08 Higher Education Reading Group

Ioannidis, J. P. (2005). Why most published research findings are false. PLoS medicine, 2(8), e124.

It felt like a different nomenclature to express basically what Kuhn says with his ideas on paradigm shift. In that there are puzzles, and they built up and then they move from one pardgimatic state to another. In other words, he has used a qualitative nomenclature to express a deeply qualitative point

Interestingly, he doesn’t really define what truth is, other by assertion and contradiction, which is especially interesting because later in the paper he states that truth isn’t really achievable.

Similarly, he mentions that there are other aspects that can supersede why people engage in research, such as wanting promotions or securing prestige within institutional settings, that he categorises under what he labels bias.

So in effect, the whole article is him having discovered, that humans are humans, and will lie and cheat to get their will. It is a sort of disillusionment. All he can propose is to have ‘better’ experiments and to adjust for ‘bias’, which technically is correct, but this will not get to the core of the issue

The core of which is our fallen human nature. Here, the “false” research, that aligns with trends and orthodoxy within a given field, is then not so much an indictment of the scientific progress, but rather a reflection of human nature and collective group behaviour.

He proposes registration as an antidote, but this will not deal with the issue, just hide the issue under another layer of bureaucracy, which is prone to be influences by biases.

What he does get right, is that there are real world consequences to this collective group behaviour, that create a false consciousness, in Marxist terms, or echo chambers in modern parlour.