"Scientific breakthroughs of the year" by technicalities

A couple of years ago, Gavin became frustrated with science journalism. No one was pulling together results across fields; the articles usually didn’t link to the original source; they didn't use probabilities (or even report the sample size); they were usually credulous about preliminary findings (“...which species was it tested on?”); and they essentially never gave any sense of the magnitude or the baselines (“how much better is this treatment than the previous best?”). Speculative results were covered with the same credence as solid proofs. And highly technical fields like mathematics were rarely covered at all, regardless of their practical or intellectual importance. So he had a go at doing it himself.

This year, with Renaissance Philanthropy, we did something more systematic. So, how did the world change this year? What happened in each science? Which results are speculative and which are solid? Which are the biggest, if true?

Our collection of 201 results is here. You can filter them by field, by our best guess of the probability that they generalise, and by their impact if they do. We also include bad news (in red).

Who are we?

Just three people but we cover a few fields. [...]



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Outline:

(01:24) Who are we?

(01:54) Data fields

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First published:
December 16th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5PC736DfA7ipvap4H/scientific-breakthroughs-of-the-year

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.