Science Is Not Broken?

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I learned that Science is filled with human values, and it matters to me because it means that Science is not broken. No, science is not broken. People are. Following one of my weird rational lines, I recognize how science and society share a relationship between transmitted values and the results we expect from science. The majority of psychology and biomedical researches cannot be replicated because their results are not true at all, P-values are being played as a puzzle, and scientists are just accommodated, working in appearances and developing money. Well, I have never been someone to be considered pessimist about stuff; at least not before I started taking these classes. Right after the last section and the research I did for my last …show more content…

The first time I read it I had my mind filled with that pessimism I mentioned before and my focus was different. However, after I turned on my questioning spirit, I thought I could use it as a source to find the answer I was looking for, and then I decided to read this text a second time. And I was not disappointed. Now, it is also important to mention that at this point I had already read the reading for November 5, “Science Isn’t Broken,” which, despite the optimistic title, is charged with current problems faced in science and, with no doubt, it might have influenced a great part of my mood towards science. However, combined, these two readings showed me something different. Science is full of human values, and it could not exist in another way. This is not exactly something bad, since sharing the truth would be a lot harder without honesty. In the other hand, when values are distorted - e.g. when evolutionists showed the scientifically proved superiority of white people above black people, or when scientists may have created scientific backgrounds for lunatics with eugenic theories -, values may produce bad influence over science. “Can we solve the problem with manipulated results in science if we stop using p-values?” The answer, of course, is no. P-values are not the problem; the problem is how they are being used. All those problems cited in “Science isn’t broken” are generated by human factors: the values our actual societies reflect in

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