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Majority of Landmark Cancer Studies Cannot Be Replicated
New submitter Beeftopia writes with perhaps distressing news about cancer research. From the article: "During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 'landmark' publications — papers in top journals, from reputable labs — for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development. Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature (paywalled) . ... But they and others fear the phenomenon is the product of a skewed system of incentives that has academics cutting corners to further their careers."
As is the fashion at Nature, you can only read the actual article if you are a subscriber or want to fork over $32. Anyone with access care to provide more insight?
Update: 04/06 14:00 GMT by U L : Naffer pointed us toward informative commentary in Pipeline. Thanks!
But they and others fear the phenomenon is the product of a skewed system of incentives that has academics cutting corners to further their careers.
As I've said before, back when I was in academia, there were always grant-whores and academics more interested in their own interests than science around. Too many people have come to treat science with a reverence more appropriate to a religion than a system of knowledge and discovery, however. And so when I point out that there are scientists out there willing to cook the numbers, exaggerate, play to politics and/or public opinion, etc. I inevitably run into those who say "Science wouldn't allow that" (like my friend who's still in the field). But science is only as good as the people practicing it. And, in any field, there are always those willing to put their own personal interests ahead of the greater good.
I just hope this doesn't cast a shadow over those out there who *are* doing good work and *are* trying to do honest work. Sadly, some of the best researchers out there are the ones who make the least noise, get the least attention, get the least grants, and are least likely to get tenure.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
See this discussion of the same paper on In the Pipeline, a blog devoted to organic chemistry and drug discovery. http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/03/29/sloppy_science.php
This is just part of the scientific process. Stuff usually does not stick. It is most often falsified. As more things are falsified, we end up with a better overall understanding of the processes we are trying to understand. Although it may be a bit disturbing if scientists are being dishonest, other researchers have a very strong incentive to go back and fact check.
There is no greater "absolute power" than knowing that if you say or write something that others will like, they will pay you lots of money and make you famous.
It's not that money corrupts. Money is not the root of all evil; the full quote is "the love of money is the root of all evil." When our society decided that money was more important than truth, we surrendered truth to the void.
A research scientist thinks about his day. He can slightly fudge his cancer study, make big headlines, get a ton of grant money and get appointed chair at the university. Or he can go down the long hall to his boss and say, "Nope, this one didn't work either, and while I'd like to start a religion based on false hope, this isn't the false hope you're looking for." If he does that, he can then watch one of his subordinates fudge the cancer study, make big headlines, and be his boss at the same time next year.
Which choice would you make?
Most people pursue careers in atmospheric science for the dollars
Many of these scientists are getting big grants to do their research. At least a few of them might be skewing their results, even just a little, to give the answers their backers want, in order to keep the money flow open. This goes for a lot of scientific research. (Not to mention the politics of getting published if your research contradicts a heavyweight in your field).
Two weeks ago said the social science studies are usually not replicated. Either because they are not true or too expensive. They were trying to explain the rise in psychology paper retractions and job firings as poor science.
My second thought is "Hmmm, academics/scientists skewing results for the sake of their own careers. Global warming, anyone?"
Your second thought is completely off because every single time someone actually tried to replicate global warming research, they DID get the same results. Unlike in the case of those medical papers TFA is about.
Most people pursue careers in atmospheric science for the dollars
Yeah, you can make way more than you could at one of those poor energy companies.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Given the expense, I flat don't believe that a private company just decided to replicate 53 studies.
And he claims that authors "made" his team sign confidentiality agreements. How do authors force that?
So, he claims, he can't even tell us which studies failed.
Now he works at a different cancer research company. Conflict of interests?
I don't doubt that we've got problems in the "medical industry", but the linked article reeks of bullshit.
Has anyone looked at Nature?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
While certainly there are those who will publish findings they know to be false, that's not really the big issue I see here. Good science demands that studies be replicated so they can be upheld or refuted. Sure, there's confirmation bias in science all over the place - the bigger problem I see is that there's very little incentive to publish a paper that simply refutes another. Busting existing studies should be a glorious field, but it's not. If big-name scientist A publishes a result in nature, and no-name scientist B publishes a paper in the journal-of-no-one-reads-it, everyone just assumes scientist B is just a bad scientist (assuming he even managed to actually get published at all).
Another major issue is that the null hypothesis is a very un-enticing story. No one wants to publish the paper: "New Drug does nothing to cure cancer". If you spent a year and a ton of money researching New Drug, you're damn sure going to try and make it work. It's unfortunate, because often the null hypothesis is very informative, but it doesn't get you paid or published. Or how about the psychology paper: "Brain does not respond to stimulus A in any meaningful way", don't remember that paper? That's because it never got published.
I think this is less about malicious behavior, and more about a lack of interest (which can somewhat be blamed on the way universities/journals/grants handle funding, notoriety, etc) in replicating and refuting studies.
Do you want to be the guy who cured cancer, or the guy who disproved a bunch of studies?
Ze Atomic Device! It iz Ztolen!
are famously bad at sceince and statistics.
And there's no benefit (to the researcher) in replicating a study that's already been done which makes for an obvious problem.
Medical science isn't alone in this of course, it just seems to be worse than most.
http://davidrasnick.com/Home_files/Begley%202012.pdf
A recent PLOS article (free to view!) analyses modern research, coming to the conclusion that most research findings are false.
TLDR: Because of the nature of the statistics used and the fact that only positive results are reported.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
If they would put scrutiny to all assertion-generating systems in the same way, nothing would be wrong for being skeptical of science. They should be equally skeptical of theology.
Because they blindly and uncritically report everything they read, regardless of whether it can be replicated or not. Sometimes they even publish bare press releases as final truth. Remember people, unless it's been replicated it isn't science. No matter how nice the scientists look, no matter how scientific the journal looks, no matter how professional the equipment looks.
A lot (in this case, almost everything) of what's first published is crap. Also remember that one of the original reasons people published in journals was to ask their colleagues: "Is this actually true?" A journal article shouldn't be regarded as a statement of scientific fact, but as an invitation to replication and criticism.
It's their methodology; to wit -
Skeptic: I do not believe that your results accurately reflect reality, and therefore would like to see further experimentation.
Neocon "Skeptic:" Uh-huYUK, I no dat I ain't come frum no durn monkey, cuz da preacher-man done told me so!
Living in the midwest, I tend to see the latter far more than the former.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
People should have *some* skepticism for science. This does not mean people should have blind faith that all science is wrong. This article is a good example of science's built-in system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, it is also a good indication that more may be needed.
Let's publish it quickly, then get a tenured job and change topic before others find out it's all wrong!
Conservative can mean many things but in the end one key value is caution, bordering on skepticism - unwilling to believe a claim just because someone says it is so.
Are conservatives so "unwilling to believe" to statements of religious authorities? I'm skeptical about that.
It's fine to be skeptical of new findings. In fact it is healthy, and most good scientists are skeptical about anything new. TFA is an example of healthy skepticism. I am curious about the findings that could not be reproduced by this group- how many of those had already been passed off as weak in the field. This is what scientists do to arrive at consensus - continuous testing. The goal of scientists is to find what is real. Granted it can be affected by human nature and desires, but the profession diligently seeks to limit these effects. The conservative anti-scientist campaign, as far as I can tell, takes aim at scientists when scientific findings do not favor the political will of the conservative. It ignores what is real in favor of what is desired.
Yeah, I'm going to get me a job with Big Green. I hear Greenpeace is paying new grads six-figure starting salaries*.
* Energy companies in north-eastern Alberta are actually offering six-figure salaries to new grad electricians among other trades jobs.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
These findings are no surprise to those who have been following medical science and research for the past decades. See for example what Dr John Ioannidis has to say about the consistency, accuracy and honesty (or lack thereof) of medical science in general: "as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed","There was plenty of published research, but much of it was remarkably unscientific, based largely on observations of a small number of cases", "he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings" - and not just in epidemiological (statistical) studies, but also in randomized, double-blind clinical trials: "Baffled, he started looking for the specific ways in which studies were going wrong. And before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals ... 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials."
Gary Taubes too denounced this accumulation of bias back in 2007: compliance bias, information bias, confirmation bias, etc. routinely introduce non-uniform effects that can be bigger than what you try to measure. And you cannot compensate for them because you cannot quantify them.
As Sander Greenland, one of the editor/authors of Modern Epidemiology, wrote in chapter 19 "Bias Analysis":
John Ioannidis, a medical statistics researcher on a small island in the Aegean, leads a group that has done significant work in this area. Here is an article in The Atlantic about his work.
From the article: ". . . Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time. Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right."
The glass is half glass.
...re: double slit experiment and what happens when you try to observe....the experiment.
If they want the same results then don't observe..... As apparently they didn't the first time
No, you don't. You demand that scientific results match your preconceived notions. Conservatives are easily swayed by anything claiming to be science that matches what you want to be true. Just look at the people who listen to Christophen Monckton, he has a bachelor of arts and claims to have cured AIDS and cancer, yet conservatives love to listen to him tell them how global warming isn't occurring, how the earth is actually cooling not warming and all sorts of other nonsense that matches how you want the world to be.
You don't trust science because you don't like the results regardless of how many times the experiments have been replicated. This article is about an inordinately high rate of failure in one particular area of research where not enough verification of results is being performed. The problem is easily fixed, the question is whether the corporations paying for the research will be willing to pay for the verifications and release the results.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
So, because someone is politically conservative, they must also be religious?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Neocon "Skeptic:" Uh-huYUK, I no dat I ain't come frum no durn monkey, cuz da preacher-man done told me so!
You do realize that most of the people who are "neocons" are products of the New York intelligentsia and graduates of Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, etc........not too many are from south of the Mason-Dixon Line or call themselves Tarheels, Gamecocks or Volunteers.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
and does a nice bit of back reasearch Reason http://reason.com/archives/2012/04/03/can-most-cancer-research-be-trusted
Vision with execution is hallucination.
Most people in atmospheric science rely on grants. Grant writers write what they think they want the reviewers to hear. More often than not, they are right.
Our system of government-funded science has created a perverse incentive (as government interventions are wont to do). This is undeniable. The only thing you can deny is the extent to which this effect has corrupted the system and the scientific community. I tend to think the corruption is widespread, but not 100%. Those who believe in global warming will tend to think that the corruption is minimal.
In my experience, it is usually the pessimist who is more right, and they are still too optimistic.
It seems to be affecting all branches of science - http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=4832
Please mod parent up. This is a real and important point that the AGW community should address if they want to be taken seriously. More replicates never hurt.
To some.
Politics is the Mind-Killer
Funny how conservatives aren't skeptical of the scientists that agree with them. Skepticism is healthy. Skepticism based on idealogical grounds is not skepticism at all.
What other people think of me is none of my business
They should be equally skeptical of theology.
I don't believe for a minute that Newt Gingrich is a Christian. Nothing he says or does shows any indication that he's anything but a damned liar who goes to chucrh to get votes from less intelligent Christians. Everything he says and does indicates that he worships money and power above all else.
If someone wears a necktie, the symbol of wealth and power, which is against everything Christ taught, you should be very skeptical of that person's faith.
Free Martian Whores!
This story it pretty horrible. The reporting of the issue as well as people like you.
A) This story talks about a few individual studies. A study is interesting, but a series of studies is needed. any 1 study can be flawed.
B) Not all studies are the same. Depending on what the goal is, or the experience of the people running it. This is also known.
C) The conclusions of studies can be wrong. Usually because the person putting the paper together doesn't understand the statistics, or doesn't see a flaw in the data presentation.
D) Yes, something there is fraud. However it's usually found out pretty quick.
Those are some of the key reasons multiple independent studies need to be done. From what I can tell, this guy grab many individual studies, as oppose to the body of evidence as a whole.
People have less faith in science right now because the media propagates the myth that someone ignorance is just as valued as someones knowledge. Couple that with the media jumping on any individual study, tossing it on the TV and acting as if it's definitive finding that will change the world tomorrow. They need to mention more often that it can take year of research to bring something to market.
"Cynically, why would anyone try and 'cure' cancer when you can keep the gravy train of research papers and expensive drugs going?"
That's more naive then Cynical.
The answer is: Money.
Think about what happens if a 'cure' for cancer was found.
A) Stock price shoot up.
B) The board gets richer.
C) The C*O get big fat bonuses.
Do you really think the board and CEO gives a rats ass about the next board member or CEO? Why would they put off making a big bonus to the next management team? IN a world run on annual and qtr. reports, there is no reason to put it of.
D) Competition. If you bury it, that means your competitors are likely to find it. That's a huge fucking risk with no gain.
E) You still make money from selling the cure because people will still get cancers. Hell it cold cost them a penny, and they could charge 10 grand and people would be happy, and it would still be cheaper for the insurance company.
" It all goes into one black hole, never to be seen again. "
Just because you don't follow the money doesn't mean it's not accountable. A lot of charities are horrible, but I'm not sure why you expect your 10 bucks in and of itself would make a noticeable impact.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Conservative can mean many things but in the end one key value is caution, bordering on skepticism - unwilling to believe a claim just because someone says it is so. We demand real proof
Then why do so many conservatives claim to be Christian?
Free Martian Whores!
I like how you fail to actually cite anything here. I mean which notable replication failures are you actually referring to?
They don't have to be, but they usually are. Go figure.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
When drug companies force you to sign NDAs to conduct studies, what they're really doing is putting a failsafe in so that if the study goes bad they can sit on it and not let the bad news get out.
Neocon "Skeptic:" Uh-huYUK, I no dat I ain't come frum no durn monkey, cuz da preacher-man done told me so!
You do realize that most of the people who are "neocons" are products of the New York intelligentsia and graduates of Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, etc........
Never been to any of those places, so I couldn't say whether or not neocons originate from that region. However, I do live in the Bible belt, and thus am responding based on my personal experience... that experience is, there are a freakin' lot of 'those people' in these parts.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Well, it's time to start a new journal (among 100 000 of already existing journals). Create a huge lab, get lots of funding to pay them for their work. And tell the to reproduce every result from every submitted paper. Publish only if result was reproductible. Expensive as hell, but soon that would be the only journal that people will bother to spend time on reading.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
Physicists get cranky if you show them research with p values higher than one in ten thousand, but medical research routinely produces p values as high as 0.2. On top of that, you have a large number of wealthy corporations who have powerful financial motivations to influence the results of medical research fraudulently, which probably doesn't come up as often in other fields. There has been a lot of news about problems with medical research lately, mostly because the medical research community itself is discussing these issues, which is a promising sign.
Most pre-meds go on to become doctors. To be relevant, your comment would have to focus on those pre-med students who go on to become medical researchers. I'm as concerned about the current state of medical research as anyone, but I can't let this argument slide. I believe scientists would call this "bad sample selection" or somesuch. ;)
There are three networks of temperature sensors: GISS, HadCRU, and NCDC. There is also two sets of satellite-based temperature data, RSS and UAH.
There are also multiple sets of ice core data. Vosok is the most well-known, but there is a set from Greenland (GISP) as well. There are also other, non-ice-core sets of paleoclimatic data.
I assume many here like me engage in conversations with people who are... even less up on science than we are (and most of us here are very far from being actual scientists). This is a good opportunity to clear up a very common misconception I find among the less scientifically literate. Too many people think that once something has been published in a peer-reviewed journal that you can take it as fact, and this is simply false. Getting published in a peer-reviewed journal is the beginning of the peer review process, and one of the most important parts of that process is independent replication of results by other researchers.
If you participate in any other Internet communities, perhaps this article will provide a good opportunity to have that particular discussion about the peer review process.
These replicated studies were a cost saving measure. Doing a clinical trial on people is more expensive than doing a preclinical trail on cell cultures. Before committing to the more expensive trail they tried to repeat the research the trial was based on. Over 10 years they did this 53 times and only got positive results 6 times. They then focused their money on those results.
He posted the article so we don't have to pay the $32 to get past the paywall.
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
However, most of the people who vote in line with this thinking do come from the south.
What other people think of me is none of my business
All right, let's get this straight: there is no AGW community. There is no conspiracy by evil enviro-commies. There is no group of people who identify themselves as global warming believers. Climate change is not a church. There is (almost) no one who benefits from climate change - climatologists who write papers about climate change would happily write papers about something else.
Calling it climate change is not an attempt to trick people. The fact is, we have to call it climate change now because there are a bunch of mouth breathers who say, "But it's still cold in the winter time! Common sense tells me that global warming doesn't exist. You are all out to get me."
Finally, endlessly addressing concerns of people who adamantly refuse to believe that their noses are attached to their faces, despite decades of mirrors and photographs and countless measurements by thousands of nose experts, is a not a productive use of anyone's time.
We demand real proof
That is such a nice weasel word there.... 'real' proof. I'd like to hear what your definition of 'rea' proof is. It seems to me science is never 'real' when it contradicts ideology. This happens on both sides of politics, but IMHO happens on the right more than the left these days. Didn't used to be. This is why I hate politics and cherish the small sectors of society that place importance on science. Politics is too finicky.
What other people think of me is none of my business
I dont know.... the same group tried to replicate all the experiments. That is really the common thread. I guess I wonder what is more likely, that all (most of) the studies were wrong or the person trying to replicate them is wrong?
This story reminds me of the one on the front page of our local newspaper that breathlessly informed us that contractors lie in order to get government contracts. This is extremely common. That papers are published in such a way as to earn publication in a respected journal or conference proceedings without revealing enough to enable replication is just as common. Money is made via patents and exclusive deals with industry. Yet, the academic still has the charge to publish. Even those of us in industry have a need to publish because of the urges of marketing.
Journals should pick (randomly and secretly) another group of researchers to replicate all studies during the peer review process. Pick two or three groups to be safe. Studies that can't be replicated shouldn't even be published, at least not in the top tier of journals. Only the experimental configuration and the null hypothesis should be sent to the independent groups, and none of the raw data or interpreted results from the study. Experimental designs that don't make sense should be rejected by either the journal and the replicator groups. Poor experimental design is automatically detected if more than one independent group tries to replicate the experiment and some support the null hypothesis and some reject it.
no, those are the neocon founders and élites. canhasdiy was referring to their dupes; the kind of people who can simultaneously claim to worship both jesus and ayn rand while understanding neither.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Don't tell them that mortality from breast cancer leveled out almost 20 years ago. There's a shit ton in money coming in.
A drug that works no better than the placebo could be used for years or decades before anyone figures out that it doesn't do anything but create side effects.
Not years, more like decades, maybe even a century....
As a child, I was subjected to almost every known type of prescription cough syrup/suppressant stuff to almost no effect (even the heavy duty codine laced stuff). Now ~30years later, they are only just admitting that the non-prescription stuff cough stuff is no better than placebo. Next thing you know they'll say the same thing about the prescription stuff.
By the time they take this stuff off the market I'm sure it'll have been sold for 100 years and then the OTC stuff will probably morph into something like Dr Pepper, Coca-cola, and Hires RootBeer which started life on the medicinal side of the fence.
Yet we never seem to learn the lessons from the past. Here's an excerpt from a popular a speech given by Richard Feyman...
For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid-- not only what you thing is right about it; other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked-- to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
... In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
Feynman called this Cargo-cult science...
There is (almost) no one who benefits from climate change
- climatologists who write papers about climate change would happily write papers about something else.
That's a rather naive view. These researches are happily going where the money is because they work for a living. There are lots of funding and grants available if you research the right topics, and even more if you tend to produce the desired results. They might want to work on something more esoteric and ultimately worth pursuing scientifically, but they are slaves to funding which is heavily influenced by the political climate.
I tend to think the corruption is widespread, but not 100%.
All right then, where are all those not corrupted climate scientists? And remember we're talking about hundreds of thousands of scientists around the world. There should be at least a few thousand climate scientists out there with real data that proves mainstream climate science is wrong. Where are they? And just to be clear, I want to see peer-reviewed articles from actual climate scientists, not blog or news articles from researchers from completely unrelated scientific fields or even industry lobbyists, politicians or journalists.
that you can't trust humans without doing checkups on what they did.
We are a bunch of liars and glory seekers and lazy fucks. We lie to make ourselves seem better, we lie for food, we lie for money.
Having a good education doesn't change basic human nature.
Human's need checks and balances or the system will get taken over by the greedy and the selfish.
You think I'm wrong? History backs me up.
Be seeing you...
That could maybe make sense, sort of, if all of the money weren't being poured into denying climate change rather than supporting it. The oil companies, some of the largest companies in the world, have been spending money hand over fist doing whatever they can to cast doubt on the science. Meanwhile, the other side has... solar panel manufacturers? Windmill operators? Come on, that's chump change.
The political climate is influenced by the money, not the other way around. The party with the greatest ties to the oil companies supports the oil companies, the party without those ties doesn't.
That's more naive then Cynical.
I'm afraid it's not sweetheart. It's the way the world works. What is sad is that scientists try and claim they are somehow 'above' all that and it doesn't happen..................
Think about what happens if a 'cure' for cancer was found.
People don't need to take cancer drugs and pay for them for the rest of their lives, thus keeping the coffers of drug companies inflated......... That's just one off the top of my head. Come on, people are simply not that stupid. Cures do not make money and create recurring income.
You're conflating all creationists with young earth creationists who base their beliefs on a literal reading of the Bible.
let's replay part of the conversation:
me: Those creationists who aren't young earth creationists may very well believe in evolution.
Screwmaster: I think "believe in evolution" would be better phrased as "accept the scientific validity of evolution."
Me: I don't think that the new terminology buys one any additional certainty
You: I could take or leave evolution or whatever it's current state is. You simply cannot say that of a "creationist".
The things to note:
(a) The creationists in question were not young earth creationists. so, presumably, they've already accepted that the account of creation in the Christian scriptures is either irrelevant, meant to be interpreted allegorically, or factually untrue.
(b) I have a hard time believing that by distinguishing between generic belief and acceptance of scientific validity, Screwmaster was trying to state that the scientifically accepted validity was actually more shakable. Rather, it seems to me that he was trying to say that such validity was somehow more certain and less likely to change than belief in general. So I'm not certain this answers the question I was asking.
(c) That science doesn't burn heretics as the stake is more of a function of increasing social distaste for capital punishment than anything else. One need only look at self-styled scientific movements in modern history: eugenics, Hitlerism, Marxist-Leninism, et cetera. I find it hard to believe that if Ferdinand and Isabella shared a scientific outlook but still faced the same cultural, economic, political and ethnic pressures of the time, they would not have been just as brutal in persecuting their opponents under some revised form of the Inquisition. The difference between then and now is less a matter of the advance in science and more of a change in what makes us squeamish.
(d) As for the possibility of change in science, I highly recommend Feyerabend's /Against Method/. I agree that science /should/ allow for changes in worldview. But the fact of the matter is that much of the "scientific" outlook actually locks people into various forms of conceptual conservatism that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for that worldview to change. Especially interesting is Feyerabend's treatment of Galileo. Most of us have learned in grade school and high school the myth that Galileo invented the telescope, made empirical observations, used those observations to fight against religiously mandated orthodoxy, and was persecuted for doing so. The reality is that Galileo had an unworkable theory (planets orbiting the sun in perfect circles) that was completely unsupported by the evidence that he gathered. Moreover, there was a model put forth by Tycho Brahe that satisfactorily explained the motions of the planets from a geocentric point of view albeit was rather cumbersome to calculate. But Galileo continued despite the physical evidence being plainly against him and started a propaganda campaign to get people to look at the skies differently. Once that conceptual shift occurred, others were able to make new observations and these observations eventually produced a workable model (elliptical orbits) that was as good as the Tychonian system at modeling observations and better at predicting other observations. This new system, however, disproved much of Galileo's work even if it was built upon the conceptual shift started by Galileo. The lesson Feyerabend would have us learn is that Galileo's faith in a Neoplatonic solar system where more perfect entities had more perfect motions is what led to one of the most important conceptual shifts in science but this faith was not only unsupported by evidence, it was contradicted by the evidence at the time. Yet he persevered and knowledge was advanced.
Please point me to the replicate initial measurement studies by independent sources.
Yes, there is an AGW community, just like there is a string theory community, just like there is a physics community. I don't know why you think there is a negative connotation to a word describing a group of people, other than the possibility that you want AGW to be ascribed some higher description, like "fundamental universal truth" or something. But that would be biased, wouldn't it?
As to the "happy to write papers on other things bit, tell that to the scientists throughout history who have clung to their outdated ideas because that is what they had spent their entire careers researching, and lost all funding when their models were proven to be false, and then died in poverty and obscurity. Your failure to recognize even POTENTIAL sources of bias and conflicts of interest makes me think that you are not rational.
,br> Your example is a foolish one. You conflate something that is easily visible and observable by any and every person on the planet with what is at best a tortuously slow process that can only be seen through careful application of often opaque statistical methods by people who would in fact be out of a job if they proved definitively that a given scary hypothesis was wrong, a hypothesis which demands extraordinary sacrifice from every human being on the planet in order to fix a problem of unknown magnitude, which many of those same scientists claim can no longer be fixed by any means, at the cost of mass starvation in the third world, which is currently reliant on food exports from the US and other petro-agriculture nations.
So yes, you had better be DAMN sure, and you need to shut up with this self-affirming "it's been proven" BS. NO other branch of science crushes dissent in this manner, even in the face of flat Earthers or anti-evolutionists. The abundance of well documented, repeatable data marginalizes the crazy opinions without the need for vicious ad hominem attacks by zealots. Indeed, the presence of zealots indicates that some other process than rationality is at play in the field. The absolute abundance of them almost guarantees it. That doesn't have an effect on whether they are right or not, but in the past the universal presence of such zealots meant the thesis was actually wrong, or at least unprovable/untestable.
Remember that your own zealotry in this reply of yours is in response to a three sentence call for more replicates than one to be performed. Remember the recent debacle with the faster than light particles at CERN? What if everyone had been as zealous as you are now about the existence of faster than light particles, and they had applied all manner of models to the data that it generated. What if the same people had repeated the experiment over and over, continuing to get the same result? What if the people who called for independent reviews had been called "denialists", and had their grant funding stripped? What if all science was run like climate science?
You do know that AGW receives ~100x from grant funding as much as denialists do from all sources, right?
Or does money from the government not count? If so, why? Is it because governments are not corruptible? Is it because bureaucrats don't exhibit any form of bias in their behavior?
It would seem the Journal of Irreproducible Results was ahead of its time.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/