"Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us"

Huh, I was expecting Science to mean "science as a social institution," but he really is making the strong claim that science as a way of learning things is "failing us" because the human body is complicated. Where of course the problem is, "failing us relative to what?"

A better subtitle for the article would be "why statistics is failing us".

Summary: "Coincidences exist."

Most recently, two leading drug firms, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, announced that they were scaling back research into the brain. The organ is simply too complicated, too full of networks we don’t comprehend.

Of course, pharmaceutical research to the brain isn't the same as cognitive science research to the brain, but still, I'm updating to have a somewhat lower estimate of "P(the brain will be reverse engineered during the next 50 years)" as a result of reading this. (Though there are still partial algorithmic replications of the hippocampus and the cerebellum which do make it seem relatively probable that the reverse engineering will succeed nevertheless.)

Interesting article, thanks for directing my attentions towards it.

Reading through the comments, we all seem to agree: there's nothing wrong with science. (I've grown to expect misleading titles and thesis statements that push too far, it seems part of the blog/internet culture, and the article can still be read for the interesting connecting bits.)

There's nothing wrong with "science" ... I interpret the article as pointing out the problem of induction in the context of a complex system with a limited number of observations. For example, an animation is a very complex system -- much more complex than Newtonian physics, requiring a model of the specific intentions of a human mind.

Given an observation, the scientific method goes, you form a hypothesis. Then you test that hypothesis, especially for the broader context that you would like to apply it to. Michotte's subjects formed a hypothesis about blue and red balls in a set of animations that would not hold up to further observations. Likewise, Pfizer formed hypotheses about cholesterol interactions in human systems that did not hold up. This is the scientific method working, just as well as ever.

An example of the scientific method not working would be experiments that change their behavior depending on what your expectations are and what hypotheses you are forming (exclude anything in psychology for the moment). For example, it would be really weird if objects knew you expected to them to fall down due to gravity and were just obliging. (The scientific worldview is rejecting that sort of hypothesis universally in the absence of any evidence for it.)

It's unfortunate that the important points in this article are surrounded by such fallacious statements as "It’s mystery all the way down." I would love to use the good parts as a discussion piece elsewhere, but it's not worth the risk that people will only take away the author's irrational conclusions.