"Another meta review, meanwhile, looked at the 49 most-cited clinical research studies published between 1990 and 2003. Most of these were the culmination of years of careful work. Nevertheless, more than 40 percent of them were later shown to be either totally wrong or significantly incorrect."
If science was really failing us, I don't see how we would have managed to retract those incorrect studies. It feels like the writer had no bigger point than "biomedical research is hard, let's go shopping." It's sensationalist to consider science a failure every time it makes a mistake.
I thought the Hume references were pretty bad, too. If you read what he says, he questions the existence of relations such as "A causes B" and prefers to phrase them as, "In the past, we have observed A-like events are always correlated with B-like events." For practical purposes, that's enough to behave as if causality "really" exists. You just have to avoid mixing up causality with mere correlation, which every good scientist already knows.
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"Another meta review, meanwhile, looked at the 49 most-cited clinical research studies published between 1990 and 2003. Most of these were the culmination of years of careful work. Nevertheless, more than 40 percent of them were later shown to be either totally wrong or significantly incorrect."
If science was really failing us, I don't see how we would have managed to retract those incorrect studies. It feels like the writer had no bigger point than "biomedical research is hard, let's go shopping." It's sensationalist to consider science a failure every time it makes a mistake.
I thought the Hume references were pretty bad, too. If you read what he says, he questions the existence of relations such as "A causes B" and prefers to phrase them as, "In the past, we have observed A-like events are always correlated with B-like events." For practical purposes, that's enough to behave as if causality "really" exists. You just have to avoid mixing up causality with mere correlation, which every good scientist already knows.