I was listening to an interesting video on my morning walk today, "Science is in trouble and it worries me” by Sabine Hossenfelder, a German theoretical physicist. This video confirmed a lot of what I have observed over the years about the science we study… it is greatly flawed, and a lot of the good science stopped by the early 1960’s. We are living on the fumes of the work of long dead scientists. Innovation is grinding to a stop, and a lot of current research is creating nonsense.
Here is my abbreviated list of problems when claiming that a dog training program is science based. The problems with that “science”, and the studies, are as follows:
1.) Questionable methodology
2.) Small sample sizes
3.) Scrubbing of data that didn’t support the researcher’s preconceptions or grudges
4.) Poor quality writing
5.) Studies that haven’t been able to be replicated
6.) Lots of “noise” concerning research that has little applicability
7.) Written decades ago, before current other research invalidated some concepts
8.) Lack of agreement on terminology
9.) Limited number of species tested: rats, mice, pigeons, rhesus monkeys
10.) Mostly performed in laboratories
11.) Genetic lines of animals that have been inbred for decades
12.) Mostly male animals
13.) Even many professors don’t have a good understanding of the topic
14.) Current research grant programs are overly bureaucratic
15.) Lack of innovation
16.) Studies need to be redone to confirm earlier conclusions
17.) Science that was never meant to be converted into a dog training program
What to do? I think you read the science, especially the major studies. You then compare that to what you have learned through years of experience and then come to your own conclusions. As a community, we are operating on faulty data. This is why current good dog trainers are now questioning the “science”, and saying they know things these scientists don’t know.
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