Well I'd like to think I'm not! I wanted to point to an actually dubious thing where we might call into question a study, so we could still respect the work being done while validating the importance of keeping standards in research.

You're right though that it's disappointing how many responses seem to address only the flaws in modern science and not acknowledge the strength of the scientific process. I think a big part of it does come down to how scientific findings are interpreted and reported to the public, and even further an all-too-human misunderstanding of epistemic limitations. Our cultures should spend more time educating people about the limits of knowledge and fact, how they are constrained by other flawed systems, etc. That would be a half-decent start, if we could only fix the entire reporting problem too.

Thank you for pointing this out.

TBF I’ve lost count of the number of times someone has cited some paper as a reference for the point they are trying to make and when I inspect the paper it has shitty “n”, the paper is written for an agenda (not sure what that’s called where I.e. a paper saying smoking is good for you/not harmful is paid for by the tobacco industry and written by tobacco industry scientists), or it might even just be straight up bullshit written to look like a legit paper.

Peer Review at least offers some barriers to the problems with papers, but it’s definitely not a panacea.

The problem is without peer reviewed papers it's hard to credit that someone all the way around the world observed something.

In a perfect world nobody is lying and everyone has the scientific base education to understand how to report phenomena properly. But uhhh... Yeah.

In theory, a paper gives you a methodology that you can use to reproduce the findings. And a refusal to use papers to repeat findings (because shit costs money and nobody wants to publish iterative studies) means you end up with a bunch of novel findings that are never confirmed through repetition.

But the fact that nobody is bothering to repeat these studies also raises a question of what exactly is being researched. Certainly, the more useful scientific research efforts are about formulating applicable techniques. So they would need to be reproducible to have any functional value.

The fact that we're not seeking to replicate studies suggests that we're investing a ton of time in niche under-utilized fields. And that may be a problem of investigative research (we're so focused on publishing that we don't care what we're actually studying) or a problem of applied sciences (we're so focused on scaling up older methods to industrial scale that we're leaving better methods of production on the cutting room floor).

But its definitely some kind of problem.

this is the way doggo puppers, hecking upboats to the left

i think you bring up valid instances where this is fair.

but i think i’m speaking to the very obvious and important ones that are worthy of reproduction. like i’ve seen articles be like “these corporations are responsible for 99% of climate change” or something

and the comments will be like “duh we knew that”

which true, but not empirically. being able to cite data from actual research from professionals is so valuable and far better than anecdotes or guesses. edit: and also informs meaningful policy.

that said, is there some way for a layperson like me to identify when research is not deemed worthy of reproduction? or is it a lost cause

I see this name everywhere these days. I think... I'm having a Baader-Meinhof about Dunning-Kruger