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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.
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.
... 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.
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.
It's intellectually dishonest to post that letter without giving the APS a chance to respond, so I'll briefly quote them:
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.
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
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.
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!"
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
Don't be absurd. Of course I've heard that F!=ma. That's well covered by the time you finish a Physics PhD.
Newton's laws are perfectly good approximations for most cases, but they're not always valid. Newton was wrong, that was the point of relativity. And yes, we're looking forward to correcting relativity when we do figure out dark matter and energy. Einstein had the intelligence to know he was wrong when he formulated general relativity; no one has figured out how to fix it yet.
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
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.
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.)
No more needs to be said.
How sad.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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!