Why flawed science should concern us all
https://unherd.com/2018/02/flawed-science-concern-us/
You may not have heard of the most surprising scientific result of all time. It was published in the journal Psychological Science1, and it found that listening to ‘When I’m 64’ by the Beatles literally made you younger by nearly 17 months.
Not “made you feel younger”, or “made your brain younger”: the study demonstrated that listening to certain songs made you younger. And these surprising findings met the standard of “statistical significance” which most scientific journals demand.
In fact, the three authors of the study had set out to deliberately make a point. They wanted to show that, by using routine statistical methods2, you could find apparently solid results that were not merely unlikely but patently absurd.
Science isn’t broken. But it is profoundly flawed. And the wrong results can have serious implications
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And they were doing so to show that science is – well. Not broken. But profoundly flawed. And the wrong results can have serious implications; we build our lives on the results of these tests: from the efficacy of the drugs we take to the policy decisions our governments make.