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"string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard" (www.youtube.com)

submitted 1 year ago by interolivary@beehaw.org to c/science@beehaw.org

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Dr. Angela Collier plays the Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and talks at length about what went wrong with string theory, and how that affected science communication.

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[-] FaceDeer@kbin.social 36 points 1 year ago

I think she leaned a bit too heavily onto the notion that string theorists, as a whole, were lying. I think more likely they genuinely thought they were on to something. They may have been wrong but they didn't think they were wrong. A lie is deliberate misinformation, not simply being mistaken.

[-] niktemadur@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

Back in the late-80s or early-90s, I remember OMNI Magazine ran an interview with a researcher of veracity in science publications as a topic, don't remember anything but a whopper of a quote in which he said that around a third of science papers fudge the numbers, even if just a little bit, to make them fit the hypotheses.

[-] hglman@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

Which is why the funding mechanism of science is so profoundly unscientific. Funding must be based on the quality of the experimental process, not positive results.

[-] jarfil@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I'd go further, and say that most scientific papers are profoundly unscientific: without the data and analysis process they base their claims on, most papers are no different than just saying "believe me, I'm a scientist".

There are some honorable exceptions, of papers which publish accompanying data and the tools they used to process it, but the vast majority don't.

The fact that negative results don't get published at all, is just disrespecting the word "science". One of its basic premises is that of falsability, so proving a theory wrong, is just as valuable as proving a different one right.