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The painfully slow process of scientific correction

Pictured: Not as effective as semaglutide. Photo by Rens D on Unsplash

Science is, in many ways, the best method we’ve found to identify truth. Humans are terrible at getting to the bottom of things on their own — we’re biased, and can be easily tricked by our own expectations. As I like to say, it’s easy to be confidently wrong if you only ever consider evidence that supports your prior beliefs. The entire idea of scientific experimentation is to remove that humanity from the equation and, in the grand tradition of Descartes, stick only to what we can empirically prove.

The problem, of course, is that science is still done by people, and people are flawed.

One massive issue in science — and academia more broadly — is the idea of correction. The grand old myth is that science is self-correcting. Horrifically flawed papers don’t make it past peer-review, or they are trashed immediately on release to the scientific community.

The reality is far more depressing. Scientific correction is a painful, years-long, opaque process that barely works at the best of times. I’ve got two recent cases from my weekend job as an expert in scientific error detection that I thought I’d share with you to show just how painful this whole process can be. Both of these papers were hugely…