The state of science - hyperbole doesn't help.

It seems like every few weeks these days there is a breathless essay or editorial saying science is broken, or that science as a whole is in the midst of a terrible crisis, or that science is both broken and in the midst of a terrible crisis.  These articles do have a point, and I'm not trying to trivialize anything they say, but come on - get a grip.  Science, and its cousin engineering, have literally reshaped society in the last couple of hundred years.  We live in an age of miracles so ubiquitous we don't notice how miraculous they are.  More people (in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population) are involved in some flavor of science or engineering than ever before.

That does mean that yes, there will be more problems in absolute numbers than before, too, because the practice of science and engineering is a human endeavor.  Like anything else done by humans, that means there will be a broad spectrum of personalities involved, that not everyone will agree with interpretations or ideas, that some people will make mistakes, and that occasionally some objectionable people will behave unethically.   Decisions will be made and incentives set up that may have unintended consequences (e.g., trying to boost Chinese science by rewarding high impact papers leads to a perverse incentive to cheat.).   This does not imply that the entire practice of science is hopelessly flawed and riddled with rot, any more than a nonzero malpractice rate implies that all of medicine is a disaster.

Why is there such a sense of unease right now about the state of science and the research enterprise?  I'm not a sociologist, but here's my take.

Spreading information, good and bad, can happen more readily than ever before.  People look at sites like pubpeer and come away with the impression that the sky is falling, when in fact we should be happy that there now, for the first time ever, exists a venue for pointing out potential problems.  We are now able to learn about flawed studies and misconduct far more effectively than even twenty years ago, and that changes perceptions.  This seems to be similar to the disconnect between perception of crime rates and actual crime rates.

Science is, in fact, often difficult.  People can be working with complex systems, perhaps more complicated than their models assume.   This means that sometimes there can be good (that is, legitimate) reasons why reproducing someone's results can be difficult.  Correlation doesn't equal causation; biological and social phenomena can be incredibly complex, with many underlying degrees of freedom and often only a few quantifiable parameters.  In the physical sciences we often look askance at those fields and think that we are much better, but laboratory science in physics and chemistry can be genuinely challenging.  (An example from my own career:  We were working with a collaborator whose postdoc was making some very interesting nanoparticles, and we saw exciting results with them, including features that coincided with a known property of the target material.  The postdoc went on to a faculty position and the synthesis got taken over by a senior grad student.  Even following very clear directions, it took over 6 months before the grad student's particles had the target composition and we reproduced the original results, because of some incredibly subtle issue with the synthesis procedure that had changed unintentionally and "shouldn't" have mattered.)

Hyperbolic self-promotion and reporting are bad.   Not everything is a breakthrough of cosmic significance, not every advance is transformative, and that's ok.  Acting otherwise sets scientists and engineers up for a public backlash from years of overpromising and underdelivering.   The public ends up with the perception that scientists and engineers are hucksters.  Just as bad, the public ends up with the idea that "science" is just as valid a way of looking at the world as astrology, despite the fact that science and engineering have actually resulted in technological society.  Even worse, in the US it is becoming very difficult to disentangle science from politics, again despite the fact that one is (at least in principle) a way of looking at the world and trying to determine what the rules are, while the other can be driven entirely by ideology.  This discussion of permissible vocabulary is indicative of a far graver threat to science as a means of learning about the universe than actual structural problems with science itself.  Philosophical definitions aside and practical ones to the fore, facts are real, and have meaning, and science is a way of constraining what those facts are.

We can and should do better.  Better at being rigorous, better at making sure our conclusions are justified and knowing their limits of validity, better at explaining ourselves to each other and the public, better at policing ourselves when people transgress in their scientific ethics or code of conduct.

None of these issues, however, imply that science itself as a whole is hopelessly flawed or broken, and I am concerned that by repeatedly stating that science is broken, we are giving aid and comfort to those who don't understand it and feel threatened by it.