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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...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Socol, Yehoshua, Shaki, Yair Y., Yanovskiy, Moshe
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2019
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.
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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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