Slashdot Mirror
New Stanford Institute To Target Bad Science
ananyo writes "John Ioannidis, the epidemiologist who published an infamous paper entitled 'Why most published research findings are false', has co-founded an institute dedicated to combating sloppy medical studies. The new institute is to focus on irreproducibility, waste in science and publication bias. The institute, called the Meta-Research Innovation Centre or METRICS, will, the Economist reports, 'create a "journal watch" to monitor scientific publishers' work and to shame laggards into better behaviour. And they will spread the message to policymakers, governments and other interested parties, in an effort to stop them making decisions on the basis of flaky studies. All this in the name of the centre's nerdishly valiant mission statement: "Identifying and minimising persistent threats to medical-research quality."'"
It's a fucking good idea and one that's LONG overdue. Huh wonder why it took so long for researchers to think of it , especially since literally every other conceivable aspect of reality, meta-reality and hyper-meta-reality has been plumbed.
Next up, journal of completely worthless careers spent discovering trivial "effects" within say, Human Computer Interface "research" that just don't matter , at all.
After that let's start a record of lectures by professors' that are actually, really, I mean in reality, incomprehensible because most of the language constructs they're forming literally make no sense even to experts ion their field or are just plain factually wrong or are merely recitations of advanced findings in their fields offered without first introducing basic concepts or how about professors who make it an art to rummage around in the theoretical junk bin delivering lectures about theories no one including themselves believes at all. That's a special one too. l Loved it when i mentioned mid lecture that something about the theory didn't seem right and my prof answered "just one thing?" and then toddled on through the whole landscape the rest of the semester.
Fucking college is a scam where the admin and profs suck the financial life out of their unwitting students like vampires and then leave their victims to wander, the financial undead, trying to pay off the student loans which finance their professors' lavish and hypercompensated lifestyles:
https://chronicle.com/article/...