Do You Trust Science?

Or do you trust scientists?

There's a pretty big difference.  I can illustrate it fairly simply: What percentage of research is replicable?

Less than half.  As little as 30%, according to some of Bayer's research.

What percentage of research is downright falsified in follow-up research?

Perhaps 33%, according to the same research.

Given that 5% statistical significance (that is, 5% of all studies -should- be false, according to the statistics used) is the bare minimum for most fields, this means somewhere around 27% of all published research is not only false, but unaccountably false.  Either there's a systematic bias that promotes publishing false papers, -or- scientists are consistently mishandling data in a manner than promotes false positives over false negatives.

Incompetence is one explanation.  The other is that a quarter of all scientific research involves some deliberate fabrication or mishandling of data.

Either way, the odds of something being published in a scientific journal being true is less than 50%.  The best bet is always to disbelieve what you read in a scientific journal; you'll be right more often than wrong.  Meaning that anti-scientific nutjobs are right about research, on average, more often than pro-science nutjobs.

Pretty sad state of affairs, that.