Anecdotal Evidence

[bennyboy]

Ding ding ding ding ding.  In case you didn't know this, science is -built- on this very statement.  That's what demonstration, replication, and peer review are all about.  Science does not ask for or require -anyone's- belief.  If you think that science is "just what some scientists told me" then you're out there on the deep end.  Realizing this won;t pull you back from the "testimony" song and dance, ofc, you'll just find another way to keep bullshitting us and yourself...because you just can't handle the fact that your silly little beliefs are not the same thing, that they're not even on the same level.

To my understanding, peer review doesn't involve seeing the experiment for ones self.   And if you follow the journal Nature, you may find that there is a growing awareness of a repeatability problem within science. 

Now I think that you have a misunderstanding of the roles of these things in science, we could discuss it, but I'll just wait for you to provide evidence for you claims.

Peer review involves as complete a disclosure as possible about how information was collected: how an experiment was done, and so on.  And a quality scientist will always try to mention what confounding variables might potentially have thrown off the results.

The value of science is very much shown by its failures.  When bad science (for example, scares about power lines, MSG or vaccines) permeates into the mainstream, it's because an uncritical media has picked up the CONCLUSIONS of an experiment, without first attempting to validate the process by which the conclusions were arrived at.  They call it science merely because a scientist has done it, not because the scientist in question has actually shown that he's done good science.

As for Nature, I don't know it, but I would certainly agree that repeatability is a problem is some areas.  You cannot, for example, repeat the smell that original diggers reported upon opening King Tut's tomb or whatever, and must take verbal reports at face value.

And here's the most important thing of all: individual scientists cheat. Groups of scientists, even whole communities, fail in their interpretations sometimes. However, new scientists must always look for holes, test weak points, develop new ideas, or they'll run out of things to do. Compare this to an institution which does NOT encourage criticism-- i.e. religious institution. How often, in Sunday school, are children encouraged to determine whether Jesus walking on water was a miracle or maybe just an illusion or a trick? How often are they encouraged to consider whether early civilizations were qualified to determine that God was real?

Never. Never, ever. These are mentioned, and immediately "remedied" by rote. "If the evil atheists say X, you can easily just respond Y."