{"id":191,"date":"2008-11-28T08:58:36","date_gmt":"2008-11-28T16:58:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=191"},"modified":"2008-12-05T17:24:29","modified_gmt":"2008-12-06T01:24:29","slug":"skepticism-of-science-necessary-needless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/skepticism-of-science-necessary-needless\/","title":{"rendered":"Skepticism of science, necessary &#038; needless"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just a quick addendum to <a href=\"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=185\">my previous post<\/a> where I advised caution about skepticism of science. \u00a0A biomedical scientist recently told me that the journal <em>Virology<\/em>\u00a0had a statistician audit all their papers within a 1 year interval with statistics to see if they were using them correctly. Turned out that 2\/3 of the papers which had statistics made basic elementary errors! \u00a0The moral here is to be very cautious of, and therefore skeptical of, new science, especially sexy new science. \u00a0Junk statistics are especially an issue with medical science because of the incentive structure of these research.\u00a0But when it comes to 100 year old science, skepticism is far less warranted. If you are hearing about it now, chances are that it has made it through the gauntlet of generations of skepticism. \u00a0Almost all scientific hypotheses initially conjectured are wrong, but those which last centuries and are still in circulation are almost certainly of great heuristic utility and predictive power. \u00a0It is important to respect and conserve knowledge which has been accumulated through experience and has proved useful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just a quick addendum to my previous post where I advised caution about skepticism of science. \u00a0A biomedical scientist recently told me that the journal Virology\u00a0had a statistician audit all their papers within a 1 year interval with statistics to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/skepticism-of-science-necessary-needless\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[1132,20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":541,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions\/541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}