So the solution is to avoid constructive criticism… forever? Besides, you’re not talking about constructive criticism, you’re talking about, in your own words, “fabricating complete fantasies”.
The fact that large swaths of scientific results suffer from a reproducibility problem, exacerbated by an unforgiving “publish or perish” demand from scientific institutions is not fantasy. Nor is bringing the issue up for discussion or suggesting ways to improve “damaging and harmful to the public”. This is the heart of science. See a problem, analyze the problem, discuss the problem and the analysis publicly and among the community, attempt several possible solutions, and settle on the one that works best.
Saying “oh, don’t talk about those problems, because people will stop trusting us” is the exact opposite of the scientific spirit. It’s the sort of thing autocrats say. As far as I can tell, the fact that people are talking about the state of science openly and skeptically is refreshing. That’s not what would result from a decline in science and reason. This is the result of an unprecedented cultural awareness of science.
That people are fighting to improve its credibility is a good thing. That people are invested in the process by which science is done, and finding a few shortcomings, instead of just reading the paper and uncritically concluding “Science says – must be true” is a good thing.
That’s not what I was saying and you have apparently completely missed the point of my example. I gave an example where a respected scientific institution that found itself under political attack asked for an expert review of its methodologies and procedures. The review made constructive recommendations for how the IPCC could improve its practices, which were acknowledged as productive and subsequently implemented.
The IPCC subsequently issued a new series of assessments which of course didn’t change any of the basic conclusions about climate (except to make them even more emphatic in light of new evidence) since there was nothing wrong with the earlier conclusions in the first place. Meanwhile, however, the political enemies of the IPCC were citing and exaggerating the IAC report in an effort to cast doubt on the credibility of the entire organization.
Read this thread again from the beginning. If you can’t see the analogy with how some – particularly Republican ideologues – are attacking the whole institution of science, I really can’t help you any further.
And here is living proof of my argument, in action. This is a preposterous generalization every bit as ridiculous as the fake headline I previously quoted. There is no evidence that “large swaths” of overall scientific results suffer from a reproducibility problem, and such an assertion is a baseless attempt to undermine scientific credibility. It can be made only through cherry-picked examples focusing on narrow areas generally outside the hard sciences. Moreover, it deceptively ignores the rather critical fact that scientific results bearing on public policy are not the result of one or two peer-reviewed papers that need verification, but of established results usually based on decades of research and hundreds or thousands of studies.
If there’s one thing you can always count on the public and the media for, it’s their uncanny ability to misunderstand and misinterpret scientific findings. The so-called “reproducibility problem” is no exception.
I think you’re painting this in a political light when it doesn’t need to be. We both agree climate change is real, occurring now, and caused by human pollution generally and carbon based fossil fuels specifically. Do you really think Exxon-Mobil, the GOP and Joe Coalminer all disagree with those facts simply because some scientists had a few nitpicks with each other about the relative importance of publishing novel research versus replicating previous results?
If you disagree that reproducibility is a problem, then refute it openly as you have in this thread. But going further and saying “criticism is damaging” is where we disagree. Criticism is the heart and soul of science. If everyone just threw up their hands and said “well you said so” every time they disagreed on something, science would not exist. When you disagree, you bring facts and logic to the table to persuade those you disagree with. You don’t just say “wow, that criticism is very dangerous and shouldn’t be made, imagine if the public found out scientists disagree on things? They’d never trust us again.” That’s Trump talk.
I think you are missing the point spectacularly, the point of **wolfpup **was that criticizing the whole of science is not really justified. Or to be more precise one needs also extraordinary evidence to do so, the particular issues mentioned do have evidence of having issues regarding the reproducing of the results. Read back and you will see that even I did make the point that criticism about medical and psychology or other branches are valid because there is evidence for that, but what it has to be taken into account is that the bigger issue IMHO is that many researchers in the medical field do not do much about doing more research to confirm past research when it is clearly needed.