The Downside Of Scientific Studies
How science has become a new religion while scientific papers are the edicts flaunted by its “archbishops”.
No matter how sophisticated we think we have become, we still bow down to anything outside ourselves so we can always escape the ordeal of self-inquiry and self responsibility.
We have passed the point in which scientific studies are of any true value (unless one is aware) for the following reasons:
Scientific studies are not absolutes: By their very nature they examine things in isolation. In turn, there is no system that can organize them, maintaining a contextual integrity; merging all the pertaining details from each study into a larger whole, to be able to see the bigger picture.
Redundancies: As a result of examining things in isolation, there is oversaturation and redundancy of studies. There were a staggering 200,000 studies made on Covid-19 alone in 2020. The vast, vast, vast majority of them will never be read or ever be put into practice.
Publication metrics have become a sad stand-in for quality in academia: Research literature, when stripped of its jargon, is just as susceptible to repetition, triviality, pandering, and pettiness as other forms of communication. Many papers serve no purpose, advance no agenda, may not be correct, make no sense, and are poorly read. But they are required for promotion.
Flawed and unoriginal publications: Universities judge their research faculty not so much by the quality of their discoveries as by the number of papers they’ve placed in scholarly journals, and how prestigious those journals happen to be. This relentless pressure to pad résumés often leads to flawed or unoriginal publications.
Take a bunch of ambitious people and tell them to get as many papers published as possible, of course the system gets gamed: The results from one experiment get sliced up into a dozen papers, statistics are massaged to produce more interesting results, and conclusions become exaggerated.Suiting one’s opinion to a study: The redundancy and oversaturation of studies brings the advent of science “Tetris”: That is, you can find any study nowadays and match it to your opinion. It doesn't matter which side of the binary your opinion belongs to.
Studies are not important for decision making: When policy makers enact their policies, those studies that counter their decisions, mean nothing. The formation of policies is based primarily on a belief that can be matched with a corresponding study and by that, turn it into a fact. Again, because they can (see point no.5).
According to this study made in the UK, examining over 12 million children, they concluded that their chances in developing severe Covid-19 and dying is %0.005. And yet, the world now begins to roll out vaccination in children 5–11. In other words, who cares for what that study says. It’s all about making a decision first, then “let’s find a study that matches our policy.”
All in all, it shows us that the information that’s given is information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another. It becomes an effort to persuade rather than inform, and the information presented withholds either essential context or what doesn’t “fit.” As a result, the constant repetition of these disconnected half-truths are turned into absolute truths known as “The Science”.
I believe it’s about time we balance the weight and put the value of scientific studies in its rightful place.
Yes, they are important, there is no question about that. But they’re very far from being absolute: a decree descendant from the gods, which is how they are treated - a communion given to the masses by an archbishop (i.e. the modern scientist).
It’s really distasteful to watch how millions of people butt heads with one another, holding onto the “according to this study” rhetoric in order to validate their convictions, but in reality, is just a crutch to compensate for the fact that they can’t go deeper into things and think on their own anymore.
And since each side can use a different study to suit their opinion, what you have is mass homogenization in the way people communicate, because they don’t really say anything profound of their own. They just parrot the same morsels of data in unison.
Everyone takes one another for a ride, since everyone has access to the same type of data from which they can filter to suit their opinion.
This is our consciousness.