What’s wrong with science? Stanford University’s John Ioannidis has been asking this question for a long time – at least since his 2005 article, “
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” And now, seventeen years later, he and a slate of co-authors from the United States, the U.K., and the Netherlands, have some suggestions about how to solve the problem.
In a new paper, a group of researchers propose the “adoption of measures to optimize key elements of the scientific process.” Will it work?
The paper, titled
“A Manifesto for Reproducible Science” and published this month in the journal Nature Human Behavior, makes the case that what’s wrong with science is simple: It’s us. As humans, we’re ill-equipped to see the world as it is; the world as we’d like it to be is much more compelling to our cognitive decision-making apparatus. We look for results that confirm our biases and we’re hard-wired to see causality where there is only randomness.
This is not a recipe for effective truth-seeking.
