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Modern Discontent's avatar

Wow, this is legitimately the stuff that would be relegated to science textbooks and used as for graduate level courses!

I will have to read this again a few times, but the most important factor in this article is the degree of laboratory procedures highlighted here. If we talk about people not wanting to know how the sausage is made, most people don't want to know how the study is conducted.

And so most people just want the punchline- tell us what this all means. In doing so, we miss over all of the effort that went into reaching the conclusion. Science is messy, science is dirty, and to be quite honest science is VERY boring. I have legit fallen asleep in lab a few times when it becomes too routine (or maybe that's just me...).

No one likes to hear the boring details because it's not mixing a few beakers to make something super colorful, or any of those other experiments conducted by pop scientists (if you have to preface your job with "pop", you're not a deep scientist).

So this is the truth of the matter. This is all of the nitty and gritty stuff that lead to the practices we have today. We can see all of the faults, but we always examine these practices through the lens of what is available at the time, and how they proceed. I'll say in the lab I used to work in I had people only a few years older than me tell me the crude lab practices they had which involved blotting blood onto special paper and just holding it up to the light and go "well, that's what that is!"

It's unfortunate that this is generally missed when we discuss science to the general public. It's not about what study was conducted, but all of the processes needed. I think that's why your posts may go over people's heads, and yet it's pivotal to understanding how you go through a study. There's a reason why neutralization assays don't tell us the whole story. There's a reason why PCR tests are done the way they are (and why they probably shouldn't be used for tests...).

Well, at this point I'm not sure where I was going, but thank you for such a deep dive that apparently only appears to go even deeper!

I've been thinking of writing about OAS because of my post from two weeks prior, and so maybe I can gain some inspiration from this post!

And what do you mean by "schizophrenic research habits"?! No such thing!

*Looks at 8 windows with 15 tabs each...

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Kirsten's avatar

This is exactly the type of detail that is needed to correct the errors and groupthinks of the past, rather than basing future developments on their faulty science.

"Age of Enlighten-meh" 😅😅

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