Part 1: https://mander.xyz/post/13579080
I feel like I’m missing something here so I’ll be the devil’s advocate, why can’t unpublished papers be reproducible? Multiple teams could independently be verifying hypotheses and results under the same organisation, adhere to the same standard but never publish, that would still be science no? Not doing humanity any favours, but science nonetheless.
Because science is about objective, provable fact following a known and public method. An organization can say their findings are reproducible, but reproducibility is more than just getting the same results every time the same lab runs the same PCR on the same machine. To be truly reproducible your results need to be able to be replicated by anyone with appropriate materials and equipment.
What you are describing is research, not science. It’s not that research is bad, but that science is a philosophical adherence to a method as much as it is that method itself.
The tobacco companies conducted research when they realized smoking caused cancer and hid those findings from others. That’s not science even if their internal researchers were consistent with each other.
Seems like the only difference is that if it’s public or not ie published. I think it becomes a matter of opinion then, because independent teams within the same organisation can absolutely peer review eachother, use completely different methodology to prove the same hypothesis and publish papers internally so it can be reproduced internally.
Science should be made public, but just because it’s not doesn’t mean it’s not science. When the organisation starts making public claims they should have to back that up along the official route, but they could just as well keep their findings a secret, use that secret to improve their working formula and make bank while doing that. Not calling their internal peer reviewed studies science just seems pretentious.
No, they can’t. Peer review is not the peers you determine - it’s the peers of your community. Science that is not public is not science, because it cannot be independently verified and reproduced. It is not a small point, it’s one of the foundations of the disciplines of science.
