I'm not a scientist. Yet there was a period in my life where I plunged deep into the world of scientific journals, and got to be friends with a number of working scientists. Good people, and dedicated researchers, most of them. But one of the things you suddenly discover when you immerse yourself in that world is that it is every bit as full of egos, laziness, sloppiness, and orthodoxy as countless other human endeavors. And you can see where scientists with very good data are often completely ignored for years or even decades. Seeing that, you realize just what a fragile thing human knowledge is.

This was really driven home for me this morning when I came across this article in New Scientist about how most scientists do not bother to read most the research they use as the basis for their own work.

The late Richard Feynman wrote disapprovingly about similar problems. Kary Mullis and others like him rail about it today. But now we have actual scientific research to empirically back up much of what they and others have complained about.

Remember this the next time you read or hear some news report about how "scientists say" such-and-such. It's not that what "scientists say" is automatically false--it isn't--but the reliability of what "scientists say" is nowhere near as high as some would like to believe.