But, but, but, it's Peer-Reviewed.

jryoung · Ladies Man Joined: 19 Mar 2004 Posts: 7664 City: Man Jose

<-- this is my shocked face.

The worst part of all this is not that science can be tainted, that should be evident. But that once entrenched it is incredibly difficult to remove or change generally accepted theory. Apply this to ANY industry.

goofyboy · Posted: May 06, 2014 9:08 am Post subject:

It's really pretty simple: eat real food (nothing processed) with as few chemicals as possible. I say as few chemicals as possible, because there are chemicals in our rain water that falls on the plants / vegitation.

eeven73 · Posted: May 06, 2014 9:35 am Post subject:

goofyboy,

My point isn't to debate diet. It is jryoungs post in regard to how easily science is perverted and used as a tool to fit the needs of a group, then how hard it is to reverse scientific "consensus". Apply this to Climate Change, Economic Theory, Social Engineering, .........

jryoung · Ladies Man Joined: 19 Mar 2004 Posts: 7664 City: Man Jose

The interesting caveat here is that in this example almost seems to be a perfect storm where the key researcher obtained a unique position of power and was backed by industry.

The beauty of science is that it may not always be right, or it could be negatively influenced, but we will always question and hope to prove what is correct.

eeven73 · Posted: May 06, 2014 10:39 am Post subject:

goofyboy · Posted: May 06, 2014 11:12 am Post subject:

I hope this isn't a shock to anyone. We have been using "science" for years to justify things.

Chad H · Posted: May 06, 2014 12:34 pm Post subject:

The key to science is to be objective when reading these articles. One thing we learned over and over throughout my education is to read a paper, and read the data,and then find out who funded the research. Normally, you can easily find out if the research was done in a way that was objective to obtain accurate results. It's very easy to skew statistics in order to satisfy your hypothesis, and while most of the time the reviewers will catch these things, sometimes it doesn't happen. Most of the well cited papers are accepted as good quality theory because they have been read by many objective viewers who agree with the methods and statistics presented.

jason_ssr · Posted: May 06, 2014 4:14 pm Post subject:

This is why I hate the bastardization of the word "theory". It used to mean theory, as in an interpretation of data resulting in a possible answer. Now its a placeholder for fact. The science world is always shocked to find out they were wrong because the theoretical nature of these interpretations is lost in the desperation to provide certainty.

The science community has taken the stance that their theories\studies are absolutely certain fact....until they are not, but then reserve the right to amend their certainty at any time. This makes all their opinions suspect.

When science provides a theory, by its nature it should be assumed to be uncertain. This realized uncertainty should be what pushes the next guy to research, until certainty is achieved. We should not simply accept the first guys guess as certainty.