This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 5th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

There is a problem in scientific publications.

According to Stuart Ritchie, author of the book Science Fictions there are at least

four fraud bias negligence and hype we talked about how science publishing has gone wrong

and what scientists themselves might be able to do about it.

This ought to be a lot simpler, that is you have an idea, a hypothesis, you test it with experimentation, you scrupulously detail your results, and then you publish

them, and then other scientists say, hey, I should try to mimic what this guy did

and discover whether or not this is a real result.

So why doesn't it seem to happen that way or what are the big problems in scientific research that you've identified?

Well, I talk about four classes of problems and I guess we can we can talk about them

whichever ones you're most interested in but I talk about fraud and bias and

negligence and hype and I think all of these four problems come in at some stage in the scientific

publication process to distort the results and make it so that the

scientific literature that we read when we see it published in the journals and so on is very different from what actually went on when the scientists were doing their work.

It's like looking through the historical record and you know

historians are aware that when they look at the historical record it's full of

biases and you know you have certain people writing against the you know the

current rulers or for the current rulers or whatever

it is distorting things but the scientific literature is not meant to be like

that the scientific literature is meant to be you know this kind of disinterested

record of what occurred and it really isn't and all of these problems kind of come in at some stage along the way.

...