Slashdot Mirror
How Science Goes Wrong
dryriver sends this article from the Economist:
"A simple idea underpins science: 'trust, but verify'. Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better. But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying — to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity. Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis (see article). A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 'landmark' studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties. Even when flawed research does not put people's lives at risk — and much of it is too far from the market to do so — it squanders money and the efforts of some of the world's best minds. The opportunity costs of stymied progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising."
Aaaand this is exactly the kind of thing that young-earth creationists and climate change deniers will jump on to show that science (and scientists) can't be trusted.
FYI, 'trust, but verify' is also a great rule of thumb for spell-check.
Are the numbers from this article just pulled out of a hat?
No results that has not been replicated should be trusted. The problem is not that errors are made but rather that results are trusted before they are replicated.
Next, you're gonna tell me you can't reproduce my cold fusion results. So, whose fault is that?...
In science, a lot of time and resources are wasted on testing ideas that other scientists had tested before, but who never published the results, simply because they weren't spectacular enough. Even though some negative results are obfuscated in papers reporting findings 'more worthwile' reporting, and even though some of the negative results are discussed at science meetings, many scientists have been trying to reinvent the wheel. Now how much is wasted? I don't know, but the result could be shocking.
is when people (especially the media) assume that published studies represent the truth rather than something that deserves more investigation.
"trust but verify" is a good idea in many areas -- relationships, law, security -- not just science. But it's especially important in areas where published results establish precedent and serves as the basis of new results. Else we end up with baggage that hampers future efforts. It's not just a matter of saying "oops, those results are invalid", we also have to ask "ok, what other research has those results affected, and how does invalidation change things?"
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
That's faith man.
How about actual proof?
Seriously, how do these studies get published? I mean this "trust" thing goes both ways and is probably why some really cool results don't get published - like the famous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov%E2%80%93Zhabotinsky_reaction
From the wikipedia: "Belousov made two attempts to publish his finding, but was rejected on the grounds that he could not explain his results to the satisfaction of the editors of the journals to which he submitted his results."
What the hell? Who needs to explain results when one can just perform the experiment!?
Trust? That's for friendships and financial dealings.
Proof (or disproof as you fancy). That's for science and knowledge.
Alright, now someone enlighten me and fix my apparently skewed view on this matter please because I don't get how this crap is happening.
All researchers in the sciences have a motivation to be published, in the form of recognition, academic progress, and financial motivation. Not many of them have an incentive stop working on looking great for producing results and check the work of someone else.
Assuming TFA's numbers are correct, I'd bet that much of the problem is that no agency, be it government or commercial (and particularly commercial) wants to spend it's money seeing if published results are reproducible. Additionally, no one ever won a Noble Prize for excellence in reproducing others' results. Verification of results is key to science, but this is one of several aspects of doing science right that the funding agencies either don't want to, or can't (as in Congress looking over the shoulders of managers at the NSF), pay for. Everyone wants "everything, all the time" without paying for it, and this is the sort of thing that happens when decisions are driven by the money people (who may be scientists, to be fair) and not the people who know what the hell is going on.
People just cant accept that the fact that an experiment (which in they have invested time and money) can produce no conclusion even though from the point of view of science this is completely valid result. In today's goal oriented world, people want every experiment to mean something; to prove/disprove some hypothesis. And so they seem to find patterns in things which dont have any.
If you can patent any kind of harebrained crap someone came up with in a pipe dream without having to provide a working model, that's what you get.
As soon as someone dreams up something that might kinda-sorta work in some sorta way, he will rush to the patent office. Should someone else finally come up with a working model, he'll rip the real inventor off with it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You know, the field that verifies theories without experiments? How many experiment designs are published that conclude the only outcome of the experiment, hypothetically speaking, without real world results? Photons that split into alternate dimensions (carrying energy with them) and also send messages backwards in time, it's all on paper and considered fact, but no experiments have been done to prove it... does that now sound like craziness to anyone but me?
The US spends too much time dithering on "proving" new discoveries and processes before taking useful, competitive actions. There is period between discovery and generally agreed development, before extensive verifications that used to be a tremendous competitive advantage for successful companies in the US. You're first, making billions with something cheaper, faster and better, while the competition's politico-bs "proovers" enjoy their sinecure 10-20-30 years. Now the proovers have everything stopped out in the economy. Enforcing excess verifications is one means that slower, technologically impaired companies steal from innovative individuals, either by forced co-option, "an offer you can't refuse," or bankruptcy. Grinding, pettifogging verification often needs to occur, but often later in the ramp up and production cycles.
A big part of the problem is null results. Getting and reporting a null result is SUPPOSED to be good science. And in a lot of areas of science, its OK - you'd obviously prefer to find something cool, but you don't kill your career by not finding something. But in some fields, if you do a study that doesn't find something, you can literally set your career back a decade or. Guess what this leads to?
I was talking to somebody was getting her PhD in Biochem. She was in the midst of a 5 year study on the effects of some drug. A condition to get her PhD was that she must publish a "substantial" peer review result. And her department had gone out of their way to define null results as not substantial. This meant that if her study found that the drug wasn't effective, she didn't get her PhD - she would have literally had to start over and had wasted 5 years of her life.
This is common in some areas of science, but not others.
So the first thing to do is get rid of garbage policies like this. My understanding is that its much more common in biology related fields, but that might just be my bias (I'm from a physics background, so I have an admitted bias here).
Until you fix this policies like this, you will always have people getting "creative" with their statistics or just outright making up data. For some reason, a lot of these biology related fields don't seem to care about policies like this, which I just don't understand. I mean, we know that these policies lead to bad behavior, but nothing is done to fix it. Maybe somebody in these areas can explain the rational to me.
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.
The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face."
I've collected some other quotes on social problems in science here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Really everyone should. Because while some of the points are good, The Economist misses the biggest one of all
In the University environment of today, the scientists and researchers are hamstrung by Non-Disclosure agreements. How does one share experimental information when to do so will cause you and your University great problems? One of the biggest offenders is the Biotech industry. Talk to someone, lose your funding and probably your job.
This is just the culmination of the past several decades shift from Government sponsored research to industry dominated research. It's a completely understandable position - industry wants return on it's investment, and research that doesn't generate profit might be good research, might be groundbreaking, but to the industry sponsoring the research it is a failure if they don't profit from it.
I'm pretty certain that industry would consider completely flawed and incorrect research as successful if it generated money for the company sponsoring the research.
So they draw the conclusion that scientists are lazy. I draw the conclusion that this is what happens when making money is the most important factor, and the scientists are bound by their contracts.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Many of those papers do lead to predictions which can be tested. Witness the Higgs particle prediction and later verification.
It's dangerous to make a broad statement, but in general I would say that if you don't have a verifiable/falsifiable theory, you're dealing with philosophy and not science. Both are valid endeavors, but we shouldn't mix them up.
trust, but verify?
We must be talking about different sorts of science, because from what i know, the simple idea rather is
"be objective, and be sure to keep it falsifiable
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
One of the key problems is that doing the replicative experiments and publishing that data, as well as any divergence from the initial data of the first study by another author, is hard to get published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, as are replicative studies where the results do not concur with the original study.
It's also hard to get funding for this.
Fix that and you fix the observed problems, which mostly crop up in certain scientific cultures that tend not to encourage juniors from challenging senior scientists. Cases in point: Asian cultures for the most part, particularly South Korea and China, where we find a lot of problems with such scientific studies.
(this is my personal observation and has not been peer reviewed nor scientifically tested)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That there is a name to be made in debunking landmark studies in the biosciences because they cannot be reproduced. That should be part of the scientific process.
Bitter and proud of it.
When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this--it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.
I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person--to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know the the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.
She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happened.
Nowadays, there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Too much funding is too dependent on satisfying funding bodies' requirements for the quantity of published research. Failure to publish jeopardises one's research career. But funding bodies do not have the resources or expertise to verify the correctness of publication, and nor do the referees. It doesn't take a rocket scientists to work out what happens next.
John_Chalisque
Now you're talking about history, not science.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Is that many experimental results are too resource intensive for most people to replicate. Just try replicating the findings that support the existence of Higg's Boson.
John_Chalisque
This is not science going wrong, this is wrongly calling something science.
It's not about being lazy. Feynman famously addressed this in his "Cargo Cult Science" rant in his Caltech commencement address given in 1974. (There's no recording AFAIK, that link is to someone reading the transcript).
He makes very good points: funding is for new results. Attempting to repeat another scientists published work is not a new result (unless you can't), and many places won't even allow you to try, unless it's something very sexy like observing the Higgs boson or something. It's an important structural problem, and it was worth calling attention to forty years ago.
There's no doubt that some unscrupulous researchers have noticed this and are gaming the system. The incentives to do so are particularly high in biochem.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You know, if you don't have enough scientific knowledge to even begin to understand what the scientists are talking about how can you do anything other than take it on faith that they know their stuff?
Except those from Climate scientist... All of those conclusions should be taken on faith!!!
When I read this comment, I was laughing until I realized that it was modded down to -1. Clearly, you struck a nerve here at Slashdot.
Let it be know: On Slashdot, YOU SHALL NOT QUESTION THE FAITH OF CLIMATE CHANGE!!! So it is written so shall it be!!!
The scientists are the ones who brought politics into it.
...myth of evolution.
Evolution and speciation have both been directly observed and are well documented, no bone fragments required.
All my mod points for the ability to edit. Of course what I meant was:
The scientists are not the ones who brought politics into it.
When results cannot be trusted, all "science" loses credibility.
bump. Gaming the system is smart behavior (maybe unethical though). Just provide incentives to do the work in the best way. Just an idea, for example, and in no way perfect: If a scientist publishes (peer-review and all) results they get a credit, but if another scientist cannot replicate results they get 90% of that credit, leaving the former with 10% of the credit. Also in an experiment you have inputs, transformations and outputs. Inputs being the data, transformations being the analysis, and the outputs being the result that tests a hypothesis. The Inputs (i) and transformations (t) must be made available for other scientists to reproduce the results. This too, can be gamified. If a scientist provides i they get a bigger credit. If they provide t, they get an even bigger credit. In another way, the scientific process as implemented is also subject to the scientific method. It should be anyway.
No longer "trust, but verify." More like "correlate, and blame."
People think science goes something like this: Think of an idea, see if that idea works, if it doesn't, try again a different way or give up. If it works, perform more test runs and then send it off to a practical science lab where they figure out how to use it practically and patent the shit out of it. Once that's done, the product goes through regulation channels and then it gets released to the public.
What actually happens: Ideas get tested, if it works it gets patented. If it doesn't, it gets patented. Once enough tests are run, they go through regulation channels, but only if they bribed the right people. Once that's done, and they covered their tracks so that they can't be sued by anyone, they release the product half-tested and let humans be guinea pigs. When people are affected by it, they try to sue but can't because there's a law that prevents them from suing and science gets richer and richer. Any employee that opposes this is hunted down and anyone leaking any information about how politics dictates science gets sent to prison.
Further trials are conducted by foreign agencies and they make claims that it's more harmful than helpful and the local corporation silences them one way or another. Anyone that attempts at making a legitimate version on whatever they were working on will get sued and the government will back them up on it. This is basically modern science in a nutshell.
The biggest problem with science is that it is conducted by humans, therefor it cannot be truly impartial as it should be. Alas, it's not something we can really rectify.
Only God can be trusted...science must pay cash.
Scientists go wrong...not science.
Sheesh!
How Big Pharma 'Science' Goes Wrong
FTFY.
Sorry, but you're just wrong. There are many problems in science where too much money is involved (medicine etc) but evolution is well documented, studied and proven over and over again. There is, as the other AC says, a "colossal wealth" of data, including DNA similarities, fossils and plain old observation. The only "myth" regarding evolution is that there is any controversy at all about it outside of a few religious zealots.
You NEVER trust science.
You always verify trust has nothing to do with it.
That is the problem with our doctrine based science programs and institutions.
It is all crappy trust science, and it is rarely verified.
So if you want to do great science, don't believe anything and trust nobody.
Find out for yourself.
But I think that is just common sense.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
If your own verifiable experimental evidence doesn't convince you that this climate nonsense is just that nonsense then you are an idiot!!
Here's a video of a 10 year old successfully demonstrating that CO2 is a green house gas. I have no idea why someone who claims to have a doctorate in physics doesn't understand the physics of the greenhouse effect and is so incompetent that they can't design a legitimate experiment to replicate it. We're talking science that was hypothesized in 1824 and first verified in 1859
Fanatically anti-fanatical
. Now, do the same experiment right under the smoke stack of a coal fired power plant. What you will notice is that there is a significant temperature change related to the amount of cloud covert and NO temperature change related to the CO2 emission.
Your experiment test a model that may not be representative of how the whole atmosphere works. Are you sure the CO2 distribution is the same as the visible smoke? If it is, since smoke does not surround the whole system, are you sure there is not a way for heat to escape the smoke? And are you sure the way it works near the ground is the same as in higher atmosphere, where temperature and pressure are different?
That and you don't often get PHD's, published papers, and prestige for trying to duplicating and test a published findings.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What goes wrong is people.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
"Trust but verify." I hate that phrase. It's used all over the place, but it is meaningless.
Interestingly enough it's a Russian proverb made famous in the United States by Ronald Reagan.
In any situation where verification is appropriate, trust is not.
In the specific context in which Reagan used it, it indicated that both countries would trust the other enough to begin dismantling warheads, but would verify each other's progress towards the agreed upon targets. It took trust to start the process, and verification would keep it going.
I guess people just don't know what "trust" means any more.
That's entirely possible. However, in this case I think it means you should generally trust that the experiment was done in good faith, however, if you need to actually use the results, you should verify them first.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
He makes very good points: funding is for new results. Attempting to repeat another scientists published work is not a new result (unless you can't), and many places won't even allow you to try...
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"
Even though funding is for new results, to get new results, these days you will almost always need to build on what has gone before. So while scientists generally don't attempt to replicate published results, if the work is important, someone will eventually think of a way to extend the work, and rely on it to build something else. At that point it will become obvious if the original research is flawed.
So good science does eventually win, it just can take a longer time than people would like to spot frauds. Science works, the last century is a testament to that.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
If you're a tech type (and I assume you are at least somewhat, or else wtf are you doing here), you can *easily* write software that uses, and proves, evolution.
Generate two lists of sets of random characteristics. Breed pairs of list items by selecting randomly between the characteristics contained in the items for a full set: AB, BA, AB, BA, etc. Now you have a new item with a new combination of characteristics. Assign each characteristic a weight: ability to find food, resistance to disease, etc. Create an environment that requires certain weights for survival. Test items against environment. Some will survive: return them to the list. They get to "breed" again. The others die. Each pass through the lists will vary the population in both count and characteristics.
A pass is a generation. After each generation, graph the characteristics. Guess what? That graph will rise until the fitness of all the items reaches a peak.
What you've done is created a situation where fitness is tested against stress, and higher fitness results in more survival. Subsequent generations will be more and more fit until they're all fit enough to survive.
Now add some randomness. Kill a few off just at random. These are "accidents." Make a few of the weaker ones survive anyway. These are cripples taken care of by the community, or otherwise lucky. Run the thing again. Guess what? Fitness of the population will rise again.
This is evolution in a fishbowl, and it's a very useful programming mechanism for anything where you can assign a "gene" to an approach to a problem, and "fitness" to the result of applying that approach. That's the practical side. On the fun side, you can (and I have done) write a great game where you have critters that breed, live and die using this mechanism.
Create a 2d grid. The genes are instructions, things like: "turn left if nextcell contains rock" "move forward" "turn left", "eat (fitness up)", "turn towards food" "turn away from food" "turn away from other critter" "breed" "if critter in next cell skip next gene" "if rock in next cell skip next gene" "knock heads (one critter dies)", etc. Each critter gets a list of these, randomized. Every move costs them fitness; eating gains it back. Seed the environment randomly with food and rocks and critters. Then run them by executing their genes in order. They will initially perform very poorly -- randomly. But as you breed them and the generations pass and the genes update from the highest fitness critters, you'll end up with critters that seek out food and then go breed, never running into a rock or another critter. Add animations to taste, be sure to graph fitness for the whole population, it's fascinating.
You can add complexity by adding recessive genes, more types of actions, more stuff in the environment, etc. There's really no end to what you can do. As a fun exercise, try to create a high performing critter manually, then throw it into the mix. Then at the end, when the fitness has maxed out, take a look at the highest fitness critter and see not only how little it resembles your well thought out choices, but what bizarre strategies it's implemented to be better than what you worked out. It can be mind blowing.
evolution: not only a fact, one well within your reach to test, verify without a shade of doubt, and use to your own benefit.
Once you've seen this work in practice, assuming you've got a decent head on your shoulders, you will immediately be able to generalize the process to nature and generations of real critters, from moths to humans to whatever. Strategies and capabilities against stressors, survival of the fittest, it's just the way it works, and there is ZERO doubt about it among those who actually understand it. Anyone who denies evolution is either ignorant of the facts or deliberately snowing you for some reason. 100% guaranteed. There are no other possibilitie
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It's not about being lazy. Feynman famously addressed this in his "Cargo Cult Science" rant in his Caltech commencement address given in 1974. [...]
Fwiw, Richard Feynam's Caltech commencement address, "Cargo Cult Science" — in your own voice. :)
His description, near the end, of an A-number-one experiment done in psychology and its subsequent disregard is a satandalone classic and probably the best part, imho.
Yesterday's Weirdness is Tomorrow's Reason Why
Wishful thinking. When Galileo's presentation was found to be at odds with religion by the ultimate arbiter of such things (the then-Pope), they certainly were in conflict. The "apology" took centuries to come around, far too late to help Galileo. It wasn't a misunderstanding. It was stubborn clinging to myth and nonsense with the added salt of the power to enforce the myth over the facts.
When religion gives us social rules, there may be, often is in fact, value to be had. When religion tries to tell us how the world came to be and why we are here, it falls flat on its face, each and every time. It's the purest form of conflict: The intentional and irresponsible promulgation of fictions in the face of repeatable, consensual facts to the contrary. The more we understand, the more visible this is.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
But as a scientist you do need to trust. You can't do everything from scratch and need to make use of previous results. If you are doing an experiment with X-rays, you may need to trust someone else's instrument on the spectrum of the X-rays that are hitting your sample. You may not have prepared the sample yourself but need to trust whoever did to have done so correctly. You may rely on someone else's detectors to see the results of the experiment.
To some extent you can cross check the most difficult / risky parts of the experiment, but you can't cross-check everything withing a reasonable time and money budget.
Have the balls to post using an ID.
Oh look, I'm responding to myself.
That and you don't often get PHD's, published papers, and prestige for trying to duplicating and test a published findings.
Or tenure. Or grant money.
With more scientists, there should be more resources to replicate experiments, not less. I'm not saying that's how it works out though.
Where he called people who didn't accept his hypothesis of the source of tides simpletons. Too bad it predicts 1 tide a day, it's the same height, and it's always at the same time. (Which people at the time pointed, none of that is true.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
How do you get a patent out of reproducing a result? Or for debunking a result? Isn't $$ the point of science?
Someone bitches about how claims of a scientific result should be verified but are not, and the supporting evidence is examples of attempting to verify scientific results which are claimed to not be happening.
If it was only shoddy experiments that'll be one thing. But some theoretical physics has gotten so used to divorcing itself from experimental verification it's turning into fairytale science.
That means that they want to avoid doing anything politically controversial or that steps on anyone's toes.
Hmm... I guess climate scientists didn't get the memo.
FYI, 'trust, but verify' is also a great rule of thumb for spell-check.
Fly eye, thrust butt there if I is lasso agate drool oven for voice recon fish in.
I think what "trust" means in this case is that the default assumption is the scientists are presenting their work in good faith and accurately reporting their results. If you base your work off of the work of someone else I don't think it's particularly necessary to verify the work first. Chances are if the other scientist's work is bad then you will get unexpected results. At that point you might need to go back and verify the work but probably not before. Good science rises to the top because it provides a sound foundation to build upon.
however, if you need to actually use the results, you should verify them first.
This is absolutely right. If it's something that's important to you, then you better make sure.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yes, we know that H2O is a more powerful GHG than CO2. But CO2 is a GHG.
We also know that much of the Earths surface is covered in liquid water. The water vapour in the atmosphere is in equilibrium with the oceans. There is no way of increasing the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere (except by raising the temperature).
We know that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising.
We know the average global temperature is rising.
Start stropping your razor.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Poe?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
slick7, are you claiming that Pons and Fleischman actually did produce cold-fusion but were smeared because no has been able to reproduce their results?
My college physics teacher was the third member of that team. He was my teacher shortly (a year or so) after Pons and Fleischman published. He asked to have his name removed before they published because they, themselves, were unable to reproduce their results so he was certain that something had contaminated the environment and did not want to publish knowing that they could not reproduce it. His last name was Jones but I can't remember his first name. He taught at BYU.
No, the AC set up a straw man in his "experiment". It ignores the higher thermal capacity and lower heat conductivity of humid air compared to dry air, for starters. He may have a PhD in physics (so do I), but that doesn't excuse him from the fact that CO2 has been shown to be a greenhouse gas.
U+F8FF
You most certainly shouldn't simply trust the detectors and generators. You should separately verify that they are working properly by testing them against known samples (baselines and such). This does require trust at some level but by using baseline samples from separate vendors, you start gaining that trust.
I think from a practical standpoint, the science community has fallen into the hole the educational industry has: Relying soley on references on papers. If you have sufficient number of references, your paper gets a pass regardless on your data. This means you can easily piece together a paper that contradicts itself but still get published if you pet enough egos in the process.
I've found from my observations toward universities, even right down to high school level that it is taught that unless you reference a "known name" your work is crap. Many students (and even professional scientists) are not allowed to question any works produced by these "known names" unless they are a direct peer. This means even if one can with substancial data prove both Albert Einstinen and Stephen Hawking totally wrong in every respect with emprical evidence, that they would not be allowed (and in fact be shunned/banned from scientific groups) because it goes against "the norm". Take note of many revolutionary inventors in how hard it was to get even their practical empirical experiments acknowledged because major science panels did not want them disrupting what was the common belief to be true established by various notible names.
At this point and how referencing is regarded now, referencing is the scientific and acedemic community's way of enforcing a status quo. It is no longer about proving yourself or your data, it is about providing another column to another work to ensure that that other work is made "more unquestionable". Only if you're high enough on the food chain do you get columns supporting your work.
Referencing needs to get back to being a secondary measure of solidity where one's own data along with the mode of how an experiment was performed is the first, where if one wants to challenge, one can say "The mode of experimentation is faulty because..." and to intrinsicaly challenge the work on its own merits, THEN to use the references to back that up. Not references first then experimentation second.
A simple idea underpins science: 'trust, but verify'.
Not true - the scientific method is what underpins science. What you state there is about convenience, not science. If you think your information comes from a reputable source or it feels right, you won't spend as much time and resources on verifying - that is an expression of human weakness, not of scientific principles, and one could argue that this is the kind of behaviour that is more commonly associated with religion.
It is a common misunderstanding that scientific method is about discovering the truth; it isn't - or it is only in an indirect sense. The scientific method can not prove anything, it can only disprove; it discovers the lies, and what it cannot disprove can be regarded as somewhat similar to the truth - or a truth, since we don't actually know that there is just one truth. A theory is just a model that seems to fit our observations and hasn't been falsified yet, and experience tells us that sooner or later new observations will prove it wrong in some place.
If you have a doctorate in physics then you should have the chops to dig into it and find the proof that it's bullshit. You would really make a name for yourself if you did that.
I'm well aware that it generally gets colder on clear nights than on cloudy nights. First noticed it back in the 1960's. But to make your thought experiment valid you would have to limit your cloudiness* to the same narrow band in the sky as the exhaust from that smoke stack rather than covering most of the sky. I have my doubts you would notice a substantial difference in that case.
I agree that water vapor is a much larger part of the greenhouse effect than CO2 but water vapor is also the only significant greenhouse gas that is limited by the temperature of the atmosphere. If it gets colder there will be less water vapor in the atmosphere, if it gets hotter there will be more (as long as there is a source of water to evaporate which isn't a big problem since well over 70% of the Earths surface is covered by water). What follows from that is that changes in temperature driven by changes in non-condensing greenhouse gases like CO2 will affect the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.
If you were to remove all of the CO2 from the atmosphere the average surface temperature of the Earth would drop below freezing because the cooling effect of the missing CO2 although not enough to drop temperatures that much on its own would also cause water vapor to drop reducing temperatures even more.
*BTW, as you probably know the greenhouse effect of clouds is substantially different than simple water vapor. On the night side clouds will hold heat in but on the day side they can also reflect sunlight causing a cooling effect. Research indicates the overall greenhouse effect of clouds is probably slightly positive but the uncertainty range stretches from slightly cooling to moderately warming.
I would say the effort has been put into making it "scientifically incorrect" to deny that human caused changes in the level of greenhouse gases play a role in climate change. Scientists are drawn into the political arena kicking and screaming for the most part.
For drug companies this is actually extremely bad. Amgen and Bayer have spent billions trying to replicate drugs that just don't work.
For a long time I just blamed the pharmaceutical companies for why so many "cures" reported in research never made it to production. I thought they were just out for a profit and had no interest in cures. However based on some recent experience this is definitely not true for all of these companies. Some of them have tried very hard to bring these cures to market and spent billions of dollars trying to do it. The problem is that it turns out nearly all of these "cures" are just false. They can not be replicated to any degree.
This kind of behavior by scientists is also driving up the costs of healthcare. These companies continue to try to bring promising research to market but the success is so low that it drives up the costs of the drugs they do manage to make.
I have even worked with some researchers that just had no idea about statistical methods. They had never had any education on the subject. As a result their conclusions were worth as much as the paper they printed it on. The problem is that at least some of them really thought their data was good and showed what they wanted to show. Far too many scientists do NOT have the statistical training required of engineers and while it would help the field a lot I doubt they will do it because that level of math would cut out far too many people for the schools to allow that.
I don't really see a way to fix this unfortunately. If you change the incentive system to reward checking other peoples results you will get a bunch of simple and obvious papers that check something else. If there is a solution to this I don't really know what it looks like but we need to find it because this is seriously hurting the rest of the society and it makes it very hard for the actual legitimate scientists to spread real research that helps us all.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
TFA has a bit of cherry-picked data. While full professors at R1 (Doctoral) institutions do indeed make ~135k/year, at other classes of institutions, the salary is significantly lower (Master's & Bachelor's full professors make ~92k): http://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/files/2013%20Salary%20Survey%20Tables%20and%20Figures/Table%204.pdf
When am I going to bang out intelligible Slashdot posts with opposable thumbs? Yep, definitely no sign of evolution here.
I have a two step program for fixing that:
1) Put me in charge of everything.
2) I kill all my enemies, real and imagined, to make the perfect people for the greedless utopia I have created.
What could possibly go wrong?
Almost all science is wrong almost all the the time and that is how it should be. Scientific discovery advances as much through failed theories and hypothesis' as it does through proven ones. Looking at the history of the golden age of physics in the 1900's, everyone was building on the failed ideas which had the effect of narrowing options to more likely ones, and focusing effort.
Nothing you have said addresses his point.
On the contrary, I provided a link to a child demonstrating how to do something that was claimed to be impossible.
Of course, the reason the AC wouldn't be able to measure the effect is because his experiment was incompetent designed, which calls into question his "solid ground" science credentials. If you stand by a smokestack of a running coal plant, what are you proving? How are you going to measure the CO2 concentration at that location? If you can't measure the levels how are going to observe a change in them over time? Why would anyone expect there to be significant change in the local CO2 concentration while the plant is running? It was running before you got there and will be running after you leave. The proposed experiment demonstrates nothing to do with CO2 because it was designed by an angry and ignorant man who couldn't even be bothered to imagine doing the work correctly.
What he is talking about is settled science. Water vapor is not only the #1 greenhouse contributor, its effects are greater than all the other contributors combined.
Indeed it is. However, it is at saturation levels in the atmosphere, so globally it can't really be increased or decreased except by changes in the global average temperature. Which means it's a feedback mechanism which turn small temperature changes, like from increasing CO2 levels, into larger temperature changes. Which is why we're concerned with CO2 instead of water vapour.
But, of course, you already knew that.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
You know, the field that verifies theories without experiments?
No, I don't know this field.
Photons that split into alternate dimensions (carrying energy with them) and also send messages backwards in time, it's all on paper and considered fact, but no experiments have been done to prove it... does that now sound like craziness to anyone but me?
No, because these aren't accepted as established fact without evidence to back them up, contrary to your assertion, and because they were created in the first place to explain observed phenomena.
Actually, I initially read that as 'particularly high in boredom, which I thinks works as well.
It's not very exciting to reproduce somebody's results. That's something often given to undergrads / med students or the Really Slow Guy. And that's only if the Primary Investigator wants to spend the money. Biochem reagents and tools are damned expensive these days.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Math brings its own problems. Just to consider your example, it's easy to test ideas with a solid mathematical description and hard to test ideas that don't lend themselves to mathematical description. A lot of important phenomena is thus ignored because it can't be easily tested.
In our "publish or perish" culture so much second-order stuff gets published that it not worth verifyng (or reading).
You seem to be missing the lapse rate in your calculations which is probably why you've got confused about something that has been completely settled for about 70 years, the physics has been understood for about 100 years and was predicted about 150 years ago.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
A failure to find evidence is not proof of non-existance.
Anthropogenic Global Warming/ Manmade Global Warming
Sure, sure, but if a scientist can have a successful career based on fraudulent results - if the feedback is too slow - that will destroy the culture of science. If a scientist, not intending fraud, can get away with sloppy process his whole career, that will damage science. Published results guide thinking.
If published results are often wrong (or simply unfalsifiable), that has really bad effects on where research goes from there. The waste of multiple decades of research on string theory in the last century is a testament to that.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Over-rated? That's what Edison said of Tesla. Edison went around gathering cats and dogs to show people the "evils" of AC electricity and what would happen when you were Westinghoused. Over-rated is what happens when you go against the "establishment", tell that to Wilhelm Reich, who by the way, died in prison after his books were burned. Over-rated is J. P. Morgan actions against Tesla when he spoke of free power for the world. Over-rated are the actions of an out of control political system that believes extending the inevitable collapse of the economy for a few more monthe is a wise decision.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
If they're writing up non-reproduceable experiments, perhaps not. Mind you, there's hope at least in say physics or computer science where results are rather easily verifiable. Pseudo-sciences like anthropology or paleontology, where a handful of skulls is used to declare the details of millenial long processes or species-wide traits, well, not so much.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.