In the end it's all what we believe. Believe it and you will see it.

There's a rampant confimration bias where scientists are rejecting the null hypothesis in order to find effects that aren't really there.

For non-science types, when you run a science you don't actually test your hypothesis you test the null hypothesis:

Hypothesis: Sugar makes kids hyperactive
Null Hypothesis: Sugar has no effect on children's hyperactivity.

In order to find an effect, you have to "reject the null hypothesis" (that sugar has no effect). Accepting the null hypothesis means you didn't find anything, which isn't going to get you published anywhere.

The use of statistics is also a problem. Uncertainties are not being accurately communicated. When you undergo a contrived statistical exercise in order to shopw the effect you're looking for, you tend to multiply existing uncertainties, until the uncertainty itself is greater than the effect you're looking for. If uncertainties are greater than the effect, you can't reject the null hypothesis, and you're not going to get published.

What we call confirmation bias in science.

That's actually the exact opposite of Science. Belief does not enter into it. That's the trap many fall into, they can't believe it so it's not real.

Data is the key to good science. Reproducible results that confirm or deny a conclusion. Anyone can drop a feather and a rock off the leaning tower of Pisa and anyone can see and measure the results. If the feather hits the ground first one time, it tells us much more than the rock hitting first one million times.

Yes, and I think it's rampant. Especially where money is involved. And as was pointed out, often it's just pure cheating.

Ultimately tho, I still think there is no truth "out there." I think we have deep biases built in, limits to what we can sense and comprehend. Different topic tho, I guess.

You're a dick.

Even logical deduction is tutrtles all the way down. Plus we are bouncing up against the limits of truth with Hesienberg's UNcertainty Prinnciple, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and some of the stranger aspects of quantum mechanics. it's a fascinating field and I'll fill pages if we ever get a topci going on that.

It used to be that Universities did research for research's sake alone. Now, they make the number of published articles as a measure for the value of a researcher.

Professor Higgs only published 5 papers in his career, and won a Nobel Prize. He was recently quoted as saying that because of this new 'Publish! Publish! Publish!' mentality, he'd never have kept his job in today's work environment.

But the point this guy I think is making is that science belongs to everyone, not just people who subscribe to a certain journal; so publish it where it's accessible to everyone freely.

I have just such an example I read lately!

Science has been searching for 'dark matter' for some time, with disappointing results. One bright man thought of a new way of detecting a particle know as a axion, a particle thought to have a mass so small it's the fraction of an Electron and it doesn't readily interact with other particles so it's difficult to detect.

This guy thought to use a microscopic detector called a "Pi Josephson junction" which should give off little bits of electricity whenever an Axion passes through it (interacting with neutrons slightly), which should happen fairly often. Much more often than the WIMPs that the dark matter experiments deep underground with billions of litres of water were designed to find.

Turns out, an experiment back in 2004 found exactly the electrical blips they were expecting to come from Axions, but the experimenters at the time dismissed the unknown blips as errors in the measurement equipment. The number of Axions, despite them being very light, could make up the mass we expect to find for 'dark matter' in the universe.