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Information about Bad Science

This article is about unreliable scientific findings. For the newspaper column, see Ben Goldacre.


"Bad science" usually refers either to substandard scientific methods or to findings that have been arrived at by such methods. Occasionally what is meant by "bad science" is something equivalent to pseudoscience or junk science. The term is also sometimes applied ironically to research that, even if conducted in a scientific way, appears to have been inspired by a false assumption or a trivial question and concerns matters that look humorous when depicted as science.

Good and bad

Starting just with the restricted sense of science as a process for accumulating knowledge, good science and bad science can be objectively measured in terms of efficiency of knowledge acquisition. Upon expanding consideration to technological and social changes made possible by science, science can be subjectively measured in terms of consequences for people that are either good or bad.

In many cases there is considerable debate about what constitutes good and bad science, particularly if some aspect of science benefits some people while harming others.

Good science

"Good science" is generally characterized by careful observations, often aided by tools and devices that extend the powers of the human senses.

Much scientific investigation is organized by processes that can be used for testing hypotheses. Many scientific efforts utilize carefully orchestrated experiments that are designed to carefully expose a limited number of particular phenomena to close observation. "Good science" is characterized by objectivity. Individual observers must give fair and unbiased reports of observed phenomena.

Within many scientific disciplines objectivity must also have a social dimension through which many independent observers can all make and reproduce the same observations. In experimental sciences, experiments must usually be shown to be reproducible before the scientific community accepts the results. Even then skepticism is still exercised because people can be misled in their belief that a particular observation is telling us a particular fact about the world.

A unifying feature of good science is consilience between the various scientific sub-disciplines. Consilience is achieved when it is possible to understand chemistry through physics and biology through chemistry and psychology through biology. It is efficient for scientific investigation to divide into specialized sub-disciplines, but these divisions are just for human convenience; scientific knowledge should be a unified whole that reflects the fundamental unity of the physical universe.

Many scientific efforts are oriented around reductionism, the attempt to explain complex phenomena in terms of the interacting components of the system. "Good science" also strives to maintain certain ethical standards. As a human endeavor, science must be integrated into human society and measured against existing ethical standards. If "good science" is done with care, it is open to critical evaluation, is honest, unbiased and deals with the undesirable deleterious consequences that arise out of scientific knowledge.

Versions of bad science

Bad Science often lacks objectivity and involves misapplications of the tools of science to start with a preconceived belief and filter one's observations so as to try to support that belief. Scientists should be self-critical and try to disprove their hypotheses by all available means.

Bad science is often biased either by unrecognized preconceptions or by unreported personal affiliations and agendas. As mentioned above, good science often involves reductionism, but reductionism can fail.

Since good science strives to provide the simplest possible explanations of phenomena (Occam's razor), greedy reductionism is a common feature of bad science. Greedy reductionism is a derogatory label applied to failed efforts in reductionism where it is incorrectly claimed that a simple set of processes can account for or explain some other complex process or set of phenomena.

At the other extreme, bad science can result when it is assumed that the methods of reductionistic analysis will fail to explain certain phenomena, so attempts at reductionism and consilience are not even attempted.

Common forms of bad science

Pseudoscience: Pseudoscience generally adopts the guise of science, but fails to utilise one or more of the required elements of good science such as skepticism. For example, creation science starts with a conclusion drawn from divine revelation and interprets data with the assumption that divine revelation cannot be wrong. The process may or may not be apparent to the casual observer in any particular account. Bad science is often unethical and offensive to widely accepted social standards that are expected to apply to all human conduct.

Cargo cult science: The term was coined by Richard Feynman to describe "scientific research" that seems to rigorously follow the forms of good science while ignoring or abusing the underlying principles.

Scientific misconduct: This term encompasses fabrication (the deliberate use of false data) and plagiarism (the unattributed use of another researcher's data.)

Bad science judgments

Science can also be judged to be bad when it results in deleterious consequences. Some philosophers of science insist that science and scientists must take direct responsibility for regulating the search for knowledge and its practical applications. Science is widely judged to be bad when it is practiced and applied for selfish gain and without correction of deleterious side-effects.

Common misconceptions

See also: List of scientific misconceptions

There are many common misconceptions about how the world works that persist (in text books, on web sites, etc.) long after they have been proven false. These include:
  • Theory of lift.[1]
  • Gyroscopic effect of wheels on bicycle and motorcycle balance.[2][3][4]
  • Coriolis effect on sink, tube, and even toilet draining.[5]
  • The reason clouds form when air cools.[6]

References

1. ^ Bernoulli and Newton. Retrieved on 2006-12-20.
2. ^ Whitt, Frank R.; David G. Wilson (1982). Bicycling Science, Second edition, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 198–233. ISBN 0-262-23111-5. 
3. ^ Klein, Richard E.; et al. Bicycle Science. Retrieved on 2006-08-04.
4. ^ Jones, David E. H. (1970). "The stability of the bicycle" (PDF). Physics Today 23 (4): 34–40. Retrieved on 2006-08-04. 
5. ^ Fraser, Alister B.. Bad Coriolis. Retrieved on 2006-12-20.
6. ^ Fraser, Alister B.. Bad Clouds. Retrieved on 2006-12-20.

See also

External links

Ben Goldacre is a British doctor and journalist, and the author of the The Guardian newspaper's weekly Bad Science column.[1] He describes himself as "a junior doctor in London and a shameless geek".[2] His mother is Noosha Fox.
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Pseudoscience is any body of knowledge, methodology, belief, or practice that claims to be scientific or is made to appear scientific, but does not adhere to the basic requirements of the scientific method.
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Junk science is a term used in U.S. political and legal disputes that brands an advocate's claims about scientific data, research, analyses as spurious. The term generally conveys a pejorative connotation that the advocate is driven by political, ideological, financial, and
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Sociocultural evolution(ism) is an umbrella term for theories of cultural evolution and social evolution, describing how cultures and societies have developed over time.
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Observation is an activity of a sapient or sentient living being (e.g. humans), which senses and assimilates the knowledge of a phenomenon in its framework of previous knowledge and ideas.
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Senses are the physiological methods of perception. The senses and their operation, classification, and theory are overlapping topics studied by a variety of fields, most notably neuroscience, cognitive psychology (or cognitive science), and philosophy of perception.
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A hypothesis (from Greek ὑπόθεσις) consists either of a suggested explanation for a phenomenon or of a reasoned proposal suggesting a possible correlation between multiple phenomena.
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In the scientific method, an experiment (Latin: ex- periri, "of (or from) trying") is a set of observations performed in the context of solving a particular problem or question, to support or falsify a hypothesis or research concerning phenomena.
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Objectivity in science is the property of scientific measurement that can be tested independent from the individual scientist (the subject) who proposes them. It is intimately related to the aim of verifiability and reproducibility.
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bias is a prejudice in a general or specific sense, usually in the sense for having a preference to one particular point of view or ideological perspective. However, one is generally only said to be biased
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For other uses, see Phenomena (disambiguation).
A phenomenon (Greek: φαινόμενoν, pl. phenomena φαινόμενα) is any occurrence that is observable.
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In the scientific method, an experiment (Latin: ex- periri, "of (or from) trying") is a set of observations performed in the context of solving a particular problem or question, to support or falsify a hypothesis or research concerning phenomena.
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skepticism or scepticism (Greek: skeptomai, to look about, to consider; see also spelling differences) refers to
  1. an attitude of doubt or a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular object,

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Consilience, or the unity of knowledge (literally a "jumping together" of knowledge), has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos, inherently comprehensible by logical process, a vision at odds with mystical views in many cultures
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Physics is the science of matter[1] and its motion[2][3], as well as space and time[4][5] —the science that deals with concepts such as force, energy, mass, and charge.
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Biology (from Greek: βίος, bio, "life"; and λόγος, logos, "knowledge"), also referred to as the biological sciences, is the scientific study of life.
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Psychology (from Greek: Literally "talk about the soul" (from logos)) is both an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of mental processes and behavior.
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reductionism is a theory that asserts that the nature of complex things is reduced to the nature of sums of simpler or more fundamental things. This can be said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings.
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Ethics (via Latin ethica from the Ancient Greek ἠθική [φιλοσοφία]
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Objectivity in science is the property of scientific measurement that can be tested independent from the individual scientist (the subject) who proposes them. It is intimately related to the aim of verifiability and reproducibility.
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bias is a prejudice in a general or specific sense, usually in the sense for having a preference to one particular point of view or ideological perspective. However, one is generally only said to be biased
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Greedy reductionism is a term coined by Daniel Dennett, in the book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, to distinguish between what he considers acceptable and erroneous forms of reductionism.
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Pseudoscience is any body of knowledge, methodology, belief, or practice that claims to be scientific or is made to appear scientific, but does not adhere to the basic requirements of the scientific method.
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Creation science is the attempt to find scientific evidence that would corroborate a literal interpretation of the Biblical account of creation. Some variants of creation science draw upon other religious texts.
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Cargo cult science is a term used by Richard Feynman in his 1974 Caltech commencement address to describe work that has the semblance of being scientific, but is missing "a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty".
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Richard Phillips Feynman

Richard Feynman, dust jacket photo for
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Born May 11 1918(1918--
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Scientific misconduct is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in professional scientific research. Examples of scientific misconduct include:

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Philosophy of science is the study of assumptions, foundations, and implications of science. The philosophy of science may be divided into two areas: Epistemology of science and metaphysics of science.
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