One of the (many) things that really puts me off about having children is how little consensus exists on anything related to children and child-bearing: can you let your baby cry? What is okay to feed a baby / child? Is a primary/high school necessary or harmful? Is home-schooling any better? Or one of the many alternative schools?
The problem exists today in pretty much every field of life, but what makes it worse when it comes to children is that a parent will be naturally terrified of the idea of causing permanent damage, and messing their children up for life. This also provides fertile ground for fear-mongering, which social media excels in.
Thankfully there are people who have actually dug into such topics and have produced an overview of opinions and the state of scientific consensus: Sleep Training by The Pudding is one of such meta-meta-analysis. I heavily recommend reading it even if you do not have children (or want to have any), because it highlights something important about the world that we live in.
First, they have looked at news sites and social media (TikTok and Reddit mainly) and gathered opinions: who thought that sleep training (whereby you do not console the baby when it is crying while it should be sleeping) is helpful or harmful? The opinions were fairly evenly divided, with slightly more in favor than against.
Next they looked at the relevant scientific research and publications, especially the ones cited often in discussions. Here they have found that no scientific paper has ever found any evidence of sleep training being harmful. Scientific papers cited by people claiming that sleep training causes permanent brain damage have routinely cited a paper that states no such thing, and talks about persistent, long-term abuse. The author of said paper even stated that the paper is not against sleep training, and any who claim that it is are abusing the science and are engaging in fear-mongering. This has not stopped roughly half the internet from doing so.
I often look at this situation in the world and despair: how can you ever possibly know something when on basically every topic there are millions of opinions claiming wildly different things? A part of the blame is certainly on social media and the so-called influencers there, but I think an equal part of the blame rests on the scientific community: science is simply not accessible, because academia and academic research is not accessible. One issue is that a lot of peer-reviewed papers are actually nonsense to one degree or another: perhaps they are just cheating with the statistics, or maybe they are straight up making things up. The recent [replication crisis of psychology](Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Running Out of Excuses) is an excellent example:
Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.
In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.
One by one, researchers have tried to repeat the classic experiments behind these well-known effects—and failed. And whenever psychologists undertake large projects, like Many Labs 2, in which they replicate past experiments en masse, they typically succeed, on average, half of the time.
Clearly, academia is broken:
In STEM, the crowd-pleasing goods are typically delivered via excessive exaggeration of the revolutionary landmark significance of each and every latest research paper in a valiant attempt to help capture the imagination of a lay public raised to expect electrifying science fiction. In the social sciences, the ever-metastasizing replicability crisis is always hiding behind the seductive talking points and press releases, while in the humanities the discourse is often so jargon-laden and deep in the weeds that even specialists’ eyes glaze over. If nobody’s actually bothering to double check the details, why wouldn’t ambitious students, faculty, and administrators quietly cut corners and fudge as necessary to snatch up the bigger money and most coveted opportunities for professional advancement, delivering what wider audiences want to hear?
The academic world, often glorified as a source of knowledge creation and innovation, is mired in crisis. Behind the lofty walls of universities and research institutions hide stories of corruption, unethical practices, and a culture tainted by the motto “Publish or Perish.”
But what are the hidden facets of this dark scenario? Let’s first look at the dilemma of data manipulation and research forgery. Researchers, under extreme pressure to secure their careers through publications, sometimes tread the perilous path of data manipulation. For example, the widely reported case of scientific misconduct involving South Korean researcher Hwang Woo-Suk, who published falsified data in his groundbreaking stem cell research work, comes to mind (Cyranoski, D., 2006).
No wonder that so many are losing faith in science and scientists! Academia is losing relevance in society:
A January 2015 Pew Research Center study found an alarming chasm between the views of scientists and the views of the public. Here is just a sampling:
87 percent of scientists accept that natural selection plays a role in evolution, 32 percent of the public agree; 88 percent of scientists think that genetically modified foods are safe to eat, 37 percent of the public agree; 87 percent of scientists think that climate change is mostly due to human activity, only 50 percent of the public agree.
This is a cause for concern. In our increasingly technological world, issues like nanotechnology, stem cell research, nuclear power, climate change, vaccines and autism, genetically modified organisms, gun control, health care and endocrine disruption require thoughtful and informed debate. But instead, these and other issues have often been caught up in the so-called culture wars.
There are numerous factors that explain this current state of affairs, but one is the extent to which the scientific community has been unable or unwilling to explain the state and gravity of scientific findings.
I am not advocating for banning social media (even if such a thing would be possible), even though sometimes I do feel like it is doing more harm than good. However, academia and scientific research as it exists today is a threat to societies and to human knowledge and progress. It must be fixed. I am really grateful that publications like The Pudding exist at least.