---
title: "Science"
description: "Many published findings did not hold up when other scientists repeated the studies — the replication crisis. Scientists found it themselves: science working as designed. Including Wikipedia."
url: https://attentionmachine.org/en/truth/science/
lang: en
updated: 2026-10-25
license: "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)"
---

# Science

The best method we have for understanding the world. How it corrects itself. How money distorts it. Why both stories matter.

## How science corrects itself

The replication crisis — the discovery that many published psychology and medical findings could not be reproduced — was discovered and reported by scientists, generated a global reform movement within the field, and left measurable signs that research practice has changed. The Open Science Collaboration's 2015 paper in _Science_[^src-open-science-2015] brought the replication crisis into the open by replicating 100 published studies and finding many could not be reproduced. This is painful. It is also the correction mechanism working.

> **Replication crisis**
>
> The finding, from the 2010s on, that a large share of published results — especially in psychology and parts of medicine — could not be reproduced when independent teams repeated the studies. It sounds like an indictment of science, and partly it is. But replication is itself a scientific method, and the crisis was found, named, and acted on _by scientists_ — which is the self-correction the rest of this section is about, working in public.
>
> **Sources**
>
> - Open Science Collaboration (2015), [_Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science_](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716), Science.
> - Begley, C.G. & Ellis, L.M. (2012), [_Raise standards for preclinical cancer research_](https://doi.org/10.1038/483531a), Nature 483, 531–533.

The field then measured itself. A 2023 study in _PNAS_[^src-youyou-2023] used a machine-learning model to estimate the replication likelihood of more than 14,000 psychology papers published between 2000 and 2019 — a discipline-wide map of where the problem is worst. And a 2025 analysis of 240,000 psychology papers[^src-bogdan-2025] published between 2004 and 2024 found that, across every subfield, the typical study now reports markedly stronger statistical evidence than it did before the crisis — an indirect but consistent sign that the reforms changed practice. The field identified the problem, published about it, and changed practice. That is not a failure of science. That is science doing what it is designed to do.

## An honest caveat

Influential studies continue to be cited after they have failed to replicate. The correction mechanism is real but imperfect and slow. Simine Vazire and Alex Holcombe's 2022 paper[^src-vazire-2022] in _Review of General Psychology_ provides an honest assessment of where self-correction works and where it does not. Science is the best method available; it is not infallible.

## Manufactured doubt as strategy

Wholesale distrust of science is not a neutral position. It is a position that benefits specific actors. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's _Merchants of Doubt_[^src-oreskes-2010] (2010) documents how the tobacco industry pioneered funding counter-research to create apparent scientific controversy where little existed — specifically to delay regulation. The fossil fuel industry used the same strategy for climate science[^src-supran-2017]. Anti-vaccine campaigners use some of the same tactics — skewing the science, shifting hypotheses and attacking critics[^src-kata-2012]. Internal tobacco documents released via litigation[^src-truth-tobacco-1969] show this strategy was explicit and deliberate.

> **Manufactured doubt**
>
> A strategy, not a state of knowledge: deliberately funding and amplifying contrarian research to make a settled question look unresolved, so that action can be delayed. Oreskes and Conway traced the same small playbook from tobacco to acid rain to climate. The tell is the goal — not to establish a competing truth, but to manufacture _enough_ apparent controversy that "the science isn't settled" sounds reasonable.
>
> **Sources**
>
> - Oreskes, N. & Conway, E.M. (2010), _Merchants of Doubt_, Bloomsbury.

When someone tells you that all scientific consensus is manufactured, it is worth asking: who benefits from you believing that? Who fills the vacuum when you stop consulting verifiable sources?

## When science is bought

Manufactured doubt has a quieter sibling: paying for the answer. These cases are documented from the companies' own internal papers — every one is verifiable at the links below.

**Tobacco.** A 1969 Brown & Williamson planning document (the "Smoking and Health Proposal"[^src-brown-williamson-1969]) stated the strategy in one line: _"Doubt is our product."_ Alongside the doubt campaign, the industry funded research designed to reach useful conclusions[^src-oreskes-2010]. Millions of internal documents, released through litigation, are publicly searchable in the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive[^src-truth-tobacco-1969] at the University of California — you can read the strategy in the industry's own words.

**Sugar.** In the 1960s the Sugar Research Foundation paid Harvard nutrition scientists — roughly $50,000 in today's money, undisclosed — for a review in the _New England Journal of Medicine_ that downplayed sugar's role in heart disease and pointed at fat instead, shaping dietary advice for decades. Documented from the foundation's internal correspondence by Kearns, Schmidt and Glantz (2016)[^src-kearns-2016] in _JAMA Internal Medicine_.

**Oil.** Supran and Oreskes (2017)[^src-supran-2017] analysed four decades of ExxonMobil's communications and found a systematic gap: the company's own peer-reviewed research acknowledged human-caused climate change, while its paid advertorials promoted doubt about it.

**And the pattern in aggregate.** This is not a handful of anecdotes. A Cochrane review of 75 papers[^src-lundh-2017] found that industry-sponsored drug and device research reaches conclusions favourable to the sponsor significantly more often than independently funded research on the same questions — the "funding effect", measured across the literature.

Note who exposed each case: researchers and journalists applying documentary and scientific method to the industry's own records. The lesson is not to distrust science wholesale — that is the manufactured-doubt playbook working on you. The lesson is to ask of any single convenient study: _who paid for this?_ — and to support the structural defences that exist because of these cases: mandatory conflict-of-interest disclosure, trial pre-registration (publishing a study's plan before it starts, so an unwelcome result cannot quietly disappear), and independent public funding.

## Wikipedia — an imperfect but instructive case

Wikipedia is not a primary source — the original study, document or record — but a summary of what others have published, and it says so itself[^src-wikipedias-own]: a starting point for research, not something to cite. It has been subject to editorial wars, manipulation attempts, and factual errors that persisted for years. None of this is disputed.

It is also one of the most instructive examples of the correction mechanism this section is about. Every Wikipedia article has a "Talk" tab at the top. It leads to the article's Talk page[^src-wikipedias-own], where editors argue out in writing how the article should change — or, if nobody has yet, lets anyone start one. There is a version history[^src-wikipedias-own] where every change is recorded, and a system of flags[^src-wikipedias-own] — the best known reads "\[citation needed]" — marking claims that are disputed or have no source. When Wikipedia gets something wrong, the correction process is visible. Compare this to a Google AI Overview, an algorithmically curated news feed, or a viral social media post: none of these show their corrections in the way a Talk page does, none tell you reliably when they are contested, and none keep a public record of what each person was shown.

Wikipedia's value lies in its correction transparency rather than its infallibility. In our reading, for scientific and technical subjects with active expert editor communities it is generally reliable; for politically contested subjects and current events it requires more caution. Its reference lists — the citations at the bottom of well-maintained articles — represent years of editorial work to find the original studies and documents. Start with the references, not the text.

**How we know — the replication evidence, and the limits of self-correction**

The claim that science self-corrects is itself evidenced, not assumed. The 2015 Open Science Collaboration[^src-open-science-2015] directly re-ran 100 studies. The 2023 PNAS study (Youyou, Yang & Uzzi[^src-youyou-2023]) took a different approach: it trained a machine-learning model on features of papers known to replicate or not, then scored over 14,000 psychology papers from 2000–2019, showing that replicability varies sharply by subfield and method rather than being one field-wide number. Bogdan (2025)[^src-bogdan-2025], in an APS journal, tracked the reported p-values in 240,355 articles from 2004 to 2024 and found them growing markedly stronger over the decade after the crisis, in every subfield — not a direct measure of replicability, but the most likely signature of larger samples and pre-registration. Three different methods, one picture: the field noticed, published, and changed how it works.

**A correction of our own.** An earlier version of this page cited the 240,000-paper study, then removed it as non-existent and attributed a rising-replicability trend to the PNAS paper[^src-youyou-2023] instead. Both moves were wrong: the large study exists (Bogdan 2025[^src-bogdan-2025]), and the PNAS paper does not report a trend. The corrections log records it.

**The honest limit.** Vazire and Holcombe (2022)[^src-vazire-2022] document where self-correction stalls: discredited findings keep being cited for years, incentives still reward novelty over replication, and correction is slow. So "science self-corrects" is a claim about the mechanism's existence and direction, not a claim that it is fast or complete. That is precisely the contrast with systems — feeds, AI overviews, propaganda — that have no such mechanism at all.

## Sources

[^src-begley-2012]: Begley, C.G. & Ellis, L.M. (2012), [_Raise standards for preclinical cancer research_](https://doi.org/10.1038/483531a), Nature 483, 531–533.

[^src-open-science-2015]: Open Science Collaboration (2015), [_Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science_](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716), Science.

[^src-youyou-2023]: Youyou, W., Yang, Y. & Uzzi, B. (2023), [_A discipline-wide investigation of the replicability of Psychology papers over the past two decades_](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208863120), PNAS.

[^src-bogdan-2025]: Bogdan, P.C. (2025), [_One Decade Into the Replication Crisis, How Have Psychological Results Changed?_](https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459251323480), Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science 8(2) — 240,355 articles, 2004–2024.

[^src-vazire-2022]: Vazire, S. & Holcombe, A.O. (2022), [_Where are the self-correcting mechanisms in science?_](https://doi.org/10.1177/10892680211033912), Review of General Psychology 26(2).

[^src-oreskes-2010]: Oreskes, N. & Conway, E.M. (2010), _Merchants of Doubt_, Bloomsbury.

[^src-truth-tobacco-1969]: [Truth Tobacco Industry Documents](https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/tobacco/) — University of California, San Francisco; searchable archive of internal industry documents released through litigation (the 1969 "Smoking and Health Proposal" contains the "Doubt is our product" line).

[^src-kearns-2016]: Kearns, C.E., Schmidt, L.A. & Glantz, S.A. (2016), [_Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents_](https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.5394), JAMA Internal Medicine 176(11).

[^src-kata-2012]: Kata, A. (2012), [_Anti-vaccine activists, Web 2.0, and the postmodern paradigm – an overview of tactics and tropes used online by the anti-vaccination movement_](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2011.11.112), Vaccine 30(25), 3778–3789.

[^src-brown-williamson-1969]: Brown & Williamson (1969), [_Smoking and Health Proposal_](https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/psdw0147), Truth Tobacco Industry Documents, Bates 690010951–690010959 — “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.”

[^src-supran-2017]: Supran, G. & Oreskes, N. (2017), [_Assessing ExxonMobil's climate change communications (1977–2014)_](https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f), Environmental Research Letters 12(8).

[^src-lundh-2017]: Lundh, A. et al. (2017), [_Industry sponsorship and research outcome_](https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.MR000033.pub3), Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.

[^src-wikipedias-own]: Wikipedia's own pages on how it works: [_Help: Talk pages_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Talk_pages) (what a Talk page is and how to reach it); [_Help: Page history_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Page_history) (every edit recorded); [_Wikipedia: Citation needed_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed) (the flag for an unsourced claim); [_Wikipedia: Academic use_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_use) (an encyclopedia is "a starting point for research, not an ending point").

[Democracy →](https://attentionmachine.org/en/truth/democracy/)\
[Symptoms: Health Misinformation →](https://attentionmachine.org/en/symptoms/health-misinformation/)

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