alt Hacker NewsIt's strange to me that in places full of smart people, it seems to be well understood that this happens and there are lots of anecdotes relating to it; yet the same people will be confused that their political adversaries don't trust "the science" on one issue or another.
Maybe it's the scientists they don't trust?
Replies
I think it's difficult to relay to the public that a lot of this noise in "scientific publications" is not the same category as real research by reputable institutions. Yes, in certain cases the line can be blurry, fraudsters are sometimes caught in big-name institutions, maybe more in some fields than others, but serious researchers of the field know very well which publication venues and research groups are the real deal and what is bullshit. Overwhelmingly, these fraud papers and nonsense LLM-generated fake stuff are not published in serious journals or conferences.
It's a bit like how can we trust online shopping if I get all these emails trying to sell me aphrodisiac pills?
That’s the beautiful thing about science: You do not have to (and should not) trust any individual. And even if you don’t trust “the consensus” of “the scientific community”, you can empirically verify yourself.