How Scientists Handle High Stakes Errors

Impressive. This is what I love about the culture of science. It is trustworthy.

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Rasmus Nielsen is a fantastically impressive (and productive!) scientist.

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Let’s not get carried away. Sometimes it’s trustworthy, sometimes it isn’t.

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Like @glipsnort said, this is a bit overboard. What I love about science is that it has accountability baked into it. Best of all, it isn’t overly bureaucratic. Instead, it is the working scientists themselves who check each other’s work. Scientists are still human, so there will be political backstabbing and cover-ups, but they are thankfully much less common in science than in other human institutions.

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Well, that’s what I mean. I’m not sure what is overboard :).

Of course mistakes are made, and science can be wrong. Of course there are stubborn people who won’t admit when they are wrong. As a whole, the scientific culture is to have a very high value on integrity, including placing systems in place to promote integrity.

“Is trustworthy” puts more confidence in science than I am comfortable with, but that’s just nitpicking over arbitrary and subjective semantics.

I can completely agree with that.

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