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New Yorker: The Decline Effect and the Scientific Method

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The Truth Wears Off – Is there something wrong with the scientific method? by Jonah Lehrer December 13, 2010

  • “Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws. But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.”
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