But it would not be impossible, or even unusual, to publish a carefully reasoned article that's still wrong. Given two papers that have both survived the vetting process, editors tend to prefer the more surprising, which means that on average they prefer the one that's wrong. But it's the unusual that makes the front page. A few years ago, economics professors J. Bradford De Long and Kevin Lang devised an ingenious way to determine just how many published economic hypotheses are actually true. In exactly none of the 78 cases could the confirmation be called overwhelming.
Strong evidence is, after all, strong evidence, even when it's a little shy of overwhelming.
In most cases, overwhelming evidence is too much to ask for, because evidence can be hard to collect and hard to interpret. So no individual article can be criticized for failing to live up to an unattainable standard. But, said De Long and Lang, out of 78 true hypotheses, surely there should be at least a few that are overwhelmingly confirmed. In fact, they gave a precise definition of the word overwhelming, according to which roughly 10 percent of all true hypotheses should come packaged with overwhelming evidence. And they're not.