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liberterrorism t1_jdwtzsj wrote

Isn’t an important part of science to be skeptical of new findings? One of the metrics the article uses is attitudes that scientists are corruptible, as if we should deny that bias can have a huge affect on research. Research that is funded by billionaire think tanks and corporations should be closely scrutinized, they aren’t paying these scientists for results that hurt their bottom line.

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Darwins_Dog t1_jdxxmuh wrote

Most of the time I see accusations of corruption here, it's completely baseless. Affiliations and funding are public and have to be reported in the publication. Big Whoever is not buying out associate professors at state schools to publish in low impact journals.

Being skeptical means reading the article and evaluating it's merits. People seem to think it means rejecting everything by default, then looking for reasons to justify the assumption.

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Sparkysparkysparks t1_jdzc1eq wrote

Yeah - throwing out allegations of corruption should be done very cautiously. Yet you often see people on this sub accusing scientists of corruption, sadly without even reading and understanding the study.

And I strongly doubt many people who have accused the scientists of corruption have contacted the editors because deep down they know their accusations are spurious. I can only imagine how these authors feel when reading this sub....

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hellomondays t1_je0jmni wrote

The problem is that most comments are skeptical of the wrong things, like critiquing assumed structural problems with how a research study is designed even though their assumptions aren't true or are already discussed in the article linked. A lot of criticism comes down to "I don't like what I believe is the conclusion of this study, so I will find some sort of technicality to discredit it". All said with no understanding of what the research question in the study is, the methodology used, or what limitations the researchers have already pointed out. That's not good critique and it's definitely not useful. It's freshmen intro to research methods level discourse

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