sortiwa
BY SOFO ARCHON
This is the transcript of a spontaneous talk.
A lot of people worship science. They blindly trust and follow it, as if it is God. But the reality is that science is corrupted.
When I speak of “science,” I refer to science as an institution. Because science as a method is great. Despite its flaws, it’s an amazing, systematic way of discovering truth through observation, experimentation, and reasoning. But science as an institution — and when I say “institution,” I mean the scientific organizations, the funding bodies, the research journals, even the scientists themselves — is very, very corrupted.
There are many ways science is being corrupted. One of them is through corporate influence. A lot of corporations invest tremendous amounts of money into hiring scientists to conduct fake research in order to show the world how good their products are. They pay scientists to conduct research through fraudulent tactics — through using what is called p-hacking, for example, which is a way of manipulating the analysis of a study in order to reach the results that they want.
Another tactic that they use is selective publishing. So they might do several studies on a subject, and they might only publish those studies that align with their interests.
Examples of scientific corruption through corporate influence include the tobacco industry, which for decades hired scientists to downplay the risks of cigarette smoking, which did immense harm because people, being misinformed about cigarette smoking, died by the millions smoking cigarettes while thinking that they are not doing any harm to them. Another example includes pharmaceutical companies, which also have conducted a lot of fake research in order to exaggerate the benefits of the products that they are selling.
Yet another way that science is being corrupted is through what is called publication bias. Most of the science that we know about was first published in peer-reviewed journals. But those journals are a very big industry — an industry worth tens of billions of dollars worldwide. And in order for those working for that industry to make a lot of money, they have to find ways to make their journals very appealing to the public. And one of the ways they do so is by only publishing studies that find positive results, thus skewing our understanding of the scientific findings.
Science is also being corrupted is through what in academic circles call publish or perish. People working for academic or research institutions are feeling coerced to publish as many research papers as they can every year. Usually the minimum amount of them is two or three. So by doing that, they sacrifice the quality of their research. And a lot of them have been caught conducting fraudulent research in order to discover findings that can help them advance their career.
Still another problem in science is peer-review bias. A lot of the scientists that review the scientific papers that will or will not be published in scientific journals have their own vested interests. They are often so attached to their views because their career depends on those views. So when they see scientific studies that challenge their views and hence threaten their careers, they don’t approve those studies.
And then you have governments, which fund a lot of the studies — and governments have their own political agendas, so they can control a lot of the research that is being done and how the findings of that research is being interpreted and utilized. And, of course, let’s not forget that governments are being influenced by corporations too. A lot of people in politics are being supported by the money given to them by corporations, so they often do not present us the truth about scientific findings that might go against those corporations. Or they might reveal “truth” that is actually fake.
So, don’t blindly trust science. Now, I’m not saying that you should not trust science at all. I’m saying, “Don’t trust it blindly.” Rather, try to understand it, to understand what the scientific method is, and to try to critically evaluate the scientific papers yourself.
Many of us have been made to believe that we cannot read the scientific papers ourselves. We see scientists as the high priests of society. And we are just irrelevant, foolish, ignorant peasants who cannot read the science ourselves. And we just need to bow down to scientists and blindly accept what they’re telling us. But the truth is, unless a study is on a very complicated and complex subject, it is quite easy to read a research paper if one invests some time in learning how to do so.
The other thing that we need to do is to see if a research paper has any conflicts of interest. If a research paper, for example, is about the benefits of dairy, and that research paper is funded by the dairy industry, then we need to be highly suspicious of such research.
Lastly, it is important to not trust the media. The media misrepresents and oversimplifies scientific research. So much so that sometimes journalists report research findings that are actually the exact opposite of what a scientific study found.
Now, collectively, as a society, there are also things that we need to do to protect science from corruption. One of them is to educate the youth about the scientific method and how one can critically think about it.
We can also advocate for open access and transparent peer-reviewed journals. Nowadays, most journals are behind the payroll, and many of them are not so transparent when it comes to the data and the design and the analysis used in many of the scientific papers contained in them. So if an open access platform was created where everyone could submit a research paper and everyone could have access to it, scientists could read those papers, evaluate them and openly critique them. This way, so many flawed and fraudulent research papers could be easily detected and brought onto light.
Another thing worth advocating for is the pre-registration of studies where scientists explicitly mention how the data of their studies is going to be used before their studies have even started, so that they cannot later on manipulate their data to come to the results that they want.
It’s also important that we encourage the replication of studies. Nowadays, in psychology, social scientists and medicine, about half of the studies that have been published cannot be replicated, which shows that half of the studies might be flawed or fraudulent.
These are only a few ways that we could improve science, but I think that the most important one is by removing money from science. Like, a lot of people say that money needs to be removed from politics or from journalism, in the same way money needs to be removed from science. But of course, to do that, our entire economic system needs to change from its very foundations, because in this system, money rules the world. Money controls pretty much everything, including science.
A lot of the misconduct that is being done by scientists is profit-driven. Scientists conduct fraudulent research because of money, because they want to advance their careers. Corporations are corrupting science because of money — to sell their products. Science is very profit-oriented, very competitive. And unless people stop competing for money, unless people start to work together, to collaborate, to be transparent, to share their findings, for the common good, for the benefit of humanity, science will always remain to one degree or another corrupted. Yes, we can manage science, we can control how corrupted it is, but only up to a certain point. Beyond that, money always finds a way to corrupt pretty much everything.
So again, don’t blindly trust science. Read it, study it, but always critically analyze and evaluate it. And if you want to see science as an institution, improve, do what you can to help deal with the systemic corruption of it.
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