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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?
Stop watching idiots.
I think we are just beginning, more and more, to recognize the inherent limitations of terms like 'scientist'. Media outlets have to struggle to be the most clicked-on, first to break every story no matter how poorly researched or even conceived. The average citizen has access to resources that can verify the accuracy of almost anything. Unfortunately this tends to get lost among the increasingly noisy media. It also requires discipline, patience, and focus to actually apply such methods to anything. Most of the time we just take what we hear at face value - this has always been the way of things. Now, however, we feel somehow betrayed by our own conceptions when they turn out to be wrong.
... short term thinking. The mindset of our era is corporate heads wanting quick turn around for profit. This is what Harper did to canada, he re-oriented the science division towards the oil sands "supporting industry" any serious research that requires any length or depth gets cut.
Once you get past the hype, the media stories, the click bait; and learn how to actually read scientific papers, they seem about as accurate as they've ever been. The second half of this paper discusses the difficulties, and that was decades ago.
Also worth recognizing that science papers are not an attempt to define absolute truth, and people who use it as such (saying, "this paper says X, therefore X is true") are likely to be disappointed. Science papers are essentially correspondence between scientists, saying "hey, look what I did and how it turned out." It's a form of dialectic, and a good one, but not every paper will be equally good, or even true......nor is it intended to be.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Companies and politicians are more interested in looking good and in getting the snazzy release announcement / photo op then releasing accurate, neutral data to the public. An announcement will be heavily promoted / advertised and people will remember those ads more then they will remember the tiny retraction issues three weeks later.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
There are more scientists today at work than at any other time in the past. They produce better results than at any time in the past. Better tools and education have improved things to the human race in general and scientists in particular.
So if we assume that scientists are just as likely as a percentage to falsify work, we can safely assume that with more scientists today at work, and the good results better than previous results, there are more errors today and they appear to be more obvious.
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.
The increasingly vocal minority promoting no-holds-barred free market capitalism creates a race to the bottom in many fields - it's not only limited to employment, banking, etc. It started years ago with the 'publish or perish' mentality and has progressed now to where various political factions essentially 'buy off' people with college degrees (I won't call them scientists) to get up in front of people and publicly throw support behind their positions, often using sketchy numbers or questionable methods of data analysis. These days everything has to have a profit motive, and science is no different. People have learned that the best way to argue with someone who comes armed with solid facts is to invent your own facts and make them difficult or impossible to prove, hence confusing the hell out of everyone until nobody cares anymore.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
https://www.google.ca/search?q...
The rest of the steps are in place so the shit is gonna hit the fan soon.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
It is because Scientists are more willing to report corruption that we're seeing issues in public.
Or did someone think they're not people with ordinary people issues?
Stuart http://stuarthalliday.com/
I'm just being nit-picky, but I believe you should be asking about scientists, or the scientific community, not science itself.
just like in the private sector we have seen more and more engineering called R&D, in academia there is more non-research people pushing for research that produces practical results. The result is actually less true research in major research universities. This combined with shrinking tenure track positions, older researchers staying longer in their positions, more and more post docs with no ability to get research money because it all goes to people that are proven Principal Investigators means that very few recent graduates of MS or PhD programs can actually follow their research instincts. Instead they do work on the projects of people who want to make safe decisions. I saw this in the large corporations world wide and in major research universities in the US over the last decade two decades.
The post attempts to criticize scientists using assumptions not scientifically examined themselves. "Increasing inability," "appears to be," "as is often claimed," "increasingly incentivized," "widespread." Such terms don't even pass muster on Wikipedia, let alone actual scientific journals.
Really? Show me the data. Like a scientist. Is the number of retracted articles increasing in a statistically significant way? Is there a statistically significant change in the types of funding incentives? What is the level at which you call something "widespread?" Prove to me that science itself is actually getting things "wrong" at any rate higher than before. But if you want to attack science, you need to do it on their terms.
Phrasing the question in this way shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. It assumes a narrative and then rapid-links a bunch of anecdotes before asking a direct question about the character of an entire profession.
If it was always getting things right then it would be prophecy, not science. Science is the art of getting things wrong in order to figure out what's correct.
... it's the media messing things up. The endless race to publish something, anything, leads to headlines like "XYZ is bad for you!" Then you read the actual study, and it turns out the "reporter" is talking about a minor study on a different topic that had a mere handful of study participants. Of course, no effort is made to actually interview the study authors, or "the authors did not respond to our request for an interview." I find that Gawker and HuffPo are among the worst offenders.
The structure of University research is a huge part of this. Researchers don't care about truth or quality of their research. They care about keeping their jobs and their pay, which means several things:
1) Publishing something that's "interesting" is more important than being accurate.
2) Giving your funding providers the results they want is more important than being accurate.
3) Null-hypotheses get avoided at all costs, so results are fabricated to avoid that case.
As long as these goals are present and more important to scientists and the scientific community at large than doing actual science, this will always be a serious problem.
"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
We don't need independent verification and reproducibility anymore. The science is settled because we have consensus.
Yes, I realize that's a bit of cherry-picking examples but all too often logical fallacies are used to justify when these things happen. I'd suggest it's an ethics crisis rather than a science crisis.
What do you get when respected members of a group have their work questioned? They call their detractors 'deniers' and try to establish a consensus, (as if a fact is something that could be voted upon), to cover up their mistakes and double down on their flawed models. I give you N Rays.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
It takes a jack-ass who refuses to blindly accept to point out the Emperor has no clothes and prove it.
'Murica, we're filled with Jack-Asses ;)
Not until every scrap of food on earth is covered by intellectual property laws. Then we can discuss your "transparency and honesty".
But it's Friday night, and that means the weekly open meeting of the Royal and Ancient Society of Slashdot Breitbarters has been called into session, so please proceed without further interruption.
[Note: the phrase that pays for our drinking game tonight is, "...funded by Big Climate Change..."
You are welcome on my lawn.
We are finally asking the right questions. Bravo.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
It is fraudsters, spin-doctors, etc. that try to capitalize on the good name of science. Unfortunately, most of them are "scientists", at least in name, if not in outlook, methods and goals. That makes it very hard for common citizens and sometimes even for scientists in other fields to identify the frauds. Typical examples are politically appointed professors, corporate "scientists" that merely serve as PR stooges and people claiming scientist status in fields they know nothing about.
The underlying problem is a stronger and stronger tendency in society to disregard reality, even resembling a belief that reality gets "crafted". Whole true for the perception many humans have of reality, this does not change physical reality at all and can be outright suicidal. It may be that most of those in power have an entirely false belief that humans are masters of the world and do not need to seek truth anymore in order to better their fate. That can only lead to a catastrophic outcome.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There are two answers to this, the first is the easy answer:
Science is often "wrong." This is how science works: you come up with a theory or some measurements, support it as best you can, but expect someone to do it better in a few years. Often "better" means results so different from what was seen before that the prior work is now considered "wrong." As we get better at science, this happens faster.
The second answer is a bit more complicated and acknowledges that there is a real problem.
To me, this is real and it's due to the recent loss in prestige and ability in government/industrial labs combined with the emergence of the internet. This led to the use of journal publication metrics to arbitrate scientific disputes instead of government or industrial validations. (This is different from the problem of sponsored research.) Using publications to "decide" scientific rightness instead of independent validations has also put immense stress on the peer review and publishing systems. Use of fast-but-incorrect techniques, shortcuts, and repetition of boilerplate language is very effective at rapidly generating publications, and thus is more "scientifically correct" in the current system. This is happening while the public has more access to this content that should not be reasonably expected to contain absolute truth.
Stupider scientists.
Footnote: THe smarter people being driven to do something else.
Moores law failing means my new laptop is on par with an atari2600 - just slightly better than the computers Neolithic people's used. Furthermore the earth really is flat and 6000 years old, the space station is the biggest lie next to the moon landings, why else would Pixar and Disney Studios be funded by secret government grants? Global warming - pshhhtt - pure hubris to think we puny humans can change anything. Why my life became so much simpler when I realized the external world is simply my internal world - whatever I believe is therefore true to me and I'm the only one that matters!
Double dare you science types to disprove that with your fail sauce 'science'...
Intellectually dishonest??
A post that quotes a real life physicists analysis of the problem?
Hive mind indeed.
That is the opinion of one physicist.
Now lets heard the opinion of other 48,000 APS members myself included.
The guy is full of shit.
I've done biomedical research in the US and Sweden. The incentive structure is totally different. Swedish scientiests take baby steps and reproduce results repeatedly before moving on. American scientists are all trying to win the Nobel prize. They shoot for the big result and nobody gets a grant in the US for repeating results of someone else. Is it a surprise that people respond to the incentives before them?
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Man, go read some of the shit that went down at the start of the industrial revolution, then come back here and say that. There have always been quacks and frauds around the fringes, and plenty of gullible people for them to prey on. If anything we're unmasking them more quickly in this day of instantaneous communication. Money clearly can subvert the process if someone has an agenda and a lot of money, but again, nothing new there. Money's been subverting the best of human intentions for thousands of years. If anyone has any suggestions on how to prevent that, I'm all ears.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"Why Does Science Appear To Be Getting Things Increasingly Wrong?"
Probably because you have more difficulty looking at things that are in the future and near term but don't understand that the past has been largely settled.
To put it another way, your perceptions of the past being more accurate is caused by the filters of history and time. You aren't seeing all the chaff.
This answer can be easily answered. Science appears to be getting worse because of a increased media coverage on the topic. To proof this, you may count the number of such media reports over time.
The article itself provides some hypotheses on the topic of "Is science getting worse?" That might be. However, I have not seen any data to support that. Even though I would also assume that present day funding methods could increase bias and negligence. But this must be tested before the assumption becomes a valid hypothesis.
Judging by the content of your post, the only thing the "negroid race" has to fear is slipping down to your level of intelligence.
Seems unlikely, though.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In the information age, reasonably well trained scientsts are probably better than they have ever been. However, a lot of anti-science politics and an increasing list for sensationalism in the media shed more light on scientific failure than in the past.
Science is built on failure. And incrementally correcting it. It's how we learn. If you have enough brains to accept that all of science is to some lesser or greater degree "probably approximately correct" based on what we know, and what we know will change, then you won't go insane thinking that science is in any way like those religions people chase after because they want TRUTH RIGHT NOW. Neither religion nor science will give you perfect truth right now -- just only one of them is honest about it.
A lot of people have fundamental intellectual problems accepting uncertainty or non-binary reasoning.
Science isn't even that. Science is a method. What you put in is behavior that hopefully complies with the method, and what you get out is data, broken into empirical and behavioral observations, to which we can apply some measure of confidence. The method -- science -- is quite solid. It's the rest that is error prone. All of it. In fact, as soon as "belief" replaces carefully restrained confidence, you're already screwing up.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"... problem appears to be getting worse..." [emphasis mine]
Anybody want to bust out some science and actually try measuring something, or just wanna sit around and whine?
Maybe -- just maybe -- you're hearing about it more because thanks to the Internet, there is more info about everything in front of you at all times. So perhaps that explains why you're seeing more bad science? (And everything else.)
Or maybe you could ask the tiny fucking supercomputer that's in your pocket with instant access to 98% of all human knowledge and voice recognition about the state of science today. Jesus fucking christ.
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
one could claim that science is by nature self-correcting
That is rather the point, isn't it? Take gravity, for example. From Galileo's models of uniform acceleration, to Newton's Universal Gravitation, to Einstein's Relativity theories, etc. each of these guys knew that their models for gravity were incomplete. Yet, each of them served as increasingly accurate tools to observe the universe and make predictions about its behavior. Someday, somebody will figure out how to make a model that ties gravity out between quantum and classical mechanics, which will be more accurate still, but almost certainly will not be absolutely complete.
When you say "science" do you mean the Scientific Method? The scientific method remains one of the most reliable methods for verifying truth. Intelligent design, astrology and alchemy may have adherents that consider them "science" but that doesn't mean they are. Science is the Scientific Method. Period. Full Stop.
You brought up the example of cholesterol. Based upon the science of the time, an increase of LDL cholesterol corresponded with an increased risk of heart problems. That is still true. They simply said "eat less of this bad stuff" which seems intuitive. If science research mirrored religion, that would be the end of it, and maybe the rest of western civilization would have followed the Jewish and Islamic faiths into the abyss of bacon deprivation. Thankfully, that is not the end of the story, scientific work continued (yes, that science) and now we know that dietary consumption of cholesterol is not the primary contributor to LDL levels. Will there be another study that shows that eating certain foods, perhaps in combination, do, in fact, contribute to high LDL levels? It wouldn't surprise or distress me if there was. I would not want to wait until there could be absolute certainty that eating mayonnaise in combination with french fries somehow appeared to skyrocket LDL levels. I would like to know soon enough that I can do something about it, even if that information gets refined later on.
You could make an argument that there is a "scientific community" that is increasingly accommodating shoddy science. But that isn't a failure of science, any more than a nut job driving a car bomb screaming "Allahu Akbar" is a failure of religion.
It takes a better scientist to correct a scientist. For all these mistakes to come to light is a sign that we are getting smarter, that research is becoming more open, and that science is accelerating. A lot of it is thanks to the internet and the speed at which information can travel. Catching our mistakes is progress. Any scientist knows this.
> that puts the very basis of our reliance on scientific research results at risk
Utter nonsense. Science is about applying our findings and building new technology. Results that cannot be reproduces are completely useless. The faster we weed them out the better.
Our reliance on scientific research is permanent. Our reliance on useless research is what needs to go.
Basically, I suspect that science that is not evaluated scientifically loses precision and credibility.
Take the headline in the original post: How many people actually read the headline, saw the modal argument, and realized that the presupposition was leading to a straw man argument?
Now take an hypotheses with lots of data and present it to multiple administrators, legislators, politicians and the public: How many will subject this presentation to even the most rudimentary argument mapping such as a Toulmin worksheet? How many are even capable?
Science is not "wrong" or "right"; hypotheses are supported or unsupported. Conclusions are never actually true or false, just justified by the evidence subject to the limits of experimentation so far.
So, the sooner some of you software geniuses create something to quickly and efficiently evaluate and sort the arguments, the quicker we can weed out the crap and improve on the quality scientific endeavors.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
For those that say you should just trust scientist X on anything, this if further evidence as to why that is fallacious thinking.
If the scientists can back up what they're saying and prove it, then fine. Proof is proof.
If they can't really prove it in a way that anyone can understand but they want you to trust them?... Ehm... depends on what that means. If they tell me something about a distant solar system that doesn't really effect anything on earth one way or the other... then sure... whatever guys. It doesn't really matter to me. If whatever it is effects me here and now, then yeah... I'm going to want something tangible or it needs to be explained with evidence in a way that makes sense.
Absent that... Absolutely not.
And anyone that disagrees can enjoy their medication that is actually poison and other fun stuff.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I know people who are recent PhDs in various sciences and with only a few exceptions they have real trouble finding financing that doesn't end up going to various vested interests within their research institutions. Basically once it looks like money is coming their way all of a sudden a handful of boomer tenured professors have their hands deep into their pockets. Without it being a written rule these junior PhDs suddenly need "mentoring" or some other bullshit excuse. But when the budget is laid out the boomer will get a massive salary compared to the PhD who's research attracted the money in the first place. But then suddenly other things appear where the boomer will be the first name on any research. This is only the tip of the iceburg where the funding agencies are also cajoled into giving the money to the institution for them to disperse which means that even the boomer professor won't do well.
But in a very few instances I have seen where the money literally went to the PhD and he could even switch institutions and the money will follow. In those cases the university is 90% happy to let the PhD write the rules but still pressure for some of the money to find its way to a few boomers.
A common overlap is that the boomers to whom they try and direct the money to are also the same ones who usually are the ones who wrote the textbook that the students are forced to buy.
One great expression is: "Science progresses one funeral at a time." and I have seen this very much in action where the above are the success stories. The more likely scenario is that the younger PhD is looking for money to basically prove the boomers discoveries wrong or incomplete. The boomers are consulted as "experts" prior to a funding decision and they say that they might as well fund paranormal studies. Thus the younger PhDs are not allowed to explore the new and the only money goes to confirming what is "known".
Then at the other end of the research (assuming it is funded) is when they go to publish and the "anonymous" reviewers are those boomers with a vested interest in the research never seeing the light of day. So instead of being published in Nature they are relegated to publications one step up from a high school science fair.
But then there is one last FU waiting for younger researchers where they will publish something fundamental in a third rate journal only to have a "respected elder" in their field effectively republish the same results in a major journal and have that publication be the one that is heavily cited.
The last layer of stupid is where a few of the top schools seem to have the ears of the media. So if they come up with a solar cell that is 5% in one way while much worse in 20 other ways they will make the science news in many publications as "revolutionizing" solar power. But someone in a 2nd or 3rd tier university who comes up with a new solar cell that is 5% better in a few ways and as good as in all other ways will be ignored. This is critical because this is where new corporate funding often comes from.
But once in an extreme blue moon someone young and hungry gets out there and sets the world on fire. This despite so many layers of old school thinking these few bright lights do manage to squeak through. This is why science is so very off the rails. Most of the institutions don't exist to further real science but to ensure the tenure of those who have put in the decades and are "entitled" to their security.
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.
When a subject has been politicized, the conclusions section will often conclude things that are somewhat divergent from, or even directly contradictory to, the actual results of the paper. This is because, in a politicized environment, the funders may pay attention to the conclusions section and only fund new projects for those who come to the "right" conclusions. Scientists finding unpopular-with-funders results may protect their careers by stating the funder-correct results in the conclusions but making it clear in the body of the paper that things are really otherwise.
The first time I encountered this was during the '60s and '70s, with research on what are now called "recreational drugs". The contrast was hilarious. (Eventually the government effectively shut down research on such drugs, for decades. Perhaps they figured out what was going on?)
IMHO governments, with politicians' power at stake and the public purse to fund them, play far more of this selective-funding game than corporate interests.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Why is the word science so insanely abused?
By definition - science can never be wrong - it is the definition of reality.
We need to defend the word because it represents an important idea. People who wrongly use the term need to be corrected.
And don't get me started on math - its a language - just because the grammar is correct doesn't mean the idea expressed is true.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Have you ever looked up just how many Bayesian algorithms have been patented? Even crackpot approaches that do literally nothing have been patented as if neither the authors nor the reviewers knew anything about Bayesian statistics or algorithms. My favorite is a way to calculate the number of iterations required to produce optimized posteriors for coupled probabilities where in order to manage computation time by knowing how many iterations the algorithm requires, it's run twice and counted forward and backward. Yes, you read that right. Somebody basically patented figuring out how many cards are in a deck by counting it twice.
Now consider how important Bayesian statistics are to science and consider the role of computation in research. Along with all the other sources of corruption, patent trolls are helping to kill research. Just another symptom of the idiocratic patent office.
I reject the submission's premise: neither the submission, nor any of the articles it links to, actually demonstrates that science is getting things "increasingly" wrong. No comparison of values over time, no controlled experiments ... it'd be fun and ironic to complain about the statistical significance of the submission's data, but I can't because there isn't any data. The warning some of the articles make about using p=.05 as an acid test when doing broad surveys is useful, but the fact that people are thinking about that now shows how science is *improving*.
So why is scientific error in the news so often? The submission skimmed right past it: public relations sabotage by political and commercial interests who stand to gain by casting doubt on science. Global warming deniers, anti-vaccine nuts, anti-evolution zealots, nontraditional medicine snake-oil salesmen ... there's money to be made, and votes to be won, by making scientists sound like they don't know what they're talking about.
And no, I don't have any rigorous data to support my claim. But according to the submission, I should treat all data as baloney and make my arguments based on truthiness alone.
That link to the APS is just a statement of growth and not opinion. I do agree that even the best of us can get stuck with our paradigms creating enough inertia not to be able to accept change. Happens all the time.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
The problem with that is the way to scientific immorality is to overturn the existing standards. If the science is wrong it can't hide from objective reality forever.
Kinda funny how there is a consensus in a field when every model produced by the experts in the field has proven to be wrong.
Perhaps your failure to understand the criteria that models should be measured against is the problem.
You're absolutely right about incentives and grant money.
How you tied this to the Nobel Prize is beyond me, so let's drop that.
The incentives are all about grant money and outside (the campus) capital. As a result, the science takes a back seat to market economics, market-ing (both of corporate partners and of academic institutions themselves, which increasingly operate in a competitive marketplace for enrollments), management concerns, investors, etc.
This incentive structure is increasingly becoming the norm well beyond U.S. shores.
So the problem isn't that science is increasingly wrong, it's that scientists are increasingly doing labor that may *involve* science, but that is in fact product-oriented R&D driven by short-term investment timelines and economic and investor-friendly optics, and whether any of it is good *science* is secondary or tertiary to whether it's profitable, whether directly or indirectly.
Let the scientists go back to doing science first and money-making (whether to support their own tenure lines or to support corporate profits) second or even better, third, fourth, or fifth, and you'll find that the ship rights itself.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
What you pointed out is a big problem, but don't pretend the way science is funded isn't broken. You have to publish to get jobs, and "massaging" the data to get better results is very common now. Plus in any field with money, there is distorting effects. I can't find the slashdot link, but there was a doctor that reigned from a major journal saying there was no independent evidence that statins helped at all and he felt he could no longer trust a lot of medical studies. Also don't forget all the important people in places like the FDA are future and or former corporate heads, and yes it effects their judgement.
There is something to be said for the empiricism of mathematics.
It may be far less prevalant, but I do believe it is there; consider that one almost never knows the consequences of assumptions before hand with any certainty (although good mathematicians have intuitions of course). Mathematics is an exploration of structures which are not completely understood. Ever. In this sense the study of highly complex human made structures is still science because we don't necessarily get even close to understanding our creations. This is why we have something called legal science (in Europe at least); it might not be a hard science but I think its fair to call it a science.
Indeed, in mathematics we even have Gödel's second incompleteness theorem which shows us we cannot use mathematics to prove its own consistency, and thus must settle for an empirical exploration of the consistency of our axiomatic systems.
"I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job."
~~Samuel Goldwyn
Check out Negative Results are Disappearing from Most Disciplines and Countries [2011] from master lexicographer Daniele Fanelli, whose other 2009 work on scientific misconduct was covered on Slashdot. He finds "the proportion of papers that, having declared to have tested a hypothesis, reported a full or partial support has grown by more than 20% between 1990 and 2007." One thing that jumped at me in Fanelli's paper [Fig 3, p7] was the smoothness of this progression for the US authors, as compared with other countries.
Richard Feynman noted "The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's most interesting." Are we seeking those things? Newton was almost right. Bereft of rigorous testing to invalidate popular hypotheses, would we be likely to notice "negative results" such as the disparities that revolutionized quantum mechanics? Or would they be swept under the rug of selective funding and implied consensus? "Of the hypothesized problems, perhaps the most worrying is a worsening of positive-outcome bias. A system that disfavours negative results not only distorts the scientific literature directly, but might also discourage high-risk projects and pressure scientists to fabricate and falsify their data." Say it isn't so!
What is being claimed here is a progressive shortage of applied effort to discredit popular hypotheses. We may be great guessers, but it is not always a waste of time and effort to back-check, to reproduce. Does it come down to money?
Or are people letting themselves become a teeny bit religious about science?
Isn't this what Carl Sagan warned us about?
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
The rest of the article can be skipped. Clickbait.
Rarely will a biologist, say, coauthor a paper with a statistician and a computer scientist (or better, a programmer). ... right? ... right?
After all, there are statistics apps and programming isn`t that hard
And no statistician could understand the intricacies of biology, same for a computer scientist (obviously)
So like the persons doing their own home renovations, some get it right without a professional, and a lot more don't. The tools are available but they just don't truly understand them nor know how to use them properly.
Ask yourself: how many students went in to psychology, biology, anthropology, etc. because they hated and/or were poor at math? Should you trust their statistics as researchers?
The world of science need cooperation, 'silos of knowledge' belong to the nineteenth century.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I tend to blame the modern political mindset rather than capitalism. I think the problem is that politicians tend to treat "science" as just another political party. I better explain that a little...
There seems to be an idea in political circules that perception == reality. i.e. whatever people believe to be true is effectively true, at least for purposes of governemnt and re-election. Because of this, politicians tend to state as truth whatever they want the truth to be, in the hope and expectation that if they convince enough people then that statement will become true, for political criteria of truth, anyway.
So when a scientist finds evidence for something that that works against a politician's aims, the politician tends react as if it was a political statement. It's automatically held to be false (because perception == truth) and the politican immediately move to discredit the offending notion by whatever means necessary. It's a fundamental clash of mindsets.
Lately, I think science as a whole must have been causing more than the usual amount of headaches in some quarters, because the we seem to have moved from attempting to discredit particular scientific opinions to discrediting science as a whole. So we have attempts to apply moral relativism to scientific opinion, attempts to paint scientists as basically corrupt and venal, etc, etc.
That's my take on it anyway.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
It's an effect of our evolution. There is more science being done, and our tools are getting better so we can test more theories.
... when there's money to be made. This is not new; look to Thomas Edison and his demonstration of the "danger" of alternating current. He electrocuted an elephant with a ghastly display of indifference to suffering, all in a disingenuous attempt to convince consumers to choose his direct current system.
That title is pure unadulterated yak dung! Granted that for the average lay person, even upon very close inspection, finely refined yak dung is barely distinguishable from finely refined bovine feces from the male Bos taurus indicus... Just because the media says so and the lay public believes them doesn't in any way reflect on 99.99% of real scientists doing actual science. Perhaps my experience is anecdotal but the scientists that I know personally are honest ethical professionals. Furthermore the scientific method is a self correcting process and as far as I can tell peer review still works and science does not appear to be getting things increasingly wrong! Quite the contrary...
"Is it time for more scientists to speak out openly about raising the level of transparency and honesty in their field?"
It has already happened - that's how you got to hear about it.
Liberals have infiltrated science to such a degree and they have politicized everything done with science to such a degree that at this point only a moron would believe anything printed in the mainstream liberal scientific literature. I recently saw a poll done by an economist (one of the few decent scientific fields left free of liberalisms degradation) that showed almost all self-identified scientists called themselves liberals and voted democrat. That alone tells you all you need to know about science and how it has become the primary way that liberals try to undermine the USA economically and socially.
Most "science" is geared towards profit making (creating new or novel commodities), not actual progression of knowledge. Just look at the figures for R&D investments vs marketing investments and you will understand the point.
Obvious troll is obvious.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
A drug maker comes out with a new drug that is "twice as effective as a placebo." That sounds scientific, and it is. But the part of statistics that is poorly understood, at least by the public, is the margin of error. Many of these studies show results that are well within the margin of error, so an effect that is "double" that of the control group is actually meaningless.
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False!
P-values are bunk in many (30%) of cases.
I think it is laughable, when viewed against the net of human history, to say that there is a problem with science. The world is increasingly wealthy overall. However, there is a problem in complexity. There is a misunderstanding even among scientists about the fundamental mathematical underpinnings of information. The butterfly effect and the P=NP problem essentially say that, as far as math goes, we don't know what initial dependency might have some severe effect downstream, and that, if there are too many variables, we can't do much anyway.
Yet, politicians of certain political stripes and some scientists themselves are enamored of the idea that we should have "science based" policy making. Policy making is about masses of people, and too many variables. Thus, even though science can say, "these people are less meat based upon and were be better off", science cannot say "everyone will be better off if we eat less meat so let's make it a law". Indeed, there's a baked in butterfly effect that says any public policy has winners and losers. When we make laws that say, 90% of the people will be better off, well, those 10% are going to be irritated. At some point, as a civilization wanders through its history, it accumulates more and more of those people that were screwed by the law. People being what they are, they don't care about how they might have benefited through being in the 90% groups, but how they were in the 10%. If new science proves that the people in the 10% were actually -right-, then, it only makes matters worse.
From a government perspective, we've actually picked the worst things to apply science to. In most people's lives, it is their diet that matters most and the science underpinning FDA recommendations and recommendations from other food authorities has been fabulously and publicly wrong. Many Americans have grown up hearing that first, butter was bad, then, butter was good, then, corn syrup was better than sugar, then sugar is better. First, its clogging of the arteries caused by cholesterol caused by diet, then, just as every middle aged american devours statins, we find out it is a combination of stress and lifestyle. It doesn't help that the public lumps doctors in with scientists - to them, scientists just means "smart people", and they see doctors screw up enough that every family has the story of the loved one that doctors wronged.
The mistrust of the medical establishment when it comes to diet is epidemic and bipartisan. There's plenty of both tree hugging liberals and gun toting conservatives reading about various health food supplement and other weird nonsense about diet and health and even medicine on the internet. The FDA and the food industry alike are seen as corrupt in the minds of both conservatives and liberals is telling. Granted, they filter that corruption into their own political worldview, but that they don't trust these institutions at all suggests a real problem.
From there, it is easy to see, that if the public doesn't believe any of the science about the thing most common in its life, and the institutions designed to protect that science, then, it is going to be a hard sell for the public to genuinely trust science in anything beyond the latest breakthrough to make their consumer products better.
This is my sig.
Science gets things wrong all the time. In the pursuit of the understanding of Nature, we only have a few reliable tools. One of them is modelling. Nature so far has resisted all attempts, and so all models are wrong at some level. However some are useful.
The general thinking is that we will never have a perfect understanding of Nature, and so Science will never be completely right and completely finished.