The credibility crisis in science
https://www.irishtimes.com/science/2024/03/21/the-credibility-crisis-in-science/
EXCERPTS (
William Reville): I could scarcely believe my eyes reading the headline to Robin McKie’s
recent article in the
Guardian...
[...] I already knew that average standards of scientific publications have declined in recent years as numbers of science journals proliferated enormously, standards of peer review of submitted papers declined, and some journals adopted woke ideology.
However, I didn’t know the problem was escalating so rapidly. The watchdog group
Retraction Watch tracks this problem. In 2013, just over 1,000 papers were retracted internationally, more than 4,000 in 2022 and, in 2023, more than 10,000.
[...] Chinese medicine has a particularly bad reputation for faking research because clinicians must publish to scale the hospital hierarchy, forcing overworked doctors to outsource their “research” to dark organisations called “paper mills”.
Paper mills produce and sell fraudulent manuscripts that resemble legitimate research manuscripts. This paper mill industry has spread to India, Russia and former USSR states, Iran and eastern Europe... (
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How we got concussions so wrong
https://slate.com/technology/2024/03/concussion-symptoms-signs-treatment-advice.html
EXCERPT: For years, doctors had been told that
concussion patients needed total rest in order to recover. But around the time of Gormally’s concussions, which occurred between 2013 and 2016, the science was beginning to indicate the opposite—patients who “cocooned” themselves in a dark room, even for only a few days, consistently took longer to get better than people who stayed engaged with their daily activities.
Since then, study after study has shown that the concussed brain requires active rehabilitation—activities like exercise, reading, and screens—to heal. The
most up-to-date Consensus Statement on Concussion in Sport, a
report prepared by an international panel of experts, recommends “active rehabilitation” and discourages total rest. As with most injuries, the specifics of what that rehabilitation looks like varies from case to case; researchers and specialists have an arsenal of protocols and therapies at their disposal.
You’d think that this would have meant a revolution in how doctors understand and treat concussions. It hasn’t. For many patients, not much has changed at all. A
report published in 2018 found that more than half of patients with concussions—
millions a year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—are still leaving the doctor’s office without actionable, evidence-based information or referrals to specialists. Instead of that crucial step, many patients, to their detriment, are still being told to simply cocoon... (
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How [today's] universities killed the academic
https://unherd.com/2024/03/how-universities-killed-the-academic/
EXCERPTS (
Kathleen Stock): Is it possible to write a satirical campus novel anymore? Satire requires exaggeration and the pointed introduction of absurdity, but it is hard to see how modern university life could be further embellished in these respects. As usual, there were some classic stories served up this week for civilians to laugh at.
[...] The organisation that first uncovered
the story about microaggressions is the
Committee for Academic Freedom, newly formed by philosophy lecturer Edward Skidelsky to push back against institutional incursions on free inquiry...
[...] while the general public increasingly gets the joke, and a growing band of disgruntled renegades joins organisations like CAF, it is still true that most employees within relevant institutions remain po-faced and acquiescent in the light of blatantly stupid initiatives by their managers and colleagues. Partly this is because they are frightened to do otherwise...
[...] perhaps an even bigger causal factor in the UK was the move towards conceiving of the student as a customer. Among the many unintended effects of this unfortunate reframing was a difference in the kind of candidate who would get appointed into lecturing positions. And the change is significantly responsible for the idiotic atmosphere we now see.
And philosophy itself has a crucial role to play here. So many humanities departments house people who call themselves philosophers but who are no such thing, according to the traditional understanding of that term. Out of politeness or fear of intellectual confrontation, they have been allowed by actual philosophers to get away with it.
The predictable result is thousands upon thousands of former students who sincerely believe that truth is relative, sex is fluid, cis het white men are scum and all the rest of it. We need to wrest the discipline back from these charlatans... (
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