sobering article in NY Times yesterday exploring the subjectivity of science (see http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/opinion/sunday/scientific-pride-and-prejudice.html ). we all know intuitively that behind the mystique of the rigors of science and the dispassionate quest for knowledge, there is a large human incentive to create the results we hope to find. (this is beyond the greed motive, wherein a drug company withholds negative results, as with gabapentin, for their own profit).
the authors point out, for example, a report in Nature that only 6 out of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research were able to be replicated. and, it certainly seems that more-often-than-not, initial reports on a new drug’s efficacy are either diluted or totally negated on subsequent studies.
this lack of “objectivity”, or course, does not just apply to science. they comment on it in literary criticism, note that Jane Austen took on this issue explicitly in Price and Prejudice, and that Austen was perhaps consciously putting her characters in challenging situations to analyze how they would act strategically (predating the formal current discipline of game theory).
geoff