Matt BlazeMay 28, 2025

HHS Secretary RFK Jr is proposing banning NIH-funded researchers from publishing in top-tier journals, including JAMA and Lancet.

This is bonkers for all sorts of reasons, but let me just mention one. He points out that Lancet has retracted articles. This is factually correct, but it's a reason these journals are *more* trustworthy, not less.

Journals and peer review don't guarantee that what's published is "correct". It's merely the best process we have to get closer to finding the truth.

Show threadMatt BlazeMay 28, 2025
When people say "scientists (or experts generally) are untrustworthy because they change their opinions all the time", they're actually describing an important reason science is *more* trustworthy.
Show threadDeb ChachraMay 28, 2025

@mattblaze There was, of all things, a FRIENDS episode where Lisa tries and tries to get Ross the paleontologist to admit that evolution might be wrong and she finally got him to admit that, yes, maybe it could be wrong.

It would have been a very short episode if he said. “Yeah, it’s a *theory*, of course it could be wrong, that’s how science works.”

Show threadMatt BlazeMay 28, 2025
@debcha And people don’t understand that a “theory” is generally the strongest thing we can get.
Show threadDeb Chachra
@mattblaze There are a few ‘laws’ — conservation of energy comes immediately to mind — but yeah, for something to get called a ‘theory’ it’s withstood a LOT of attempts to disprove it.
May 28, 2025 at 8:55pmWeb
Show threadSophie SchmiegMay 28, 2025
@debcha @mattblaze those are only stronger in the sense that Noether's theorem is a mathematical theorem, i.e. a tautological statement that is true regardless of the physical universe. But even Noether's theorem has preconditions. If they do not apply in the real world, the conversation law fails.
For example, if time fundamentally changes the laws of the universe, then conversation of energy is gone, and if the laws of the universe prefer one direction over another, conversation of angular momentum is gone, too.
Show threadsabikMay 29, 2025
@sophieschmieg @debcha @mattblaze
arguably conservation of energy didn't hold during the 20th century because of the definition of the kilogram
Show threadDennis ClarkMay 28, 2025

@debcha
In science the terms are often historical.

Newton's hypotheses on motion were called laws because it withstood a lot of testing at the time, but we now know it fails to hold at relativistic speeds. They remain useful so we still call them Laws of Motion.

Darwin's hypothesis on evolution was called a theory because he only tested it against a tiny fraction of life on Earth. It has been tested against all manner of life we've discovered since and we've yet to find an exception to it. However it retains the name Theory of Evolution.
@mattblaze