How are we, the laymen, supposed to trust published, peer-reviewed papers? They seem to be just a bunch of words now with little meaning.
Before, I used to consider scientific papers... well, scientific and would try to base an informed opinion on the abstracts and conclusions. After reading blog entries like these and actually reading some papers (especially soft science papers which are easier to understand), even as a layman, some glaring mistakes can be spotted.
Popular scientists like Dawkins and that black astronomer are happy to point out the glaring problems in other areas of life, but it's looking more and more like the scientific field doesn't have its shit together either.
On a scale of bullshit to trustworthy, where stuff like Breitbart and ThePinkNews live in swamps of bullshit, scientific publications and papers seem to barely reach "believable". One always has to question "who payed for this research", "who reviewed it", "which country is this from", "what reasons could there have been to do this research", "are these results too good to be true", "who would benefits from these results", etc.
It seems like one really cannot trust anybody or anything and has to constantly keep their wits about themselves.
Will we ever be able to clean up our act? What can we do?
>How are we, the laymen, supposed to trust published, peer-reviewed papers?
You are not supposed to.
The laymen really isn't the intended audience of academic publications. The literature is always in flux and inherently unreliable as discoveries are claimed and over decades, proven true or false. Taking a snapshot of the literature at any one time is to accept that a proportion of the claimed truth will be false. Unfortunately the laymen doesn't get this, and they believe that published=true.
As a layman, you should be looking to sources of information that have been vetted for truth, like textbooks. Textbooks are made to distill the most reliable information from the literature by a team of experts.
One paper isn't truth, a dozen independent papers, all pointing to the same thing is. That is what we call the "scientific consensus".
For one, consider the institutions and nations that the research is from. It's too bad that journals are not more discriminating, but we as consumers of articles can be.
Before, I used to consider scientific papers... well, scientific and would try to base an informed opinion on the abstracts and conclusions. After reading blog entries like these and actually reading some papers (especially soft science papers which are easier to understand), even as a layman, some glaring mistakes can be spotted.
Popular scientists like Dawkins and that black astronomer are happy to point out the glaring problems in other areas of life, but it's looking more and more like the scientific field doesn't have its shit together either.
On a scale of bullshit to trustworthy, where stuff like Breitbart and ThePinkNews live in swamps of bullshit, scientific publications and papers seem to barely reach "believable". One always has to question "who payed for this research", "who reviewed it", "which country is this from", "what reasons could there have been to do this research", "are these results too good to be true", "who would benefits from these results", etc.
It seems like one really cannot trust anybody or anything and has to constantly keep their wits about themselves.
Will we ever be able to clean up our act? What can we do?