However you define it, the truth implies a connection to reality that can be tested. It's true that helium is lighter than air and that water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Science depends on being able to revisit those facts over and over without getting strangely ambiguous results. Yet things are shifting in stranger ways than anyone ever expected, as one discovers in an eye-opening article that appeared around Christmas in The New Yorker. Everyone who is interested in how truth works should read Jonah Lehrer's troubling "The Truth Wears Off," which can still be found online.
What Lehrer is primarily concerned with is replicability, the term scientists use for repeating an experiment and arriving at the same result. Certainly the most important findings in science have been repeated many times over. Not necessarily. Some results, particularly in medicine, are not holding up at all. This "decline effect" forms the central mystery, because no accepted reason has been found for why a treatment should suddenly begin to dwindle in its effectiveness. Lehrer cites three prominent examples: antipsychotic drugs, hormone replacement therapy for women past menopause, and the use of aspirin to prevent heart attacks. In all three, the treatments are still widely endorsed in the medical literature, ignoring the fact that the decline effect is in full swing, meaning that the original results expected from these treatments are simply not there anymore or have declined to a fraction of what they once were.
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