Should We Trust Science?
Finding the middle ground
Research is the number one way that we find out new things about the world. It’s hard to overstate its importance. Pretty much everything that we do is powered or made possible by something that was, at some point, a research project. We have electric and self-driving cars, gene editing treatments, and we have AI.
As someone who works at a University, I have views — strong views! — about some of the ways in which our students are using that AI. But I can’t deny that these results are staggeringly impressive and that’s not to mention the medical research that keeps us alive. Such are the fruits of scientific research.
Given that evident excellence, does that mean that research should get a free pass? Does it mean that we should leave the scientific process well alone, and just trust that everything will turn out ok?
Blind trust in science might then seem tempting if we just look at those outcomes.
Simply: if we can have all that because of the research, shouldn’t we just trust the process to get us the right results?
Scepticism
Ranged against that argument for trust in science and the scientific process are a number of factors. For instance, there have been challenges around replication in a number of studies and those challenges have given rise to some serious concerns.
For those of you not already familiar with the crisis, the challenge goes a bit like this. It seems that replication is a hugely important part of the scientific method. If we can’t reproduce a finding that someone has made, then that should give us some reason to doubt the findings.
And, over a period of a few years, it came to light that a number of prominent studies could not be replicated. The main findings were located in and around psychology and medicine, though other fields were impacted as well, and it’s pretty likely that the ‘replication crisis’ impacts papers and studies that haven’t as yet been identified. (If you’re interested in pursuing this, there’s a nice recent paper on current thinking about the crisis here.)
So, given all of those findings, shouldn’t we in fact be massively sceptical of science and the scientific method, and not trust it at all?
I don’t know about you, but that seems too strong a position to take. Whilst I know that there are mixed feelings about the way in which governments responded to the pandemic, the scientific endeavours that led to the production of vaccines were amazing. I wouldn’t want us to give up on those benefits — and the saving of lives — because of an overly strong sceptical attitude.
A middle way
The answer must surely lie somewhere between these two extremes. Unquestioning trust in every scientist and every scientific result is naive. Results have been misleading before and will be again.
But for the most part, they aren’t. For the most part, we can trust what gets published through the process of peer review. Smart people use cutting edge equipment and test their methods and findings through a robust series of processes. This is a powerful combination that for the vast majority of cases works incredibly well.
And with recent changes to the way in which results are published and then publicly checked, we can see the way in which the research community is helping to support that positive approach. But we can do more!
In this 2019 paper, Nature noted the following commitment for all of their Nature Research publications.
“Matters Arising is a new content type specific for challenges and clarifications to published work by the journal.”
This was done,
“[t]o encourage post-publication debate and allow for due process in the peer review of scientifically relevant and timely comments and clarifications”
Post-publication debate is certainly one very helpful way to allow a further series of checks and balances on what is published. That much is true and I think that Nature should be applauded for this move.
While we’re here, do let me know in the comments what other checks and balances you would suggest for improving trust in science. I’m always looking for new ideas!