I'm having a pretty intense reaction to reading certain articles and could use some support or a solution:

Here's what I read and my reactions:

1. Feynman's Cargo Cult Science (Which is about how a lot of scientific studies are done badly, often due to researchers not being allowed to do the research correctly.)

2. The PLOS Medicine article "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"

3. An article about how psychologists aren't usually using the treatments most supported by science which links to a document that contains a horrifying account:

"During many of my 20 years at Stanford University, Albert Bandura and I tried to hold on to a science-based clinical training program. The bizarre situation we faced there is of more than personal and historical interest: I suspect that many of the same conflicts still exist and motivate the efforts described by Baker and colleagues. Bandura and I, and our students and other colleagues, were discovering the remarkable discrepancies between what the scientific work was revealing and the requirements imposed by the pressures for maintaining accreditation. The professional accreditation requirements insisted on continuing practices whose value was contradicted by the empirical findings. Those requirements not only flew in the face of the data but also made enormous demands on faculty and student time in the clinical program."

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/inpress/baker.pdf

I'm having a variety of reactions:

1. What meaning is there in doing anything (being a doctor or a psychologist for instance... or any number of other professions) if we can't even trust the research or the schooling? How can I make a difference in the world or do anything useful with no real knowledge? How do you find meaning, LessWrong?

2. Thank goodness I found this place. I am in love with the glimmers of sanity I see here. Before I found LessWrong I was just kind of... "WTF humanity is a mess." Now it's more like "WTF humanity is a mess but at least there's a group of people trying not to be." If anyone is up to describing this wonderful and horrible feeling in their own words, I could really use to feel related to about this.

3. Do you know of a website where one can look up a piece of research to see what flaws it has? Is one planned? I need this because it would take a very long time for me to read enough on each relevant topic to discover whether a piece of research I want to use is flawed or not. For instance, Feynman explained about how lots of studies have been done with mazes and rats, but people didn't seem to realize that the rats were using methods to find the food that were unexpected and all sorts of stuff has to be controlled for ranging from the scent of food to the type of flooring in the maze. If you don't know that all of these things need to be controlled for, you won't know that the vast majority of studies done on putting rats into mazes are useless. It's simply not realistic to expect ourselves to be able to single handedly give every single study we read a thorough enough review to detect all the flaws. I love research, but I now feel that it's futile. Does anyone know a solution? I know that peer reviewed journals are supposed to address this type of problem, but I don't see the online studies that I find being rated or marked as flawed in an obvious way.