Most scientific papers are bullcrap.
This started as a post to complain, because I lost several hours of my life researching the sleep hormone melatonin for a blog post before deciding that I couldn’t trust anything that I read.
But the post got bigger and more uncomfortable, because science has gotten political. You are either pro-science or anti-science, and there isn’t much market for being a nuanced critic of any field, least of all a critic of science as a whole.
But screw it. I read scientific research for my work, and scan through dozens of papers for each entry in this blog. And people who read what I write care about science, and are (hopefully) adult enough to grapple with the truth that:
- Most scientific papers are wrong
- It’s possible for entire fields of science to run off the rails in major ways, for decades at a time
This sounds depressing. I roll my eyes *a lot*. But there is hope. Continue reading