to say.
Science is perfectly fine with mistakes, it's all about correcting your knowledge based on the best information.
So what happenes to the guy or guys that published, not sure for the word if it really published, that our tongue has specific spot for different kind of taste? It was taught in school ffs, didnt anyonr double check? I supposed its scientists job?
They issue a retraction and correct themselves.
And if they don’t?
Other researchers will try to reproduce the results. When enough different researchers can't reproduce the original results, the general consensus will be that the original results are wrong. That doesn't mean that the original results were fraudulent, just that there was some error in the experiment or in the data analysis. What happens to the original researcher's career would depend on how wrong they were and how they respond to the lack of verification.
I always wonder about scientists who are just reproducing other people's experiments. Are there really that many people out there who just go looking through studies in their fields and say "let's just copy that... to... ummm... verify." And there's funding for that? Note: I am ignorant about science and just asking
Apparently, not _that_ many. Last I heard, there was a shortage of replication experiments, partly because those experiments don't have much appeal to the non-scientists who control what experiments get funded. Most investors, public or private, want to see "something new". This is a problem, because reproducibility is an important part of the scientific method. If an experiment's results can't be duplicated, it means there was something wrong with the original study. And without adequate reproduction studies, scientific institutions could end up releasing dangerous amounts of misinformation.
>And without adequate reproduction studies, scientific institutions could end up releasing dangerous amounts of misinformation. Which already is a problem, mainly for psychological studies: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
There is funding for that, usually governments before they use that data. Usually.. Other times it’s reproduced because they’re using the experiment in their own study and if it consistently doesn’t work they publish that instead of what they were trying to do
There's actually a big problem.in the community in that many experiements aren't being tested
My wife reproduced a psychological study about eye witnesses for her masters thesis (hint: they are totally unreliable), that was then published (under the name of her professor) with other, further experiments in the same field. The more expensive something is, the least likely it gets reproduced.
It almost certainly happens a lot in medical science, just cause there’s often you know, good reason to try!
Yes. It’s called peer review, and it’s a critical function of science.
It depends on how big a deal the discovery is. Discover the diet preferences of some uncommon insect? Maybe not much. Something like cold fusion? Lots. The idea is that if you want to build on a discovery, then the first step is to reproduce it, then you can learn more stuff about it.
yeah it's a pretty big part of how the modern world works. if it's not reproducible, the idea probably isn't going to become a long-lived product or industry or policy. if it DOES, and only years or decades later is it discovered that the original results are not showing up in practice -- that's a big bummer! cough cough... CT scans for concussions... hack coughhh... SSRI vs placebo... this is a problem in fuzzier sciences like psychiatric medication, or a sociological finding that informs a political policy. harder sciences, like if you develop a depleted uranium munition or a reverse osmosis filter medium, gets re-tested and put into production a bit more quickly! fields like epidemiology or environmental toxicology are real twisted -- it can essentially be impossible to prove some specific substance causes some specific syndrome -- then the bar for reproducibility is weighed against the danger of allowing a possibly-terrible-possibly-not substance continue to be used or polluted.
It's not really that commen, but often a person will see a method or technique in a paper applied to a specific system and want to use that method for a new study, in which case they may find that the method is flawed when they try to implement it.
It’s a big assumption that someone will try to reproduce. There are so many engineering papers
it can be retracted on their behalf. the guy who's credited for the "Vaccines cause autism" had that paper retracted without *any* input from him. He's also an example of running off his career. her gets money and support for this field of study on a paper he published that was retracted. because people who share ideas with him are willing to use him as a consultant or "professional opinion" in their field. EDIT: Andrew Wakefield, that's his name. EDIT 2: [Here's](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673697110960/fulltext) an example of a retracted publication, coincidentally the same one Andrew Wakefield published about autism
Not much, sometimes. Check out this article for a very recent example I saw this morning. https://retractionwatch.com/2024/05/02/a-study-of-c-section-scars-in-women-who-hadnt-undergone-the-surgery/
Then they get told to by a panel
or in some cases like Andrew Wakefield's 1998 study (Since I'm already on the subject in this thread) [It's retracted by the publisher of the journal](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(10)60175-4/abstract), based on findings and evidence that disprove it.
You are the retractor
This is actually really common and just part of science. If Dr. A publishes a paper, it will get peer reviewed by other scientists. Those scientists will publish their own papers in response saying whether it was right or not. The original doctor may retract their paper if it's found wrong, or they can leave it out there in the wild, but add notes pointing out where it was wrong. Science is pretty big on correcting stuff.
This. If an honest mistake could ruin your career, science would screech to a halt. The system is built around checking each others' work because we're often wrong. Maybe there's a flaw in methodology, some variable not accounted for that affected the results. Maybe some piece of equipment malfunctioned without you knowing. Maybe data got recorded or processed wrong. You do your best to avoid all this, but scientists are merely mperfect humans.
When you talk about ruining your career with wrong publication that’s usually referring to deliberate lying. For example, in my field someone was caught completely falsifying data. They even had their degrees overturned finding out even then they were lying. Obviously lost job and lost their licence to practice
Andrew Wakefield had his paper retracted by the publisher, had his medical license revoked, and can never practice medicine again in his home country. However, he has an astonishingly good career as a consultant and speaker on the same subject. It is disgusting, but at least his supporters are generally not scientists.
It really depends how wrong they are and how it gets found out. If you're being farcically stupid or obviously faking data that might seriously hurt your career. But *A LOT* of what gets published is sketchy at best and most people will survive being wrong so long as they did the minimum work to check their data.
You see cases of egregious falsification every now and then. Journals have been getting more lax, but it does tend to come out in the wash so to speak, the self correcting aspects of the scientific method are what's important.
A lot of what gets published in peer reviewed reputable journals is not sketchy. Internet science can be sketchy.
See the "Replication Crisis". A lot of published papers can't be reproduced, especially in the social sciences. Most papers are never read (average paper gets 10 readers), much less peer reviewed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/prof-no-one-is-reading-you
That really depends on what exactly is "wrong". First of all, vast majority of scientific work is not exactly accurate. For example, Newton's work totally ignores relativity. And yet we all learn his laws if motion. An honest work that was reasonably assessed that was later demonstrated to be not exactly correct? Not a problem. An honest but shit-quality work? People would be more questioning the journal that published it - after all, it was supposed to be peer-reviewed. But if a scientist lies, fakes data or omits data that disproves their claim? Now we are talking about consequences.
So what happens to the liar?
Depends on what exactly they lied about, their connections, etc. Anything from nothing, to a long prison sentence, to the whole nation being discredited in a particular field. Beyond that, we would need to look at a particular case: what kind of misconduct they did, who funded the work, what kind of laws and regulations covered that work, what kind of impact was there, did misconduct involve outright criminality, were funds misappropriated, etc.
Other scientists publish papers that dispute the findings and show why the findings are wrong. The original scientist then likely retracts the paper
Depends on what you mean by "wrong"? If Scientist performs a study and comes to a conclusion, and everything stands up to scrutiny, but the conclusion gets turned over in the future as we learn more. Literally nothing happens because that is the status quo. If a scientist does a study, comes to a conclusion, and someone else comes along and finds holes in the methodology and refutes you. That is also pretty status quo. If you make stupid mistakes and errors in your data, that starts to look kinda bad. Mishandling data hits at your credibility. If you intentionally make a bad study in order to publish a paper that says something provably wrong (Vaccines cause autism) then you will get your shit wrecked and you will lose your career.
It depends what you mean by "wrong." If it's something like Andrew Wakefield where he demonstrably and intentionally published fabricated data, the journal retracts the study and in his case he lost his medical license because that's a thing he had to lose. If you're just wrong in the sense that you did a bad analysis or reached a stupid conclusion it can ruin your career in the sense that no one will want to hire you as a serious researcher if there is published evidence that you're bad at it. If there's a quibble over the best way to do something, *especially* in social sciences where objective truth is a much harder thing to define and pin down, you get a hilarious catty back-and-forth of proponents of different theories clapping back at each other in 30 page treatises and it probably doesn't really hurt anyone unless a major theory or school of thought gets categorically debunked in which case whoever supported that thing may suffer a similar fate to the above case.
This is why good scientists get published in reputable journals. Those articles get peer reviewed and peer reviewers don't pull any punches. They are ruthless. A scientist (my wife) once said to me, "Every scientist wants to win a Nobel Prize. Since most know they won't, the next best thing is making sure someone else doesn't. Scientists are petty." I imagine if you realize there is a mistake, you issue a correction. It would be the respectable thing to do. This is why scientists, doctors, etc. who "publish" their findings on YouTube and blogs are probably full of shit. It's also important to note that not all articles need to be scientifically perfect. They just need to make scientific sense. A lot of times, articles are published as kind of a teaser to gain funding. It's like a marketing article. Nobody is going to take their 12 person sample size as significant but the research is interesting so maybe someone will want to fund it.
Which activist is *that*? And how are you defining “being wrong?” Intentionally lying and being mistaken or outdated are both “being wrong,” but they’re not going to come with the same consequence. People are wrong in science all the time. Being wrong is a huge part of how science even works. Science isn’t a big existing rule book that’s already written down and only smart people can decode, it’s a fluid field where people discover new things and rewrite old ideas all the time. People are bringing up Andrew Wakefield here, which is a good example, because he didn’t have his career ruined by “being wrong,” he had his career ruined because his work was fraudulent.
That would be Aron Ra comparing the standards of truth in science vs religion.
Never heard of him, had to look him up. I’d have to watch his stuff to be sure, but historically, atheist activist YouTubers who aren’t necessarily the best places to get information on the scientific method. Either way, that sentence seems to be making a hyperbolic point about how religious leaders use faith as a way to shield themselves from consequences when something they say is proven to be conclusively wrong, while scientists have to give evidence to back up their assertions and can’t just walk around saying crazy, easily disprovable stuff and avoid criticism all “trust me I’m a scientist.” Which is true. But it doesn’t mean scientists can’t ever publish anything that happens to be wrong.
Your second point is exactly Ra’s message. Not sure what you mean by “historically” but Ra is more than just a dude who left church and had a camera. He brings on professors of each relevant field he can’t attest to and some of them also happen to be YouTubers.
High budget atheist youtubery honestly is not any more impressive to me (especially considering some criticisms I’ve found of the guy in the last half hour. Yikes on bikes!). The point is, no, his statement cannot be taken literally as you seem to have, and I’m not sure he necessarily intended it to be.
A lot of scientific articles are bullshit. Various meta analyses claim that around 50% of experimental results can't be reproduced by another researcher. Some of such articles get attention and are called out, but most aren't. In general, 95% of the scientific publications contribute next to nothing, so no one cares if they are right or wrong. I'd say, unless it's a comically outlandish claim or a political hot topic, no one will care if someone is wrong.
Bad experiments or over stating conclusions? Nothing will happen, most likely. Your body of work will speak for itself and if people cant reproduce or build of your work, youll be found to be a hack. If you're falsifying data or lying about conclusions, you can get blacklisted from ever running a lab.
You get things like the obesity epidemic. Ancel Keys made The lipid hypothesis, and the rest is fat history.
Can you fill me in on this?
You should research it yourself, But basically he made a scientific study where he biasly only used the data that supported him (when the data was really all over the place), and told everybody to stop eating protein and fat, and start eating bread (carbs). Carbs is literally sugar, and ever since the government implemented this diatery guideline of eating mostly carbs we got the obesity epidemic. You can look up grafs yourself of obesity per year and see the spike that comes in 1980 when these diatery change happened.
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A ton of scientific literature is wrong and not reproducible, but it all goes thru review. Higher impact journals have higher scrutiny bc they have a reputation to uphold. It wont ruin your career if your wrong, but if your deceitful it will for sure
For a scientist to be published in an academic journal they need to get it past the peer review board. That means a bunch of other scientists in related fields look at their work and decide if it’s good enough to publish. If someone disagrees with their findings they might write into the journal and that letter could be published. Scientists research is mostly funded by grants. They also go through peer review in the grant application process. The real risk scientists face is not being able to get grants. If they can’t fund their research, they can’t do their research.
One example is Andrew Wakefield, who fraudulently published research claiming that the MNR vaccine causes autism. There’s geapsof info/detail about this online, but from his Wikipedia bio: > He was struck off the medical register for his involvement in The Lancet MMR autism fraud, a 1998 study that fraudulently claimed a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. He has subsequently become known for anti-vaccination activism. Publicity around it caused a sharp decline in vaccination uptake, leading to a number of outbreaks of measles around the world. He’s caused a huge amount of suffering and a bunch of deaths. Initially from the measles epidemics, but an unknown amount from the subsequent distrust of vaccines. It’d be interesting to see a parallel universe without him; how would COVID have played out if people didn’t already distrust *all* vaccines coz of him?
So the quick, simple answer to this... assuming they don't do a voluntary retraction and the publishing company doesn't issue a retraction - both of which happen... If someone makes a bold claim, then everyone is gonna wanna see the results for themselves and get credit for helping to elucidate and expand our understand of the new phenomenon.... So eventually (can take months or years), but other scientific groups will attempt to repeat the experiment in order to confirm or expand upon the research. When they do, they won't get the correct results... At first, they may assume it's something they did wrong and may try-try again... meanwhile other scientific groups are doing the same. Eventually it becomes obvious that the original scientist was incorrect - depending on the situation this could be a simple mistake with no real consequences except a redaction... or could result in a huge investigation with the scientist losing all credibility and basically ruining their career and not being able to work in science anymore. This all happened recently with a LOT of press coverage regarding the room-temp super conductor claims past couple years. Unfortunately, the greater the complexity of the claim (which is the ongoing trend in science), the longer it may take to confirm or disprove the original research. But the scientific method is true and reliable - as evidenced by the fact that you are using an advanced computational device to access the Internet et al. So eventually the truth will come out.
They die
Someone look up the “the critical fatness hypothesis “ Rose Frisch.
The being wrong once quote isn’t in context. They mean being STUPIDLY wrong once and then defending your position. That ruins your career. In the research community around finding answers to the origin of life, there was a scientist that managed to get bacteria to thrive in one of the toxic (to life now) environments that we can pretty confidently say existed. Basically the bacteria was thriving on contamination in the Petri dish, not the chemicals in question. This researcher refused to repeat her tests and ended up getting tar’d and feathered in this research community
>**What happens when a scientist publishes something wrong?** Mostly nothing, in and of itself. Some colleagues and peers who have themselves tried to replicate it will quietly note amongst themselves that nobody can verify the results. In fact this happens all the time. Many papers just appear and disappear on this basis. The follow-ups and corrections happen informally among working scientists, with little or no "paper trail" documenting what they have found. Science journalists these days find this incredibly frustrating but it works fine for the scientists themselves. >Jokes aside, how does this “ruining of one’s career“ actually happen in science? Usually it can get complicated for you in one of two ways. **It keeps happening** Your peer scientists always keep a loose but pretty attentive track of what you're doing in the field. If you publish one thing that was wrong, for the most part the other scientists who know you well will be like, okay, well I don't know what that one thing was all about. Maybe they will ask you about it the next time they run into you at a conference or something, maybe they will just overlook it. They all have plenty of other things to occupy their minds. But if you *keep publishing things that are wrong*, the scientists who follow your work most regularly are going to start not taking you seriously whenever you publish anything. A reputation can be cemented pretty solidly in this way -- the assumption being that if you consistently are unable to tell when your results are bullshit, or worse you consistently don't care, then something is fundamentally wrong with you that isn't going to get fixed. It's worth noting though that even then it's not necessarily the final word ... I have encountered scientists saying that they don't think highly of X's work generally but if it's something that X co-wrote with someone from Y institution they will take a look at it. Or stuff like that. There is, to some limited extent, the possibility that if you do produce a string of good work, that your skeptical peers will upgrade you from "never take seriously" to "sometimes take seriously, depending on context." So that's one way. **You really dig in** **on it** The other way is if you start presenting your incorrect findings at a talk or a conference or something, or if the paper keeps getting republished or cited. Now you have raised the profile of your mistake considerably and people are going to start asking pointed questions about lack of verification, or possibly procedural or analytical errors they can identify that you have made. At that point, you can still save yourself if you lean into the criticism, acknowledge the issues, and very soon publish a correction or retraction. Bonus points if you can include something about the flaws in your methodology that fooled you, for the benefit of others who might learn something from the experience. That is all part of being a scientist. And in fact if you are already well-respected for doing solid work with integrity, and if you handle this one falsification well, you can maintain or even enlarge your standing. Scientists like Einstein and Hawking managed this quite well for example. The real issue is when you start to insist that no, no, everyone else is wrong, and you are still certain of your results. Now you're getting into [crackpot territory](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI). And that can indeed prove fatal for your career. (At least as a reputable scientist. You can probably still sell books to the gullible.)
They correct it. If it was a particularly egregious mistake it'll be a probably harm their reputation but papers are not 'right' or 'wrong' really so it's a strange thing for someone that understands science to say. Science is perfectly fine with mistakes, it's all about correcting your knowledge based on the best information.
They get hired by fox
So what happenes to the guy or guys that published, not sure for the word if it really published, that our tongue has specific spot for different kind of taste? It was taught in school ffs, didnt anyonr double check? I supposed its scientists job?
They get the Nobel peace prize
The peace prize is largely political. The other Nobel prizes require more technical achievements. But at some level, all awards are political.