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Ask Slashdot: Why Does Science Appear To Be Getting Things Increasingly Wrong?
azaris writes: Recent revelations of heavily policy-driven or even falsified science have raised concern in the general public, but especially in the scientific community itself. It's not purely a question of political or commercial interference either (as is often claimed when it comes to e.g. climate research) — scientists themselves are increasingly incentivized to game the system for improved career prospects, more funding, or simply because they perceive everyone else to do it, too. Even discounting outright fraud or manipulation of data, the widespread use of methodologies known to be invalid plagues many fields and is leading to an increasing inability to reproduce recent findings (the so-called crisis of reproducibility) that puts the very basis of our reliance on scientific research results at risk. Of course, one could claim that science is by nature self-correcting, but the problem appears to be getting worse before it gets better.
Is it time for more scientists to speak out openly about raising the level of transparency and honesty in their field?
Is it time for more scientists to speak out openly about raising the level of transparency and honesty in their field?
1. difficulty: problems are getting harder to solve
2. error margin: and the demand for correctness is increasing
3. everyone's a scientist: but most are not really. there's a lot of charlatans out there
4. substitution: tons of stuff we thought we knew turned out to be wrong, because now we think we now better
5. mass: there's just so much "information" out there, there's bound the be something wrong. and the more there is the more will be wrong.
really... most things are just self evident.
"I've noticed several incidents of this happening" doesn't constitute a trend.
And science isn't immutable truth. It's defensible belief.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Hal Lewis’ Letter Resigning His Membership in APS
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it.
For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate.
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands
He accused the APS of being corrupt. The APS says he's full of shit and they're not getting any money to talk about climate change. If you're going to hype the "controversy", be honest and quote both sides.
If you're interested in reading papers outside of your area of expertise, this is what I'd recommend. Firstly, don't read the paper from front to back. Contemporary journal articles are way too dry for that and you likely don't care about all of the sections (eg, the experimental methods).
Read the abstract to determine if you are actually interested in what the paper is going to discuss. The abstract will also give you a decent idea of who the writer considers to be their audience; if the abstract is completely and totally over your head, you're not likely to understand most of the paper.
After that, you can skim the introduction to get a grasp of the context (and read any introductory subsections that you aren't familiar with or are fascinated by).
In my field (and many/most others?), the story is generally told through figures of data and their captions. Generally, you can inspect the figures and captions and get a very good idea of what the paper is saying and what they're basing their conclusions on. You can jump to parts of the discussion section if you want more information than the captions are providing.
The conclusions section ties it all together, but too often that section is just a wordier restatement of the abstract. The conclusions are also where you're most likely to find the speculative crap that excites journalists and potential sources of funding.
If you're really into the topic, or it's in your field, you can dive in and read the sections that interest you, but a well crafted scientific paper should be able to tell the whole story through the figures and captions.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
This is exactly what happened in Japan at the Riken Institute. A lead researcher made claimed to make a fantastic breakthrough, but it was unreproducible. Clearly the pressure to be a winner overwhelmed good scientific practice.
The FDA had to crack down on Big Pharma, because they were not reporting negative results from clinical tests. If you can pick and choose so that only positive outcomes are used, then it's as bad as not doing any tests at all. The motive was greed, and the public be damned.
The phrase "Publish or Perish" sums up the pressure that results in this behavior. It's exactly the same as predatory capitalism; if you can make money, then nothing else matters, even killing people.
Why is Snark Required?
If it is not Chemistry, Physics or Math, it is not science.
If it involves an experiment designed to falsify a hypothesis, then it is science. That includes far more than just the hard sciences. Also, Math is not a science, any more than a hammer is a bookshelf.
I have spent nearly 20 years at several different American universities doing biomedical research and your experience is very different from mine. I've repeated other people's work. It was never thought to be unusual because it isn't. Science is incremental, constantly building the new upon the old, including papers that win Nobels. The methods sections of any paper are full of repeating work, and the discussion section of any paper is full of comparing the new work to the old. It doesn't matter what country where the work's done, USA, Sweden, Japan, wherever.
Also, nobody tries to win Nobels except first year graduate students who don't know they're also in their last year, and cranks.
posting as AC because I'm moderating the thread.
Nope, not me at all. I was a tech, then got the PhD, then did postdoc #1, then in my second postdoc I realized there was one constant in science: grant money keeps getting harder to find. I never got higher up than a soft money supported university scientist. After bouncing around many different departments at several different universities I wanted to start a family, but that is completely irresponsible when grant paylines don't reliably hit 10% (they were designed for 35%). I left academia for industry but while job security and pay is better it's no picnic either. The "solution" every pharma CEO in the last decade has had for the shrinking drug pipeline is to fire even more scientists which means life sciences employment is in a crisis now and for the foreseeable future.
As for who does and does not get to do Nobel prize winning research you can't predict who or what will or won't get the prize with any real accuracy. My thesis advisor back in the day turned down a postdoc postion which won the runner up the Nobel. Being in the right place at the right time with enough brain cells to do the job worked for Kary Mullis and that crazy bastard's done little before or after other than a shitload of drugs and engage in conspiracy theories about UFOs and vaccines.
Obligatory XKCD
Oh, pooh-berries. Should have cited. Here ya go! http://data.worldbank.org/indi...