120
What have scientists discovered very recently that most people should absolutely know ?
(sh.itjust.works)
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
120 points (97.6% liked)
Ask Lemmy
36678 readers
1273 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Recreating scientific studies that have been funded by large corporations is very difficult and disproving or countering any findings are less common because to apply the scientific method properly is beyond skill and know how, it’s down to money.
getting grants from them is difficult, some professor spends most of thier time writing grants. corporations dont like to hear things like "this study is the result/fault of the industry that is funding the study"
I'm a researcher myself, so I feel like I can weigh in on the "reproducibility crisis". There are several facets to it: One is of course money, but that's not just related to corporately funded research. Good like finding or building an independent lab capable of reproducing the results at CERN. It basically boils down to the fact that some (a lot of) research is insanely expensive to do. This primarily applies to experiments and to some degree to computationally expensive stuff.
Another side is related to interest. Your average researcher is fired up by the thought of being the first person to discover and publish something no one has seen before. It's just not as fun to reproduce something someone else has already done. Even if you do, you're likely to try to improve on it somehow, which means the results may change without directly invalidating the old results. It can be hard work to write a good paper, so if you don't feel your results are novel enough that they're worth the effort (because they're basically just equivalent to previously published values) you might not bother to put in the effort to publish them.
Finally, even without direct reproduction of previously published results, science has a way asymptotically approaching some kind of truth. When I develop and publish something, I'm building on dozens of previously published works. If what they did was plain wrong, then my models would also be liable to fail. I've had cases where we've improved on previously published work, not because we tried to reproduce it, but because we tried to build on their results, and found out that their results didn't make sense. That kind of thing is fairly common, but not reported as a "reproduction study".
There's also review articles that, while they don't do any reproduction themselves, collect and compare a bunch of comparable work. They usually have some conclusions regarding what results appear trustworthy, and what appear to be erroneous.
I've always considered sciences like psychology to be more susceptible to the reproducibility crisis. It seems if someone decides to pursue a career in academia the criteria becomes publishing, and well publish or perish as is goes.
I think some researchers areocing towards things like prerigistering hypothesis and open data+publishing source code for calculations and using that as references in there paper so it can be updated afterwards.
They're have definitely been a lot of papers where results were later determined to be wrong but is still referenced because well you can't update a paper from the 1970s.
This is hearsay from friends I've never done any serious research or published in journals. As a side note I do enjoy reading taking a scroll through https://retractionwatch.com/
Slightly unrelated tirade:
Background in psychology here: Psychology and sociology are also terrifyingly hard fields to pin down. Any one human's behavior can be wildly inconsistent within a given set of parameters, and ppl evolve across time. Cultural context and social expectations come into play at and individual level.
Add in individual sensitivities to authority, understanding of a request, general intelligence, and you get massively varied outcomes that may change as a person grows and changes.
Then, for sociology, pile on group pressures and tendencies, plus group think and group cultural context (I have no background in sociology).
I truly believe psychology and sociology are great fields of study, that yield light on human truths. That said, from a technical scientific perspective, I think it's nigh impossible to measure their value the same way as you would for mathematics or physics. At least, without finding a way to apply those fields to psychology lol
Replicating results is a problem across the board; I’m sure money is a factor but it’s not just the chocolate-sponsored-by-Hershey studies that have replication challenges.