You...post updates to your study via the same channels?
Also, this assumes that all "errors" are alike, but a methodological error in a study is very different from "new evidence has come to light that questions the hypothesis", "we now know that these things have a third common cause", "we discovered in subsequent research that there are confounding factors we did not know to control for in the original study", etc.
IMHO, this comment badly misunderstands the point of scientific inquiry. It isn't to produce a final and immutable result, it's to make observations to rationally assess a hypothesis, and then to repeat the process. This means that science necessarily represents the best interpretation we have for existing observations, with the understanding that subsequent observation might show us confounding factors we couldn't have thought of before.
To put this another way: what if Newton had articulated his understanding of physics in the internet age, and then relativity came along? Do we now tar and feather Newton because he failed to anticipate the contradictions between his position and subsequent observations around the speed of light? That seems like an impossibly high standard to hold scientists to, and that to me is the crux of the problem: we should be expecting scientists to get things progressively more right and to explain why, not to get it completely right the first time.
>What if after a year of posting, you find an error in your study? You have just misinformed everyone for a year. How do you backtrack on that?
If a paper turns out to be flawed, then you retract the paper. In order to retract it, someone needs to figure out that it was in fact flawed. Most scientists don't knowingly publish bad research, they just make mistakes that get missed in peer review. Keeping research hidden away in paywalled journals isn't going to improve the quality of science one iota.
Expecting scientists to maintain radio silence is roughly analogous to security by obscurity, with the same obvious shortcomings. The literature is full of widely-cited studies with significant methodological flaws, because they're useful enough to cite but not important enough to warrant serious scrutiny. If we're serious about building a credible scientific literature, we need to subject papers to the disinfectant of sunlight. We need to leverage the power of social media to make connections between scientists, iterate faster, bring informed laypeople into the conversation and find those bad papers.
> If a paper turns out to be flawed, then you retract the paper. In order to retract it, someone needs to figure out that it was in fact flawed. Most scientists don't knowingly publish bad research, they just make mistakes that get missed in peer review. Keeping research hidden away in paywalled journals isn't going to improve the quality of science one iota.
Except OP wasn't suggesting keeping silent, he was suggesting not broadcasting it on social media. You can broadcast it through scientific channels of course, because scientists generally know to preserve some healthy skepticism until something is replicated.
Some new result on social media could easily go viral so almost everyone hears about it, but do you think the retraction on social would get the same attention? Of course not, so it's about stopping the spread of misinformation, which I hope you agree is a problem these days.
The public discourse around science is dominated by non-scientists, many of whom habitually make grievous and blatant errors. Telling scientists to "stay in their lane" and avoid talking about their research in public isn't going to improve the quality of that discourse.
> Telling scientists to "stay in their lane" and avoid talking about their research in public isn't going to improve the quality of that discourse.
There's a difference between results that have been validated by multiple studies and replicated, and results that have only one or two studies backing them. I think the replication crisis clearly shows why.
Furthermore, there's also a difference between scientists making positive claims and scientists correcting improper interpretations of existing results.
I think my post was pretty clear about what scientists should not be writing about on social media. Writing about anything else is perfectly fine.
Perfect knowledge is impossible. All information is misinformation to varying degrees.
All scientific studies have errors. Science itself is the process of finding errors and correcting them. It is a asymptotic journey of discovery that tries to obtain perfect knowledge but will never quite reach it.
What if after a year of posting, you find an error in your study? You have just misinformed everyone for a year. How do you backtrack on that?