{"id":162637,"date":"2021-09-14T20:28:15","date_gmt":"2021-09-14T18:28:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=162637"},"modified":"2021-09-14T20:28:16","modified_gmt":"2021-09-14T18:28:16","slug":"science-also-a-pandemic-victim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=162637","title":{"rendered":"Science Also a Pandemic Victim"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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John P.A. Ioannidis writes at The Tablet How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science.<\/strong> <\/a>Excerpts in italics with my bolds aand some added images.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Imperatives like skepticism and disinterestedness are being junked to fuel political warfare that has nothing in common with scientific methodology<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before the pandemic, the sharing of data, protocols, and discoveries for free was limited,<\/strong> compromising the communalism on which the scientific method is based. It was already widely tolerated that science was not universal, but the realm of an ever-more hierarchical elite, a minority of experts<\/strong>. Gargantuan financial and other interests and conflicts thrived in the neighborhood of science\u2014and the norm of disinterestedness was left forlorn.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for organized skepticism<\/strong>, it did not sell very well within academic sanctuaries<\/strong>. Even the best peer-reviewed journals often presented results with bias and spin.<\/strong> Broader public and media dissemination of scientific discoveries was largely focused on what could be exaggerated about the research<\/strong>, rather than the rigor of its methods and the inherent uncertainty of the results.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, despite the cynical realization that the methodological norms of science had been neglected (or perhaps because of this realization), voices struggling for more communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism had been multiplying<\/strong> among scientific circles prior to the pandemic. Reformers<\/strong> were often seen as holding some sort of a moral higher ground, despite being outnumbered in occupancy of powerful positions. Reproducibility crises in many scientific fields, ranging from biomedicine to psychology, caused soul-searching and efforts to enhance transparency,<\/strong> including the sharing of raw data, protocols, and code. Inequalities within the academy were increasingly recognized with calls to remedy them. Many were receptive to pleas for reform.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Opinion-based experts (while still dominant<\/strong> in influential committees, professional societies, major conferences, funding bodies, and other power nodes of the system) were often challenged by evidence-based criticism.<\/strong> There were efforts to make conflicts of interest more transparent and to minimize their impact, even if most science leaders remained conflicted, especially in medicine<\/strong>. A thriving community of scientists focused on rigorous methods, understanding biases, and minimizing their impact. The field of metaresearch, i.e., research on research, had become widely respected. One might therefore have hoped that the pandemic crisis could have fostered change.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, change did happen\u2014but perhaps mostly for the worst.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lack of communalism during the pandemic fueled scandals and conspiracy theories<\/strong>, which were then treated as fact in the name of science by much of the popular press and on social media. The\u00a0retraction of a highly visible hydroxychloroquine paper from the The Lancet was a startling example:<\/strong>\u00a0A lack of sharing and openness allowed a top medical journal to publish an article in which 671 hospitals allegedly contributed\u00a0data that did not exist,<\/strong>\u00a0and no one noticed this outright fabrication before publication. The\u00a0New England Journal of Medicine<\/strong>, another top medical journal, managed to publish\u00a0a similar paper; many scientists continue to heavily cite it long after its retraction.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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