Nate Breznau

There's starting to be a movement, if you want to call it that, to do what's called an adversarial collaboration, where scientists who have maybe different opinions or different theories or even different ideological positions get together and design studies together.

and agree on the criteria in advance.

They say, okay, like we're going to do the study like this.

We all agree this is the way to do it and, you know, and agree on what the results mean in advance.

So they say like, if we get results A, that means there's a positive effect.

If we get results B, there's a negative and C, there's no effect.

And so they already like clarify all that in advance.

And so that would be a good way to avoid some of this bias that might creep into the process.

Yeah, that's a great question.

So one simple answer has to do with their knowledge of science.

So if you imagine someone who only knows how to use a hammer, they're going to run around trying to hammer things.

They're going to try to solve problems with a hammer, whether or not the hammer is appropriate for that problem.

And so some scientists have different training and backgrounds in their methodological knowledge

can limit or affect what they come to.

But other aspects of the process can be, like, people have a profit motive, you know?

Like, one of the...

anti-vax movement cites a paper by Wakefield.

And he was one of the only papers that we know of to show negative consequences of vaccines.

And it turns out he had a bunch of money to make if he could show negative consequences of vaccines.

And so it's like, oh, wait a minute.