The Neuroscience of Screwing Up

resistant writes "As the evocative title from Wired magazine implies, Kevin Dunbar of the University of Toronto has taken an in-depth and fascinating look at scientific error, the scientists who cope with it, and sometimes transcend it to find new lines of inquiry. From the article: 'Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) "The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen," Dunbar says. "But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn't uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn't make sense."'"

Comments

You never discard the data

[techno-vampire]

If the data don't make sense according to your theory, you don't discard the data, you discard the theory and work out a new one that fits the facts as you've observed them. TFA says that Dunbar was watching postdocs doing research, and if so, they should have known better. Alas, too many people who call themselves scientists are more interested in proving their pet theory true than in finding out what's actually going on.

Re:You never discard the data

[bcrowell]

If the data don't make sense according to your theory, you don't discard the data, you discard the theory and work out a new one that fits the facts as you've observed them. TFA says that Dunbar was watching postdocs doing research, and if so, they should have known better. Alas, too many people who call themselves scientists are more interested in proving their pet theory true than in finding out what's actually going on.

This is a beautiful explanation of how science is supposed to work. In reality, science doesn't really work this way. It doesn't work this way in my experience as a scientist, and it doesn't work this way if you read the history of science.

For some good historical examples, see Microbe Hunters, by de Kruif (one of the best science books of all time, although you have to look past the racism in some places -- de Kruif was born in 1890). A good example from physics is the Millikan oil-drop experiment, where he threw out all the data that didn't fit what he was trying to prove -- but then claimed in his paper that he'd never thrown out any data. Galileo described lots of experiments as if he'd done them, even though he didn't actually do them, or they wouldn't have actually come out the way he described.

Michelson and Morley set out to prove the existence of the aether, published their results believing they must be wrong. Nobody else believed them, either. Various people then spent the next 30 years trying to fix the experiment by doing things like taking the apparatus up to the top of a mountain, or doing the experiment in a tent, so that the aether wouldn't be pulled along with the earth or the walls of a building. By the time Einstein published special relativity in 1905, most physicists had either never heard of the MM experiment, or considered it inconclusive.

When your results come out goofy, 99.9% of the time it's because you screwed up. You don't publish it, you go back and fix it. If every scientist published every result he didn't believe himself, the results would be disastrous. If you try over and over again to fix it, and you still fail, only then do you have to make a complicated judgment about whether to publish it or not.

The way science really works is not that scientists are disinterested. Scientists generally have extremely strong opinions that they set out to prove are true using experiments. The motivation is often that scientist A dislikes scientist B and wants to prove him wrong, or something similarly irrational, personal, or emotional. The reason this doesn't cause the downfall of science as an enterprise is that there are checks and balances built in. If A and B are enemies (and if you think the word "enemies" is too strong, you haven't spent much time around academics), and A publishes something, B may decide just to see if he can screw that sonofabitch A over by reproducing his work and finding something wrong with it. It's just like the adversarial system of justice. Society doesn't fall apart just because there are lawyers willing to represent nasty criminals. Einstein was famously asked what he would do if a certain experiment didn't come out consistent with relativity; his reply was that then the experiment would be wrong. Einstein fought against Bohr's quantum mechanics for decades. Bohr fought against Einstein's photons for decades. They were bitter rivals (and also good friends). It didn't matter that they were intensely prejudiced, and wrong 50% of the time; in the end, things sorted themselves out.

Re:Ridiculous

[wizardforce]

If your equipment is malfunctioning, you may end up with data that is fairly random where there should be some pattern or your measurements on your controls don't remotely match the values they should be. As an example, a standardized solution tests for a markedly different concentration than it should; a good sign that something is wrong. Things go wrong occasionally. That is why it is imperative that experiments be repeatable and have good experimental design.

Bugs

[graft]

If the data doesn't fit your theory, the problem is most likely neither with the data (which is fine) nor with your theory (which may also be fine) but with the method you used to produce your data. You probably wired in an incorrect resistor, forgot to close a parenthesis in your Perl code, forgot to add the correct amount of EDTA to your reaction, etc. Then your results ended up looking like shit, and not surprisingly. Doing science is hard.

There's no need to postulate any grand conspiracies or take pot-shots at science in general. This paper is examining real people doing real shit. Most of the time we fuck up, and we're not smart enough to figure out where we made the error.