Dr. Kesten Green: ‘Most of What Passes for Scientific Research These Days is Either Useless, or It’s Harmful’

Dr. Kesten Green, the co-author of a study that revealed just “a fraction of 1 percent” of scientific journal papers follow the scientific method, joined Breitbart News Editor-In-Chief Alex Marlow on Breitbart News Daily to discuss how scientists have betrayed their profession in favor of political advocacy.

“There is a problem,” declared Dr. Green to Marlow, who was hosting the show. “Most of what passes for scientific research these days is either useless, or it’s harmful, because it seems like science, but it’s actually designed to support a predetermined position. And advocacy is the opposite of science.”

“These aren’t new phenomena, but probably the sheer volume of useless research and the extent that pseudo-science and advocacy is encouraged… are new,” he continued. “Why is that happening?”

Marlow went on to compare the problem with many journalists, who ignore research discovered during their time writing an article in favor of a predetermined political narrative.

“Dr. Green, one parallel that I find in the journalism world, which is where I make my living, is that a lot of reporters you can see they go out to write a story, and they start researching and start investigating, and then they merely write the story they thought they were going to write, where any good, honest reporter will inevitably find surprises,” Marlow explained. “They’ll inevitably have their thinking and world view shaped by their own research, yet a temptation is just to write the piece you thought you were going to write when you set out and began your research. So this seems to be what’s happening in the scientific community, which is they come to the conclusion before they’ve gathered the evidence.”

“That’s a very good parallel,” Dr. Green responded. “We were rather surprised about this initially, going ‘gosh, this is really how scientists are working’… “The global warming alarm for example, and to our surprise, we found alarms, environmentalist alarms, were being raised by scientists about environmental catastrophes which they promised were going to happen and the government needed to do something about it, were actually common phenomenons. So this advocacy thing, with scientists as advocates, is actually a common thing we found.”

Listen to Dr. Green’s full discussion with Alex Marlow below.

You can also listen to Alex Marlow’s discussion with Dr. Green’s co-author, Professor J. Scott Armstrong.