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Interests, Bias, and Consensus in Science and Regulation
Scientists are human. As such, they are prone to bias based on political and economic interests. While conflicts of interest are usually associated with private funding, research funded by public sources is also subject to special interests and therefore prone to bias. Such bias may lead to consensu...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
SAGE Publications
2019
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6557026/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31217756 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1559325819853669 |
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author | Socol, Yehoshua Shaki, Yair Y. Yanovskiy, Moshe |
author_facet | Socol, Yehoshua Shaki, Yair Y. Yanovskiy, Moshe |
author_sort | Socol, Yehoshua |
collection | PubMed |
description | Scientists are human. As such, they are prone to bias based on political and economic interests. While conflicts of interest are usually associated with private funding, research funded by public sources is also subject to special interests and therefore prone to bias. Such bias may lead to consensus not based on evidence. While appealing to scientific consensus is a legitimate tool in public debate and regulatory decisions, such an appeal is illegitimate in scientific discussion itself. We provide examples of decades-long scientific consensus on erroneous hypotheses. For policy advice purposes, a scientific statement or model should be considered as the subject of proper scientific consensus only if shared by those who would directly benefit from proving it wrong. Otherwise, specialists from adjacent fields of science and technology should be consulted. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6557026 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | SAGE Publications |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-65570262019-06-19 Interests, Bias, and Consensus in Science and Regulation Socol, Yehoshua Shaki, Yair Y. Yanovskiy, Moshe Dose Response Original Article Scientists are human. As such, they are prone to bias based on political and economic interests. While conflicts of interest are usually associated with private funding, research funded by public sources is also subject to special interests and therefore prone to bias. Such bias may lead to consensus not based on evidence. While appealing to scientific consensus is a legitimate tool in public debate and regulatory decisions, such an appeal is illegitimate in scientific discussion itself. We provide examples of decades-long scientific consensus on erroneous hypotheses. For policy advice purposes, a scientific statement or model should be considered as the subject of proper scientific consensus only if shared by those who would directly benefit from proving it wrong. Otherwise, specialists from adjacent fields of science and technology should be consulted. SAGE Publications 2019-06-05 /pmc/articles/PMC6557026/ /pubmed/31217756 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1559325819853669 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
spellingShingle | Original Article Socol, Yehoshua Shaki, Yair Y. Yanovskiy, Moshe Interests, Bias, and Consensus in Science and Regulation |
title | Interests, Bias, and Consensus in Science and Regulation |
title_full | Interests, Bias, and Consensus in Science and Regulation |
title_fullStr | Interests, Bias, and Consensus in Science and Regulation |
title_full_unstemmed | Interests, Bias, and Consensus in Science and Regulation |
title_short | Interests, Bias, and Consensus in Science and Regulation |
title_sort | interests, bias, and consensus in science and regulation |
topic | Original Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6557026/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31217756 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1559325819853669 |
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