More on a topic I've blogged about before, Problems with Science.
His solution? 'Todd Talks'
The reason for all the confusing findings? According to Oliver,
"Scientists are under constant pressure to publish, with tenure
and funding on the line. And to get published, it helps to have
results that seem new and striking. Scientists know nobody is
publishing a study that says, 'Nothing Up With Acai Berries.'
And to get those results, there are all sorts of ways that --
consciously or not -- you can tweak your study."
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Per usual, Oliver has an amusing solution to the problem: Scientists'
sourcing and methodology should be explained when their results are
shared everywhere from viral stories to news segments. "I know what
you're thinking: `Hold on, if that happens, where where am I going
to get all my interesting bulls-- from?" says Oliver.
"Don't worry -- we have you covered.'"
Video
The next logical question about our origins, of course, then becomes that of where did inflation come from? Was it a state that was eternal to the past, meaning that it had no origin and always existed, right up until the moment it ended and created the Big Bang? Was it a state that had a beginning, where it emerged from a non-inflationary state in spacetime some finite time in the past? Or was it a cyclical state, where time looped back on itself from some far future state?
The difficult thing here is that there's nothing we can observe,
in our Universe, that allows us to tell these three possibilities
apart. In all but the most contrived models of inflation (and some
of those we can rule out), it's only the last 10^(-33) seconds or
so of inflation that impacts our Universe. The exponential nature
of inflation wipes out any information that occurred prior to that,
separating it from anything we can observe by, well, inflating it
beyond the portion of our Universe that we can observe.
...
The total amount of information accessible to us in the Universe is finite,
and hence, so is the amount of knowledge we can gain about it.
There's a whole lot left to learn and a whole lot that science has yet
to reveal. But some things we will likely never know.
The Universe may yet be infinite, but our knowledge of it never will be.
Independently verifying research can help science regain its credibility, argues Laurie Zoloth.
Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, wrote in April:
"Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects,
invalid exploratory analyses and flagrant conflicts of interest,
together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious
importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness."
Something needs to change. In this spirit in November 2011,
a group of American scientists led by Brian Nosek, a psychologist
at the University of Virginia, began The Reproducibility Project.
Although there was an entire conference on it earlier this month,
spurred by a controversial opinion piece written a year ago by
George Ellis and Joe Silk, the answer is very clear: no, string theory
has not yet risen to the level of a scientific theory.
The way people are trying to turn it into science is --
as Sabine Hossenfelder and Davide Castelvecchi report --
by redefining what "science" is.
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If you want to rise to the level of a scientific theory, you have
to make a testable -- and hence, falsifiable or validatable --
predictions. Even a physical state that arises as a consequence
of an established theory, such as the multiverse, isn't a scientific
theory until we have a way to confirm or refute it;
it's only a hypothesis, even if it's a good hypothesis.
And related to the problem:
While information is cheap and getting cheaper, meaning is increasingly expensive. We are beset by confirmation bias, our tendency to look for and accept evidence that supports what we already think we know and ignore the rest. Per motivated reasoning, we tend to reject new evidence when it contradicts our established beliefs. Sadly, the smarter we are, the more likely we are to deny or oppose data that seem in conflict with ideas we deem important. Finally, bringing true believers together in a group tends only to compound the problem.
And sometimes even bullshit is made to sound scientific.
Of all the slick woo peddlers out there, one of the most famous
(and most annoying) is Deepak Chopra.
...
Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention
from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not,
to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation.
Here we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly
impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful
but are actually vacuous.