“Science is under attack and scientists are losing credibility,” Gary Smith warns at the outset of ‘Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science’ (Oxford University Press, £25, ISBN 9780192868459). “There are three prongs to this assault on science: disinformation, data torturing, and data mining. Ironically, science’s hard-won reputation is being undermined by tools invented by scientists. Disinformation is spread by the internet that scientists created. Data torturing is driven by scientists’ insistence on empirical evidence. Data mining is fuelled by the big data and powerful computers that scientists created.”
The diagnosis is convincing. Throughout ‘Distrust’, Smith explains clearly the phenomena that are eroding trust in science: fake news, confirmation bias, p-hacking, the myriad problems with the world of scientific publishing.
Smith has crammed his book with case studies. There are some well-worn examples and some more original...