Healthy Skepticism

The Rational View podcast with Dr. Al Scott

In this episode I address skepticism, the basis of the scientific process. Science is applied skepticism, and scientific knowledge accumulates through a process of testing hypotheses and following the weight of evidence.

Recently the social sciences have encountered a crisis of reproducibility, one of the cornerstones of the scientific process. Some well known scientific results were found to be irreproducible. A team of independent humanities scholars undertook to reproduce major results to determine the extent of the problem. As a result of this work it was found that roughly half of the major results tested were falsified.

Why should the public trust science if half of the published results in the field of social sciences are found to be false? This podcast introduces a healthy level of skepticism by reviewing the statistics behind the publications, and provides some insights on how the field of science moves forward sometimes slowly, through the cumulative weight of multiple independent studies.

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