Science Fails

Dodie here.
This is the latest article from Brian Dunning's Skeptoid.

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https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4458
Science Fails

Science has let you down time after time, and that's one reason why it gets better and better.
by Kevin Hoover

Ladies and gentlemen, science has failed you.

It has misinformed and misled, built up hope and dashed it, taken your money and offered in return noise, nonsense and deception.

Science, and its demon spawn, technology, have sold you bad medicine, used citizens as experimental subjects, crashed spacecraft, created superbugs, helped supervillains and governments to invade your privacy and steal your wallet and even sent you out in the rain without an umbrella. It has made vile weapons available to bad actors, empowering them to commit horrific destruction on what could be a civilization-engulfing scale.

Scientists have been careless, lazy, mercenary and outright deceptive, plagiarizing papers, rigging experimental results, fudging findings and faking photos, sometimes conspiring to bamboozle peers and the public for profit, or just the personal glory of being first. They've rushed undercooked research into premature announcements, exciting the media with breakthrough revelations which, long after the claims were retracted, left the public with woefully wrongheaded and even dangerous ideas.

All this has helped fuel popular doubt about science and driven many to more comforting, consistent but not necessarily evidence-based belief systems.

The list of science fails is long and disturbing, and ever-growing. It stretches back to the earliest days of scientific inquiry and continues right up to the present day.

Ancient Sumerian cosmology held that the Earth was a flat disc, with other celestial bodies embedded in a solid, sky-dome firmament. That explanation, repeated across many cultures, with variations, served as scientific conventional wisdom for millennia.

Philosopher-mathematician Pythagoras of Samos is first known to have taught that Earth was round, but he mixed his science with various supernatural assumptions - another problem which scrambles science and spirituality even now with, for example, Intelligent Design.

Through the centuries, the sciences have lurched along at the pleasure or pain of the powers-that-be, balancing their quest for knowledge with service to patrons who hold the purse strings. Science usually has to justify its existence as a sort of economic jukebox in times of peace, dispensing monetizable technology on demand, and in all seasons, it is expected to supply the military with ever-more effective tools. This unseemly alliance has further fostered distrust of science.

As soon as curious people started mixing things together and standing back, new discoveries came about that found wide application, peaceful and otherwise. Metal alloys allowed fabrication of spears, swords and shields, while gunpowder gave way to shells, missiles, bio-weapons, nukes and space warfare. Thanks, science.

Leonardo da Vinci, arguably history's most astounding all-around genius, also served the military-industrial complex, designing a tank, a machine gun, a giant crossbow and even a robotic soldier. Some of his inventions functioned as intended, others needed more work.

da Vinci's wide-ranging discoveries set much of modern science in motion, helping it transform civilization. But one thing that hasn't changed in our increasingly science-dependent society is scientists' perpetual propensity for foolishness and failure.

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