Everything Is Bullshit: Study
• “A major investigation into scores of claims made in psychology research journals has delivered a bleak verdict on the state of the science. An international team of experts repeated 100 experiments published in top psychology journals and found that they could reproduce only 36% of original findings. The study, which saw 270 scientists repeat experiments on five continents, was launched by psychologists in the US in response to rising concerns over the reliability of psychology research,” the Guardian reports.
• “The vetted studies were considered part of the core knowledge by which scientists understand the dynamics of personality, relationships, learning and memory. Therapists and educators rely on such findings to help guide decisions, and the fact that so many of the studies were called into question could sow doubt in the scientific underpinnings of their work,” notes the New York Times.
• “It’s almost like nothing is real and even the things you once thought were true turn out to be just another empty promise, like love, like life itself. The only thing about which we can be certain in science — in anything, really — is that we are all a collection of atoms spinning about without real purpose and we are each accorded our little amount of time on this earth and then we return to the void whence we came having done little, meant less and, in the scheme of things, been negative space. Everything is black and the black creeps back in no matter what you do to convince yourself there’s light there. These things that seem so important to you are worthless. There’s no hope. It’s a short ride in a fast machine through a dark empty valley and the speed of the trip makes us think we’re seeing things outside but really we’re rolling past nothing, coming from nothing, on the way back to nothing. I’ve wasted my life, but then all lives are wasted,” remarks an observer.
• “[Study leader Brian] Nosek believes that other scientific fields are likely to have much in common with psychology. One analysis found that only 6 of 53 high-profile papers in cancer biology could be reproduced and a related reproducibility project in cancer biology is currently under way. The incentives to find results worthy of high-profile publications are very strong in all fields, and can spur people to lose objectivity. ‘If this occurs on a broad scale, then the published literature may be more beautiful than reality,’” Nature declares.