raboonthebaboon wrote:
validation of evidence is incredibly tricky, you can't honestly say you know everything about the context and motives of the experiments/papers you have listed, who sponsored them, why, etc etc etc
i'm trying to live my life by the statement "i don't believe in anything"
you can't guarantee me anything either
though i'd never actually thought about the clear aerosols i'll admit, though that doesn't mean anything really
you just can't be sure
anyways, i'm sure we'll all know the truth soon enough
I wasn't going to do too much talking here, but whenever people post shit like this it gets my goat.
Anyone who has done any research can tell you that it's ridiculously hard to get published, especially in a reputable journal such as PNAS, Nature, JI, NEJM, etc.
First, you think of a problem/phenomenon, and postulate an explanation. My 2 year old nephew can get this part, however, this is where conspiracy theorists stop.
For the rest of the scientific world, we then do experiments. Some of which are easy, some of which are stupidly hard (crossing mice to get a knockout mouse can take years... I can make a youtube video in 30 minutes...). Following this, we analyze the data. Again, this can either take months (especially if the experiment didn't go as you expected) or hours.
Then we sit at our desks and write up what we found. Up until this point, yes, personal bias can get in the way.
However, once everything gets written up it gets checked by your principal investigator (PI). Then, it gets sent to a journal (let's say Nature, just for fun). They then send it to many different peers who have similar degrees and conduct similar research. Those peers (whom you have no contact with, as the lab proposing the paper) then spend days looking over the paper, trying to find illogical problems, personal bias, etc. Usually they'll find something wrong and send it back. You make revisions, then send it back to the journal. Then they peer review it once again.
Now if you believe that all of the peer reviewers involved in this process have the same personal bias, given that they have no direct contact with the lab proposing the paper, I can see how you believe that the government has a master plan to give us all Alzheimer's through contrails.
*Just as a caveat to that, it doesn't necessarily mean that a paper is worth it's weight in gold just because it got published. One example that comes to mind is Medawar's paper in 1948. In his paper he had an n=5, of which 2 died. He then did the statistics on the 3 surviving mice. It passed, probably because it was 1948 at the time, but there's no way those statistics hold any water if you consider all 5 mice. And 5 is a pretty piss poor number to start with anyways. In the end he got a Nobel prize for it, but I still think his paper was a piss poor piece of research.
** So I guess the moral of the story is: If it's published then we can assume that the peer reviewers did their job, theres no reason not too. Just because it's published and the abstract looks good, doesn't mean the research actually has any relevance.
/end rant
