Look Who it Was Random video

Dirty Science: When, Why, and How Scientists Get It Wrong

550 views · Published 23 September 2015 · 3:38 · Indexed 23 September 2026

Channel: ScIQ · 2015 · Science & Technology

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Science is not perfect - we've managed to get a lot of stuff wrong! It turns out, breakfast is not the most important meal of the day! Vaccines don’t cause autism!  People are not more likely to change their opinion of gay marriage based on doorstop conversations, and eating cholesterol-laden food like eggs and bacon is unlikely to affect your health. This last one is interesting, because it undoes 40 years of government warnings about cholesterol consumption.

We know and expect science to be wrong someties – with thousands of studies being pubished every year, it stands to reason that there will be a small margin of error. 

But this is not a small problem. Since 2001 the the annual rate of retractions by academic journals increase by more than 10-fold.  Of the 2,047 retractions of biomedical and life-sciences articles 21 % were retracted because of an error. But 67.4 % resulted from misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43.4 percent) and plagiarism (9.8 percent).
This is a real problem!

Even worse, a 2009 meta-analysis found as many as 1 in 3 scientists confessed “a variety of  questionable research practices including ‘dismissing data points based on a gut feeling,’ and ‘changing the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressures from a funding source’ . 

The question is – science is a field that prides itself on being right – that has processes in place to make sure that new studies are advancing knowledge. 
HOW COULD SCIENCE GET IT SO WRONG?

Science claims to be impartial. But it's actually not. Between publication bias, pressure from funding sources, and an addiction to narrative, science shouldn't fool itself into thinking it's purely objective. 


This video is presented by Jayde Lovell, produced and edited by Yohana Yoshe, at Youtube Space NYC. 
Thanks to Jimmie Hammel for the title suggestion!

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