How Can We Possibly Trust Science Anymore?

The scientific community has seriously betrayed the American public, and their reliability and reputation are in jeopardy as a result of the deceptions and fraudulent acts they have perpetrated. After the poor guidance and literal lies that the members of medicine and science have told us over the last few years, we have to ponder: where do we go for the truth?

There are many reasons for scientists taking a deceptive approach to their research, and by exploring them we may learn how to overcome the compulsion to misrepresent results.

Trust in our scientists has become difficult to discover and maintain:

While there is no denying evidence of low trust in scientists among certain social groups, or of critical public appraisals of some aspects of scientists' work, the solution does not consist of blindly seeking to replenish trust. Trust that is misplaced is no better – and, indeed, is often worse – than trust that is absent. Misplaced trust can induce credulity, opening up individuals to believing and/or sharing misleading or erroneous scientific claims. [snip] Yet any route to greater trust needs also to work through scientists' status as social actors, and the public's appraisals of them as such, and not simply as disembodied providers of knowledge and expertise.

So, if our trust in the scientific and medical community has been compromised, it is partly because we want to believe that they are highly ethical, educated people, seeking the truth and wanting to help society. In fact, however, they are vulnerable to the same whims, desires and goals that the rest of society experiences. And we may have to remove them from the pedestals upon which we have placed them:

We hold certain assumptions about science that seem to have validity in the past. That history has encouraged us to believe the research and results. The rules for conducting scientific studies were firm about being honest with us: Science earns trust because it is transparent, self-correcting, and built on collaboration among scientists who rigorously test, challenge, and refine ideas. Mistakes are exposed and corrected through peer review and replication.

But times have changed. And so have the attitudes and beliefs of the scientific community. The rigors identified with science seem to have eroded. Scientists have fallen prey to many of the same attitudes about their work that we regular people may consider about our own, whether they are standards, integrity or outcomes:

At the American Council on Science and Health, Chuck Dinerstein [Director of Medicine] is hardly the first to express concern about the erosion of trustworthy science. But he expresses it well; instead of just hand-wringing, he offers some context: Scientists tend to be the sort of people who want ‘credit and recognition,’ not wealth: Unfortunately, the very same force can push people over ethical cliffs. To win the accolades, one must be first; speed matters. One need look no further than the continuing controversy over who ‘discovered’ CRISPR. In scientific research, when there are dozens of methodological ‘forks in the road,’ the dishonest can make murky results look crystal-clear. [snip] And when the watchdogs are political actors, the incentive shifts again; more to do with keeping results palatable to those who hold the purse strings or public platforms than passing peer review.

Many realize that seeking the truth is the preferred approach to research, and faking results is simply not acceptable. And because the public tends to hold scientists and doctors in high esteem, we are reluctant to doubt them. But again, they are vulnerable to the same aspirations as the rest of society, although they focus on different rewards:

But the scientific world is not powered by curiosity alone: It also runs on a credit system, [Robert] Merton argued in a 2007 essay. The scientists who create new knowledge are rewarded with recognition. Jobs, funding, and sometimes awards and fame, follow. Under the credit system, misconduct starts to make more sense. [snip] The experience also instilled in him [Merton] a cynicism about the incentive structure in science, he says. When a scientist’s worth is measured by their h-index [productivity and impact of a researcher] and grant dollars, that can ‘encourage fraud that might not otherwise occur. Because for some people, I think it’s just out of desperation. Or, for some people, it’s a desire to be the best, but they want to get there too fast, or they don’t care how they get there,’ he says. ‘If you create perverse incentives, you’re going to create perverse behaviors.’

The fraud appears not only in the research itself. The publishing journals have become inundated with fraudulent papers, and the situation has worsened in recent years. The problem has become an international one. A group at Northwestern University conducted a study to determine how widespread the fraud actually was:

The researchers conducted an in-depth examination of scientific misconduct by pairing large-scale analyses of published research with detailed case studies. While discussions of research fraud often center on individual wrongdoing, the Northwestern team identified complex international networks made up of people and organizations that deliberately coordinate efforts to compromise the academic publishing system. The problem is so widespread that the publication of fraudulent science is outpacing the growth rate of legitimate scientific publications. The authors say this trend should alert the scientific community to the urgency of the situation and prompt action before public trust in science is seriously damaged.

The Northwestern researchers are also sounding the alarm with the approaching acceptance of AI:

‘If we’re not prepared to deal with the fraud that’s already occurring, then we’re certainly not prepared to deal with what generative AI can do to scientific literature,’ Richardson said. ‘We have no clue what’s going to end up in the literature, what’s going to be regarded as scientific fact, and what’s going to be used to train future AI models, which then will be used to write more papers.’ ‘This study is probably the most depressing project I’ve been involved with in my entire life,” Amaral said. ‘Since I was a kid, I was excited about science. It’s distressing to see others engage in fraud and in misleading others. But if you believe that science is useful and important for humanity, then you have to fight for it.’

Let’s hope that the scientific and medical communities will take the incursion of fraud seriously, that they reinstate standards and expectations, and that they hold each other accountable for the quality of their work.

Otherwise, we are all at risk.

[originally published in American Thinker]