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Can Bad Scientific Practice Be Fixed?
HughPickens.com writes: Richard Horton writes that a recent symposium on the reproducibility and
reliability of biomedical research discussed one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with science (PDF), one of our greatest human creations. The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. According to Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, a United Kingdom-based medical journal, the apparent endemicity of bad research behavior is alarming. In their
quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world or retrofit hypotheses to fit their data.
Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivized to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivized to be productive and innovative. Tony Weidberg says that the particle physics community now invests great effort into intensive checking and rechecking of data prior to publication following several high-profile errors. By filtering results through independent working groups, physicists are encouraged to criticize. Good criticism is rewarded. The goal is a reliable result, and the incentives for scientists are aligned around this goal. "The good news is that science is beginning to take some of its worst failings very seriously," says Horton. "The bad news is that nobody is ready to take the first step to clean up the system."
Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivized to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivized to be productive and innovative. Tony Weidberg says that the particle physics community now invests great effort into intensive checking and rechecking of data prior to publication following several high-profile errors. By filtering results through independent working groups, physicists are encouraged to criticize. Good criticism is rewarded. The goal is a reliable result, and the incentives for scientists are aligned around this goal. "The good news is that science is beginning to take some of its worst failings very seriously," says Horton. "The bad news is that nobody is ready to take the first step to clean up the system."
It's not.
No.
A null hypothesis is usually nothing but a strawman. If you act like disproving strawmen has a valid role in science you will get these problems. Once you accept that the path forward becomes clear. Unfortunately that means also accepting that most stuff since 1940 will have to be redone.
Yes, by education. It costs money.
fix that first. science can lead the way.
The case against journalism is straightforward: much of the news articles, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, journalists has taken a turn towards darkness. The apparent endemicity of bad journalist behavior is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, journalists too often sculpt facts to fit their preferred narrative of the world or retrofit hypotheses to fit their data.
Unlike journalists, however, science will always have to bow to reality. So, yeah, bad science practice will eventually run aground when reality hits, no matter how many epicycles one add to the model. But bad journalism will persists as long as it attracts eyeballs.
Oliver.
Bad scientific practices can't be fixed, but they can be ignored and discarded. However, we live in a world where one data point is enough to foresee rising trends in just about anything, so I guess it's going to be business as usual.
The MMR vaccine fiasco is of course the classic example of this; there are still people acting on the assumption that the lies were true, and that's getting people killed.
Modern culture celebrates the storyteller, not the story. Hence, video articles on Slashdot, "vlogs" and countless Youtube channels of lameness.
...when we replaced the scientific method with scientific consensus?
That 99 out of 100 scientists agree one thing is true doesn't make it true - it may be, it may not be, but the number of people that believe doesn't make it so.
When the scientific community is caught 'correcting' raw data and ostracizing 'non-believers' that challenge their beliefs they undermine the public trust in 'science'.
I was taught that the scientific method welcomed challenges to accepted beliefs - a return to that position would go a long way towards reforming belief in science.
Ken
There will always be shitty studies out there. With the proliferation of these pseudo-journals there will be even more bad science out there. This science is a waste of time of money but I don't think it poses much of a direct threat to progress. The bulk of the wrong studies are likely also the obviously bad and unintersting studies. These are the studies that nobody reads. The quantity of genuinely significant work (stuff that pushes forward a field) is tiny. When something that looks like this comes out it is immediately mobbed: people rush to reproduce the results and/or use the new techniques. If it's wrong we'll know very soon. In practice there is always an attempt to replicate the important stuff, even though the publish or perish nature of science means that pure replication studies are rarely carried out and instead are dressed up as a minor extension of preceeding work. The lesson is that it's dangerous to treat a single study as definitive. Wait for the field to catch up and, where appropriate, wait for the meta-studies.
soylentnews.org
Much of the problem comes from studies being published whose data is not robust because the sample size is too small to be meaningfully significant. This needs to be headlined in the abstract if it is published at all; the best magazines should refuse anything without a decent sample size, whilst the ones further down the food chain should have statisticans on hand to ask hard questions.
Discovering an apparent effect should result in more research - not a rush to believe...
That's exactly what scientists should be doing, re-testing long held dogma taking advantage of state of the art equipment. It's a human endeavor, so sometimes they'll make mistakes. The scientists who reported the results presented plenty of caveats, but nobody listened.
Climate science is the most politically tainted and diseased field of all.
We could start fixing things here. The statement that 'much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue' is linked to a 4-year old news article which has no mention or evidence for the claim.
No new news here. Similar to those who claim that publishing in a referreed journal is anything other than a start on the process. We don't reward validation (or invalidation) of model and measurement-based science anywhere near the level we do those who make the original (claimed) discovery. Until we do it's just science of old. We could start with a requirement for any government funded research to be published and archived in some cloud repository (verified as part of the next grant award), not just the resulting paper but all the data and code. If there's an IP reason to hold private until some money can be made, put an embargo on it for seven years or so and after that depend on copyright protections.
Another sad example is the bad science behind fifty years of low-fat food guidance that was overturned only recently some decades after the "big men" of that era died and could no longer shout down their deniers.
We now know that obesity and diabetes largely track high carb and purposefully low-meat-fat diets. The U.S. food police got it badly wrong starting back in the 1950s. The has caused no end of misery and even early death in the mistaken religious-like faith that meat fat is the same as body fat leading to fat plaque in arteries. All because "science" and the government (even the FLOTUS) said "live this way to live longer" even though it was never proven to prevent any heart disease (faster emergency care, defib units everywhere, statins perhaps, etc. have increased lifetimes far more than diet - and even exercise). See Nina Teicholz superbly footnoted text "The Big Fat Surprise" (following in the footsteps of Gary Taubes good work). Note this Stanford prof from a decade ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eREuZEdMAVo&feature=youtu.be&t=3237
We inflate the importance of "science" - when instead cold reality is that every claim that hasn't been re-validated multiple times over a decade or three should just be ignored (especially in terms of informing any policy or law). It certainly should not override the first democratic right - that of voting with your wallet until well after a long cooling off period - 50 years is about right. Not that results shouldn't be published and evangelized to the public, but it must remain an individual choice, not a government dicta given how often the science is just wrong:
http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
Worse is those who in ignorance or malice let this common failure and nonsense survive in their "science" without any humility that this might well be the case, no matter how well intentioned:
http://xkcd.com/882/
Too many "scientists" are more concerned with the next big grant than with doing quality research. And getting grants is often a lot more about politicking and ass-kissing than making a case for why you actually deserve it.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
That's the issue.
It is as a great man once said "cargo cult science"... it presents the seeming of science... the seeming of logic... but is it? And the thing is that only people that are genuine can really tell one from the other.
While this will sound terribly retrograde and classist... the issue is that we have a lot of sleazy people in positions of trust. Sleazy people are not going to behave themselves under any system.
A community is not just defined by those in it but those not permitted to join it. Some sort of integrity check should be put on the system and those that are clearly only interested in money or power or attention should be kicked out. Those interested in actually doing a real science... humble though it often is... should be the only ones on the pay roll.
I speak of public universities only. Private universities and corporations can do whatever they want. But if you're taking the public coin then the public has a right to insist on integrity. What private individuals want to do with their own money is their own business.
Simply cutting the sophists off from public funding should largely solve the problem. That is where this fungus has grown. The corporations are too goal oriented to get side tracked by this sort of thing. And the private universities are likely just as vulnerable as the public ones but their credibility is their problem and not one anyone else needs to worry about.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Just take back the money they got for the fake science.
Publication fees, grants, salary, tenure, patents, etc.
Darpa or Nih might be able to put a pullback clause in their grant contracts.
Something like, this grant is contingent on your previous work and the work from this grant not being fraud.
Holding the school as grantee responsible will indirectly get the bad actor.
Moving the money from the fraudster to the guy who figured it out might be a nice touch.
When you step outside observed reality all you find is a coke machine.
Well I half believe that article ... judged by its own criteria
Science has always been full of bad science. The people involved have always had agendas. The problem is that we are creating so much data, that it is hard to process and identify what was created in a rigorous process and what is just a pile of crap. And, it is not easy to tell them apart. Then you have people involved. Newton tried his best to discredit Hooke. Hooke was lacking in some areas, but a genius in others. Some scientists just create large quantities of data, and don't know what to do with it. Others have a specific idea, and ignore anything which proves them wrong. Science has just gotten so big, it is hard to find the good amongst the, not really bad but, useless. Scientists must publish or be ignored, so they create anything they can to keep going.
not as much as billions of $$$$ of some new drug that may or may not work and by the time the lawsuits come you are rich and retired
There's been a bit of almost Soviet style Lysencoism over the last couple of decades with political appointees over-ruling the scientists that work for them. Put a horse judge in charge and that "heck of a job" just isn't good enough for anything other than judging horses.
Where they fired their Minister of Science because he was of the opinion that Pot was not as bad for you as they preveiously claimed? Because of Bad Science?
Here's a grain of salt the size of Wales.
But who cares, because because you gotta keep turning that endless publication crank. If you don't you might get kicked off the team.
Just visualize legions of white coated scientists chained to their lab benches/computer screens, pulling a lever to get their jolt of drugs injected directly into their veins. If they don't pull the lever often enough they'll go into seizure and break their own backs through muscle contractions.
But it's all good because uncontrolled competition always produces the best outcome. Just ask any Wall Street banking executive who gets a mountain of money no matter how badly they screw up. Just trust the system and you will be safe, secure and happy. Really.
Why is Snark Required?
But the human element will always be a problem. Man cannot be "fixed", only educated and persuaded.
"Publish or Perish", Degrees that require new original ideas, Strict hierarchy structure...
Academic institutions are culturally stuck in victorian times. So if you want to work up, get the choice projects and research, you need to publish. The more your publish, the higher the chances you will move up. Because there is so much published material, people don't read it much, so they found that they can get credit for half ass work.
Your name becomes your brand, so when you try to get a grant your name+institution you will work for will get you the grant money.
There isn't any reason why Say State University of New York Buffalo can't get a grant to study seismology, but chances are it will go to University of California Berkeley not because they will do a better job, but because of the name.
Finally institutions haven't learned how to deal with today's political climate with the attempt for breaking news. Every Hypothesis is sold to the public as a new Theory... Then if that Hypothesis is shown false (as it is common in science) then the media who may have a political slant will go and say see Science is Wrong again, just like our political stance has predicted!
Science for the most part is quite work, collaborating with like minded people, with checks and balances to try to filter out strong egos. But it has gone commercial so these checks and balances are weaken as strong egos will win out.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Can bad scientific practices be fixed?
I whipped together a quick study that shows that it is completely impossible. I'm sorry, it can't be fixed.
In the case of children's vaccination the medical community would be wise to co-op the language of climate change activists and label the opposition as "vaccine deniers". Shame them as anti-science and anti-medicine. Point out how the anti-vax movement's loudest voices are b-list celebrities with no expertise on the subject.
Real science -- the kind that actually advances human progress -- is no longer occurring in academic laboratories. Rather, it's occurring within companies like Cisco, Google, Apple, even occasionally Microsoft.
Real science make extensive use of the quantuum tunnelling effect, for example. Real science has changed everything about the way we live. Indeed, it's changed it several times during my life (I'm 50).
Science coming out of universities is at best marginal. That coming out of government institutions doesn't even follow the Scientific Method.
"Science" is doing just fine. It's academic institutions that are completely broken.
I say this, by the way, after three years' teaching at a technical college. Most of our incoming students were outright illiterate. They could neither read nor write nor perform the most basic math.
(Want the true definition of "futile"? Try teaching binary mathematics and logic to students that can barely count to ten using their fingers.)
We have raised an entire generation of illiterate ignorami. Small wonder that this bleeds into academic science.
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
So science has trolls too.
You are mistaking kicking back against PR agencies, people in politics defining a difference to other people in politics and medicine show "religion" who see science as a threat to their business model for "scientific consensus".
Banding together against the barbarians at the gate who wouldn't know the scientific method if it bit them on the arse is not "scientific consensus" - it is a defence of expertise versus wilful ignorance and deliberate lies.
Science touches critical social issues and trust is vital Rising seas and global warming are huge examples. It is obvious that we all will suffer a tax burden greater than at any time in history as we try to prevent economic disasters being already caused by rising seas. Every nation surely has its own reasons why its citizens fail to trust their government. In the US i strongly believe that the refusal to release all of the JFK assassination materials, whole and unedited, have created a massive distrust of the US government that simmers and boils beneath the surface. At a certain point distrust becomes a mood and sort of constant mode of thinking. I don't think many people actually believe that there is anything in the JFK files that could substantially effect national security nor do I believe that embarrassment for anyone involved has much merit at all as most of the people involved are dead or simply too old to be embarrassed by anything at all. Secrecy about the JFK assassination has done us more harm than the assassination itself. Supposedly the documents will be released in 2017 but you can bet that that will not really take place. The truth is that large numbers of people in government had to do with that assassination. Both Nixon and Johnson are highly suspect as well as some of the CIA spooks, organized crime, and the military industrial complex. JFK wanted out of Vietnam and there were billions of dollars in war money involved.
When 1000's of studies, all done differently, with different data, in different places all come to the same conclusion....you ask for 1001 because, hey, you never know, right? Here's three we can put to bed: the world is not flat, vaccines work well, and smoking causes lung cancer.
Really. Atheists have replaced belief in God with belief in science. They hold science up as a truth and clammer to believe that which they hold as absolute truth, when it might not be or more likely is the truth at that moment. People like Myers and Dawkins cast science into a role that science doesn't want, that is, to be our messiah saving us from oh so repressive religions. Now it appears that even scientists are believing it.
I have witnessed way too many brilliant, and I mean off the scale brilliant graduate students who are forced to pretty much credit their work to some 60+ year old very tenured professor because he is the only one who can get access to the money. But worse than that I see the same off the scale brilliant students being told that they are wrong wrong wrong. Not because they are wrong but because when they are shown to be correct it will upend the research and conclusions that entire careers were built upon.
I find that many senior professors/scientists never really accomplished anything and simply became experts in an established field further establishing that field. They are threatened by anyone who comes along and shakes the tree which might cause a few of their most rotten fruit to fall. But they are also threatened that if recognized that a truly great young scientist will come along and "steal" all the grant money that is rightfully theirs because of their seniority.
There are the rare senior scientists who encourage new and radical thinking along with making sure that credit is properly assigned (first name) but pretty much without exception these are scientists who accomplished something in their day.
I find a very common song sung by these terrible scientists is that all science is now to be done by groups. Yes groups are often required to conclusively put something new to bed but almost without exception great science had some key crack opened by some one person(or two) thinking way outside the box; not merely going through a checklist.
I have long thought that one of the reasons that so many great scientists are a bit autistic is that only this way can they ignore the continuous social pressure to conform to the groupthink that the lesser scientist would prefer they would. Whereas the more social but less capable scientists are the ones who can rise to the top on little or no accomplishments and cajole and structure the system so as to provide them with a huge cut of the grant money.
Vaccines works - that is well established. They also have risks - so the question usually boils down to "do we save way more lives than we take with this vaccine program?"
We therefore use vaccine against measles, because measles will otherwise be epidemic and kill/maim about 1% of its victims. The vaccine is much safer than the disease.
Also, we don't vaccine everybody against the common cold. The cold runs epidemic every year, but is mostly harmless. Vaccine is available for the unusally vulnerable who might die from getting the cold. There is no gain for normal people though - but still the risks that follow any vaccine like allergy, or the risks of any injection like an unclean needle, bleeding and so on.
No. I ask for precise a priori predictions to be compared to new data. This is the ONLY way to really think you have a handle on what is going on. It is usually simply impossible to rule out every explanation for a measurement going up or down. There is nearly zero of this going on in medicine.
I also ask that, if you use significance testing, that the level you use be a function of the complexity of the system under study. They so easily "come to conclusions" in medicine compared to particle physics because they study something ~10^20 of times more complicated than a fundamental particle but use a criteria for evidence that is 10^5 times weaker. This should not be the case, it certainly looks like people are lowering their standard of evidence until the "right rate of results" are being published.
None of this means those claims are wrong. But the way they were arrived at are questionable.
Cities were better when they were smaller. The internet was better when the entire world wasn't on facebook and twitter. Slashdot was certainly better when they didnt care so much about traffic. Science was more accurate when it was a much smaller. Human nature is to spoil things when you get too many people involved. And it's not a linear. That said, the real question is whether more good science is being done even as the ratio goes down.
I think part of the problem is that nobody wants to publish a paper where the experiment failed--but they should.
Failures are useful; they're not wasted time. You've almost certainly learned something from a failed experiment. Maybe you learned that the setup wasn't rigorous enough, or maybe you just learned that a certain avenue of research wasn't viable for one reason or another. I get that journals are looking for breakthroughs, but it would be so useful to read a paper in your field and find out that someone already tried the thing you're attempting, and now you don't have to fail in exactly the same way.
But that requires a much more collaborative system, and one where the community is interested in finding answers, not glory.
Do you know who has been actively spending lots of time and money on trying to show us all how bad science has become? The Magic Man In The Sky crowd.
"Publish or Perish", D
Exactly. Ditch that. No credit for publishing lightly done bad work, so you might as well not do that, then. Find another metric than "number of articles/pages". Reward only quality.
Link to one paper that shows smoking causes cancer that rules out that it instead increases the growth rate of cancer. Link to another that shows the cause is not simply toxins in the cigarettes killing cells leading to more rejuvenative cell division rather than directly causing mutations. I bet you can't.
Without an agreeable metric for how to declare it to be "fixed", that is an unachievable goal. It is worth noting though that the percentage of bad players in science is no worse than in any other vocation, and indeed lower than many. The difference is just that more media attention goes to unethical science than to drywall installers who cut corners.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Andrew Wakefield wasn't a journalist, he was a scientist. Not a good one, but a one. This is another example of a problem not with journalism but scientism.
There is no vaccine for the common cold, not even for the "unusually vulnerable." There are over 200 different cold viruses. As a kid, you get lots of different colds, as you get older, you get fewer because you've already been exposed to a large cross-section of them. The next generation is going to have much bigger problems because they won't have been exposed to many of them when they were young - kids with colds are not allowed in day cares so nobody else gets exposed, nobody lets their kids play in the mud any more, everything has to be sanitized (like good old soap and water isn't good enough - you have to have an antibacterial soap).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I don't think so...
I agree it's not a problem. As can be seen at Retraction Watch, lots of bad science if found out and retracted. That's a good thing not a bad thing. One could ask how much of published science is made up and undetected but a better question would be how many results are simply crappy in the data or crappy in the analysis. It surely dwarfs the latter. But who cares. If the result is important it will be replicated. if it's not important then no one will cite it.
ultimately it's the well cited articles that also get vetted by reproduction. Those constitute the body of science moving forward. the rest goes into the gutter of history.
In skiing the saying is, if you fall and your fall isn't forward your not being aggressive enough. It's the same in science. People will make errors. If they weren't then then were not paying for aggressive enough research.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
In medical research, the problem is that most of it is run by amateurs. Medical doctors receive somewhere between no and very little scientific education, and conduct research in their spare time while not treating patients, yet in North America an MD is considered not only sufficient, but actually desirable for a "clinician scientist." There are some excellent scientists who also hold MDs, but it's secondary to their scientific training. Clinicians have very creative ideas about how to do science.
Measles vaccine effectiveness is one that is specifically in doubt. People used to have "measles parties" and spread the disease on purpose! Then they stopped once it was no longer so deadly (before the vaccine) but there is no data on how this changed over time. Also, lab tests were developed and began being introduced at the same time as the vaccines that only verify 100/25,0000 of suspected cases. We also learned about many other viruses that have similar symptoms (that is that 25k cases of measles-like illness every year).
http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S185.full
So sorry, but it is not straightforward to interpret the data on measles.
Actually there is not a problem with science there is a problem with biomedical research which the author of the article keeps confusing with all science despite actually referring to fields such as particle physics which does not have this problem. That's not to say that we do not have mistakes but these tend to get caught quickly and retracted e.g. faster than light neutrinos.
Except for medical research, I'd say most of science is the same way as particle physics: the odd mistakes which tend to get caught quickly. I don't hear of frequent retractions or contradictions by chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists, geologists or even non-medical biologists like you do frequently for medical studies. In fact it is incredibly ironic that an article written by a medical researcher criticizing the poor practices in his field is so inaccurately and carelessly written. This aptly illustrates at least part of their problem.
For a study to be funded, it must be ground-breaking. For a study to break new ground, it must be non-obvious. For it to be non-obvious, it must be, to some degree, counter-intuitive. To be counter-intuitive,it must, to some degree, be illogical (at least from a standard perspective.)
Since scientists can improve their chance of getting funded if they are studying illogical things, there's likely going to be a strong bias toward studying things that aren't true . Some of these things will not b shown to be conclusively wrong, either due to poor design or willful negligence of proper methodology.Unfortunately, this does not get caught by the peer review process, because "peers"can exhibit the same behaviors as movie critics (you can always find one willing to make a positive comment just to see their name in print, or be able to add a line to their vita.)
Because of the proliferation of "journals" in the Internet era, there is a "news cycle" view within the scientific press now, where each publication is trying to be first to report new discoveries.
Preliminary studies that would never have been published in the past are presented in the same format that well-studied research streams were previously, so that the start-up journals can appear to have the same legitimacy as the leaders in the field.
The popular press, desperate for sensational headlines, jumps on these illogical theories with scant research and inconclusive results and treats them like news, simply to fill the requirement for 24-hour reporting.
The problem is that the people who are the anti-vaxers are the vary same people who carry the Global Warming torch the highest and are most vocal in the popular media.
How would it look to have a bunch of Hollywood idiots putting on some Gala for Global Warming awareness and at the same time have people labeling them "Deniers" for opposing vaccines?
What we can observe today,with certainty, is there is link between smoking and increased rates of lung cancer. We are still working on understanding cancer.
Science spoiled by humanity. Go figure.
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.
That has ALWAYS been true. In fact just about the only way to make a name for yourself in science is to show that someone else is wrong about something. Einstein is famous because he showed how Newton was wrong. We put forward hypothesis, test them and (in what should be a surprise to no one) most of them ultimately turn out to be wrong or defective in some way. As a general rule that is both acceptable (to a point) and expected.
Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.
Again, why the notion that any of this is somehow new?
Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivized to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivized to be productive and innovative.
Bullshit they aren't incentivized to be right. Being right is hugely incentivized. The problem is that it is hard to be right about something that is actually complicated and meaningful. So we have to break big problems up into little problems and most of those aren't consequential and many are going to turn out to be wrong or dead ends. Not every bit of science is going to be of world altering importance. Some people are doing some shady things to earn a paycheck and stay in the game but they tend to get found out in due time. Science is remarkably effective in weeding out bad data over time.
Here is a project tracking 10,000+ colorectal cancer patients over 19 + years. https://www.cancercare.on.ca/r...
That project rolls into this project and shares data with 5 other registries. http://epi.grants.cancer.gov/
There is a lot of very good, very detailed very repeatable work out there. Medical research can't generate patients like a physicists can generate electrons, unless you want to induce more cancer in the population...To dismiss this important research out of hand is insulting.
Well I can link to a paper that shows that cigarette smoke contains mutagens, which means that it is directly causing mutations in cell DNA. That is unless you are going to claim that mutagens circulating in the blood stream don't actually cause mutations in cell DNA.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
This has been known for OVER FOUR DECADES you stupid moron. Look at the data on that paper, it's 1974.
The basics are when smoking was first linked to cancer it was statistical inference with unknown mechanisms. That has changed in the intervening decades and the mechanisms are at least partially understood now.
"Publish or Perish", Degrees that require new original ideas, Strict hierarchy structure...
Academic institutions are culturally stuck in victorian times. So if you want to work up, get the choice projects and research, you need to publish. The more your publish, the higher the chances you will move up. Because there is so much published material, people don't read it much, so they found that they can get credit for half ass work.
Your name becomes your brand, so when you try to get a grant your name+institution you will work for will get you the grant money.
There isn't any reason why Say State University of New York Buffalo can't get a grant to study seismology, but chances are it will go to University of California Berkeley not because they will do a better job, but because of the name.
Finally institutions haven't learned how to deal with today's political climate with the attempt for breaking news. Every Hypothesis is sold to the public as a new Theory... Then if that Hypothesis is shown false (as it is common in science) then the media who may have a political slant will go and say see Science is Wrong again, just like our political stance has predicted!
Science for the most part is quite work, collaborating with like minded people, with checks and balances to try to filter out strong egos. But it has gone commercial so these checks and balances are weaken as strong egos will win out.
This reminded me of two things:
1- One of my favorite Roy Scheider lines from 2010: "Look, just because our governments are behaving like asses doesn't mean we have to! We're supposed to be scientists, not politicians!"
and
2- Dr. Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the palm pilot and handspring lines of devices, who is an avid researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, pointed out in his book, On Intelligence, the following about his approach to his interests and career path:
"Frequently hypotheses in the academic environments don't pan out into ground breaking research and as a result can be career enders." This is why he approached his study of neuro-biology to the end of designing and building intelligent machines, to the corporate research and development environment which tends to take more of a "Back to the drawing board" approach to engineering and science programs that don't pan out into discoveries or innovation. This is a much better approach for many obvious reasons, but part of the problem is that academic research is too quick to blame the researcher and not the questions or the actual research or research approach and black list the people involved, which is very much like throwing the baby out with the bath water. It is no surprise that academia has serious problems with the integrity of it's publications (which is the root of the actual problem pointed out here) because they have created an environment where it is profitable or expedient to be less than honest, at least in the short term, if there is one constant in life, it is that nothing remains a secret forever. Academia would do well to reward the actual merits of research that does not pan out into something groundbreaking, because like Edison, it adds to the body of research that can hep to define later research that does pan out into something novel. (like the 1000 tries at finding the appropriate material to use as a filament in the first light bulb and the famous quote "I just found 999 ways not to make a light bulb" before he settled on tungsten.)
There are so many talented scientists and engineers that are unable to find places to apply their talents due to the system that is in place in academia making the process work against itself in this manner. I would say this is why (coming full circle here) we did not actually end up exploring the outer solar system in the last decade. (2000 - 2010)
Yes it does matter, that is the "understanding" you mention later. Why are we trying to understand cancer if "it doesn't matter"?
Sure. Perhaps people who get addicted to smoking have a deficiency in expression some enzyme related to dopamine signalling. This deficiency manifests as increased oxidativate stress or whatever that also contributes to cancer. Correlation is not causation, you need to rule out these other possibilities. The best way is to derive a precise prediction from your theory and have it match new data. If you prediction is vague (smoking increases cancer formation) you won't be able to rule out the other possibilities.
Double-blind studies are standard practice for studies. So why not do the same with funding? Donors to a university don't get to pick and choose which researcher or topic of research will get the money (but it has to be guaranteed to go to research and not into the general fund). The researchers' funding is allocated by some random method and they don't know in advance how much they will get if any nor do they know where the money came from.
If I remember correctly, the scientists were saying that they MEASURED faster than light neutrinos, and were soliciting community aid in figuring out what was going on. They weren't confident at all of their results.
It's arguable that if they hadn't published their measurements, it would have taken a lot longer for them to have got the help which resolved the issue.
Did I just make a case for knowingly publishing results which are very likely wrong? Does it in fact boil down to simple honesty from the scientist about the likely validity of his claims/observations?
Even in the biomed area: "The subject study is admittedly small, however, if the results can be firmly established in a larger study, then significant medical benefits will accrue...."
--PM
"None of that" refers to theories making precise predictions. Collecting this data is a good and valuable thing as it is the first step to theory development. In fact, I consider age-specific incidence of the various cancer's to be the most valuable info we have on that front.
However, data !=evidence. To turn data into evidence requires interpretation which requires assumptions to be made. To check our theory and assumptions we need the a priori predictions. Science is hard, simple as that.
No!
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
And guess what? All those mutagens are also toxic and lead to cell death. I think you'll find Bruce Ames agrees more with me than with you. The point mutation rate is too low to account for it! http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC54830/
Apparently reproducibility and reliability are not a matter for concern for Climate Scientists.
Failed models, failed predictions, data that is constantly "adjusted", but oh we know our theories are correct. So much so that we are willing to inflict trillions of dollars of economic hardship on the world.
If Climate Scientists were in the biomedical research field, they'd have been fired, defrocked and ostracized by now.
YES! Exactly! and I will add to it that Fox news pointing out that all the climate change deniers are somehow "right" despite being disproven at every turn by every piece of evidence uncovered by unrelated groups of scientists across the world, and are somehow part of some massive conspiracy to make money somehow, off of actual science that is uncovering a consistent and complete consensus over time, that global warming is indeed happening, despite no proof of the connections of the people or financial interests involved in this hypothetical "Conspiracy". The deniers on the other hand are clearly oil interests and have been for a long, long time and a fifth grader can point that one out without much help.
Good catch there! /Sarcasm
I work in psychiatry research, analyzing and maintaining the sexy fMRI neuroimaging data. I also write the storage and analysis database that we use. The database usage has been growing exponentially as data sharing projects have started and the NIH has mandated data sharing. In other words, my workload of maintaining this software system has also grown exponentially. What my PIs do not understand is that software is not at all like scientific papers. Once one of their analysts (or post-docs) writes a paper and gets its past reviewers, its done. If there is a major or minor flaw, chances are good that no one will notice or say anything.
It's completely different with software engineering. If there is a tiny bug, people will notice. Having transitioned from analyst to programmer, my work is viewed entirely differently. If the papers published from workplace underwent the same scrutiny that the software does, we would produce much more robust science.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
No, it can not. The problem is science long ago became a buzzword and has since been used for many things which is not science at all. The entire scientific process is about observations and experimentation and developing repeatable and predictable experiments which can be used to prove or disprove theories which are used to explain the behavior. If you can't create a repeatable and predictable experiment then it's not really science.
This isn't to say that theories can not be used to potentially explain past events and much of science is done trying to do just that, but as soon as you make a claim that some past event *MUST* have been caused by some previous event you have left the realm of science. It may be the best theory and there may not be any other understood cause but unless you have a reliable observation you can never be certain. Therefore much of science is also based on assumptions which is fine as long as you understand that they are just that... they are unproven assumptions.
It gets more complicated when theories build on each other because while it can be very helpful it is often easy to lose sight of the base assumptions or worse get into cases where your basis of support is a circular argument that theory A proves Theory B which proves theory A though almost never as simple as two theories.
The incentives are not good and the pay is atrocious. What do people expect?
In my opinion science had took a bad turn to a more "bussiness" oriented mindset. I am not just reffering to "publish or perish" but in general it seems that scientific institutions do science and evaluate it in order to get some "dollars". This is in general true, but in many cases the reason is not just "to make profit" (somekind of profit) but rather to be sustainable.
I believe that science should be done (and evaluated) for the good of hummanity and the society in general. Therefore, bussiness-oriented mindsets etc do not fit.
Although I acknowledge the importance of "money" and the contribution of "bussiness-oriented" thinking in general, I believe that it simply does not fit science at least not in the top-5 things that come to your mind when talking about science and research.
Appart from that, good science and good research has to do with education. By education I mean basic education on fundamental values (that have to be taught from early grades in school but also have to do in general with society). Well educated people in a non toxic (for science) enviroment could be a first step towards better and more reliable science.
Slight correction: Edison settled on carbonized bamboo filament (and he wasn't the first to use a carbon filament). The tungsten filament lamp came several years later, and not from Edison.
The process of becoming a PhD is the central corruption in academics. The thesis writing is a joke these days, PhD candidates work hard putting together several sheets of bullshit, then their future peers smell it and agree that it smells like the same bullshit they put in their own thesis and thus a new PhD is born.
We had hoped that the process would result in fresh young minds contributing something of value in their field, but the poison that we have added to our society is that everyone succeeds if they try long enough and hard enough. We reward people for effort, not for truthful contributions to a field.
You showed a lot of hustle out there kid, so here's your diploma of appreciation.
"Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivized to be right."
Yeah, bullshit. A significant mistake will permanently cripple a young scientists career, if not outright end it.
46 & 2
Valid scientific practice undeniably settles deniers' unsettling practiced denial of settled science's validity. Now say it with a mouthful of marshmallows.
I think there is are several fundamental issue with applying the scientific method to the question of anthropogenic global warming. First, the gold standard of scientific proof is experimentation. Experiments must be independently reproducible. Given that we only have one earth, this is a problem. Another challenge is multiple variables which interact in unknown ways. The best experiments are when one variable is changed, and everything else held constant. This is simply unattainable on a global scale. The third challenge I see is time. When the delay between cause and effect spans multiple generations of human observers, the probability of getting useful information falls dramatically. In short, the scientific method has its limitations.
This is a general problem in science (not just biomedical research). I'm a physicist, and we see the same sorts of issues.
It all comes down to how academic research is funded and judged: number of papers, number of students graduated, and amount of money raised. Inside granting agencies, this is how different research efforts are compared to determine which programs get (more) funding and who gets cut. The importance of the work, the correctness of the work, and the ethical behavior (or not) of the researchers are not considered. Scientists are not stupid, if those are the metrics used to determine funding, they optimize for those things.
If we want to fix science we need a different set of metrics.
I'd suggest replacing the three metrics above with: number of validated results, public interest, and amount of private investment in the work. This would apply specifically to government granting programs.
"Validated results" requires a third party to validate, that should be government labs validating academic/commercial work (we're talking about reviews of government grants) and the opposite for new work done at government labs.
"Public interest" is much easier to track now than it used to be. A simple metric would just be google search ranking (although I'm sure something better could be used).
Private investment may seem overly commercial to some people, but we have a big problem right now with a lack of development of scientific work. Last year was the first time since 2000 that private investment in startup companies exceeded government investment in basic research (in the US). Commercialization is much more expensive than basic research; we're still only passing on a fraction of the potential practical work. We need to motivate people doing basic research to work more with industry (where appropriate, right). In addition, you have several diseases (usually "orphans") where private donations for disease research are greater than government investment (i.e. Lyme disease). Maybe that's fine, but the granting folks need to take a look at why that is and whether they're really investing public dollars where they need to go.
Lastly, I would change the system every 10 years or so. The longer any set metric is used, the more likely it is that people are gaming the system rather than working in the public interest.
Measles vaccine effectiveness is one that is specifically in doubt.
Having looked at this problem, I note that before and after the measles vaccine was introduced, we saw a three order of magnitude drop in US measles cases with similar declines in other countries, correlating with the introduction of measles vaccines in those countries. There's just too much of an effect to hand wave away with the assertion that the world no longer practices measles parties as much as it used to or with the other assertions you make.
Also, lab tests were developed and began being introduced at the same time as the vaccines that only verify 100/25,0000 of suspected cases. A suspect case of measles is not a case of measles. It is not even a diagnosis of measles. It is a case where doctor is covering their ass for a measles-like illness by ordering the test. There is no reason today to expect a "suspected case of measles" in the developed world to have a high likelihood of being a case of measles, especially with the extremely rare incidence of measles. There is no actual evidence here that doctors have a high likelihood of misdiagnosing measles.
You know, this stuff has been explained to you before and yet you continue with your erroneous assertions. When are you going to listen to reason?
The science of climate change is settled. Al Gore flew his jet to Washington to say so: http://www.npr.org/templates/s....
I remember reading a story a number of years ago, where someone was saying there's billion available to fund any research relating to global warming. So some scientists were basically joining what they wanted to study, with some obscure link to global warming, and hey, presto! They've got the grant!
weren't we supposed to have that 30 yrs ago?
Yes, that is my point! There is no real evidence either way. We are missing basic information that is required to interpret the data. Those attempting to draw conclusions without that info are using poor methodology. Supposedly it has been explained many times how that information is not relevant. Please link to it so that others can judge the validity of these explanations for themselves.
The MMR vaccine fiasco is of course the classic example of this; there are still people acting on the assumption that the lies were true, and that's getting people killed.
Do you think the fiasco was caused by bad science, bad journalism, or bad politician?
Oliver.
Just reward those who find flaws in the published literature. If I can get a PhD for calling "bullshit" when I spot it, I'll be a *much* more attentive reader.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Papers get 'impact scored'. Based on the number of times they are cited by other papers, especially other high impact papers. Basically Google page rank for papers. If Google ever tried to patent 'page rank', scientific papers 'impact scores' are prior art. It's even done 'on the internet'.
Not surprisingly, this is also gamed.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
First, the gold standard of scientific proof is experimentation.
Uh... there's a lot more to science than that. But even if we take your word for it, the climatologists create statistical models based on observable variables and fit those models to collected data. The better the fit, the more accurate the predictions.
One issue with academia is that all research must be the stated hypothesis is confirmed, i.e. a negative hypothesis result is not considered valuable. Even though the elimination of a degree of freedom from consideration for further study is one of the cornerstones of science. Instead, everyone must make something new and groundbreaking.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
For those too lazy to read the papers. The second one is from the same author as the first, who writes supporting the claims of the "stupid moron" AC:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC54830/
Really... do your homework before being a internet science advocate.
The problem is that the people who are the anti-vaxers are the vary same people who carry the Global Warming torch the highest and are most vocal in the popular media.
Yeah, people like Donald Trump and Michele Bachmann are poster children for "people who carry the Global Warming torch".
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Handwaves ("dark matter") and faddism exist in many disciplines, but what the article focuses on is biomedicine. Perhaps it's time to supplement those crappy, glacier-slow double blind medical studies with something that makes better use of the incredible data processing resources available to us in the new century. Let's develop a supercomputer model of human biology detailed enough that we can test large numbers of pharma possibilities against it. This would enable us to zero in on cures a lot faster and respond to epidemiological emergencies like the Ebola crisis in a more timely manner.
Can we hope for a Moore's law in medicine?
Is there such a word? Only in America...
Damn that "endemicity" of the use of the word "endemicity".
IPCC is the best example of Bad Science (astrology).
Ja ja ja ja
We are not even close to a point where a computer can simulate biomedicine well enough. We do not have enough data to develop accurate models and there is also a lot of variation in genetics/diet/environment/etc. that complicates the matter even further.
Given that we only have one earth, this is a problem.
Without taking sides on the actual issue, are you telling us you can't imagine experiments that don't require the whole planet, or that couldn't be repeated? Really?
Just another day in Paradise
One problem - in the US at least, no one has died of Measles since 2002. Over 100 have died from exposure to the vaccine.
If I remember correctly, the scientists were saying that they MEASURED faster than light neutrinos, and were soliciting community aid in figuring out what was going on.
Not quite. They claimed evidence of FTL neutrinos and then tried to hedge their bet by asking for external experts to come and investigate to confirm. In fact a good proportional of the collaboration refused to sign the paper which is a very sure sign that you are on incredibly dodgy ground: if you cannot convince the vast majority of your fellow collaborators that the result is right you are unlikely to convince others and it should be a very clear message that you need to do more checks and get more data.
If you really want to get into the details, Steve McIntyre has been dismantling Mann's sloppy statistics for years, and has a nice compendium of the results here:
http://climateaudit.org/multiproxy-pdfs/
It was a classic example of agenda driven science, where data was spliced together without notice, some proxies were accidentally inverted, and the principle components method was abused.
I notice you didn't even try to refute anything.
I suppose you think the models are spot on?
I suppose you are OK with "adjusting" raw data?
I suppose you think Satellite data is less accurate than "adjusted" data?
I suppose you think that the last near twenty years without statistical warming is just a fluke? or maybe it's due to natural variation, which you've been telling us for decades is not significant enough to affect warming one way or another?
Or maybe you'll put your stock in a simple HS experiment that's been extrapolated by multiple orders of magnitude and applied to a system that isn't even fully understood.
Make no mistake..."Climate Change" is an agenda driven science with a predetermined outcome.
Given that these errors and failures are caused by not applying the scientific method, the solution is to apply the scientific method.
We don't claim that since 2/3rds of people don't vote for the winning party (nor that the rampant corruption of politicians) indicate that democracy can't be fixed.
We don't claim that since 90% of ventures fail that capitalism must be fixed/
We ought merely to seek to apply the principles that make the endeavour work.
But note that the climate screamers and shamers are not the scientists themselves but political activists acting on what they think are the scientists' findings.
Do you mean like Hansen, Mann and Gleick?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
A consensus is the RESULT of reality. Only morons like yourself, parroting without understanding, a talking point that you've been led to believe is a "killer argument" claim otherwise.
If you disbelieve consensus comes from observing reality, then you're going to have to close down and end the entire justice system, since there's no way to tell what really happened.
Things fall down when you let go of them.
There is a consensus on that subject.
Does that mean we're all going to fly off the planet because that's not proof it's true???
He was a Gastroenteritis, a Medical Doctor looking to market a competing measles vaccine, in short the Anti-vaxers believe that "Big Phara" is out to get profits above their children's welfare, based on the results obtained by "Big Pharma" out to get their profits at the expense of their children and lost his license to practise as a result of his avarice.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
My philosophy has always been that once having passed the bar of qualification, a scientist should be left alone, career-wise, to have peace, and time to think and experiment, and time to try and fail with impunity. And these time chunks need to be on the order of 5 years or so.
The current system is optimized to produce incremental advances by scientific worker-drones. It is not designed to produce important new insights or confidently well tested important results.
It is way more expensive to waste scientific talent on bureacracy, grant application toil and stress, and writing of interim cruft than it would be to just let the people friggin' work unmolested using their own best judgement and wisdom about what to work on and at what pace and priority.
Scientists are, or are before it is beat out of them, all highly self-motivated, DRIVEN people with unique interests and insights.
Take off the reigns.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Grant writing has always had an element of 'trend following marketing' involved.
It's like grants are being given out by the South Park secret girls club: 'It sparkles'
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If you try, you're saying they're NOT unanswerable.
And how do you find out the answer? The scientific method. Hoping and praying doesn't work.
After a serious grounding in statistics, you throw the class at a load of scientific articles - by the barrow load - and get them to spot the howlers for the term paper. Then submit the results to the publishing journals...
Models are certainly useful for understanding small systems with few variables, interacting linearly, over relatively short time periods. The math involved in modeling truly complex systems, non-linear partial differential equations, is extremely difficult. In fact, the ones we study in school are a small subset that have closed solutions. The majority don't. I never hear about Nobel prizes in physics going to climate modelers.
Right, I'm in the humanities and there is this running joke that you only need to publish one really bad and obviously flawed paper on a really popular topic, and your career is certain. It's true, one bad paper, a followup book that is even worse published at 'prestigious' publisher like Oxford UP*, and you will get cited everywhere and get full tenure within about 3 years after the book has been published. I swear I'm not kidding, I've seen this more than once.
So much for impact scores and citation indices ...
-----
* I mention this publisher because he's well respected and nevertheless publishes many bad or at least dubious books without a proper peer review. I should know, because they once contacted me, a lowly postdoc from an unknown university, to review the latest book project by one of the most famous researchers in my area. It's obvious that they just googled me, as I'm easier to find on the net than some of my more established colleagues.
What surrogate could possibly serve as an analog to the earth? That would be like testing a drug on amino acids instead of living cells.
Page Rank patent
The MMR vaccine fiasco is of course the classic example of this;
How so? It seems, instead, to present a counter-argument. I would refer you to the comments of Richard Horton, of the Lancet. To wit:
"But there are fair questions to be asked about the style of government and expert response to claims about the safety of MMR. Three reactions have been discernable. First, there has been an appeal to evidence. The Department of Health's www.mmrthefacts.nhs.uk website contains a superb collection of materials designed to help parents make the “decision in your own time and on your own terms”. The difficulty is that in a post-BSE era, where government advice is no longer immediately taken on trust, the weight of accumulated evidence carries less force if it comes from government than it once did.
Second, public-health officials have disparaged as “poor science” evidence that appears to contradict their official message. This approach has a cost. The reason that today's retraction is partial and not total is that the discovery of a possible link between bowel disease and autism is a serious scientific idea, as recognised by the MRC,8 and one that deserves further investigation. Although dismissing the entire 1998 Lancet paper as poor science gives a clear and correct message to the public about the status of any claim regarding the safety of MMR, in scientific and clinical terms it is both wrong and damaging. The autism-bowel disease link was considered part of a series of physiological observations judged by the MRC to be “interesting and in principle worth investigating”. Subsequent research has yielded conflicting findings.13, 14 This work should be supported.
Third, there has been an effort to starve critics of legitimacy by refusing to engage them face-to-face."
there are still people acting on the assumption that the lies were true, and that's getting people killed.
There were no "lies", only misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and misrepresentations OUTSIDE of the scientific community, and a failure to disclose associations and funding on the part of ONE of the many researchers, which turned out to be irrelevant to any of the research conducted or findings reported.
Further, I think you would be as hard-pressed to show a direct causal link between any specific refusal of the MMR vaccine and any specific death as researchers have been to show a causal link between any specific vaccine and autistic enterocolitis.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
kids with colds are not allowed in day cares
My kids' daycare allows kids with (mild) colds, as long as there's no fever.
In their quest for telling a compelling story, ... retrofit hypotheses to fit their data.
Can someone tell me how this isn't just unseemly science rather than bad science? Sure it might seem like you are "cheating", but if the data tells you something that you didn't expect going in and you change your hypothesis along the way, you still are presenting data and you simply just took a shortcut publishing your second paper and just tossed-out your initial attempt at writing a paper.
To me, bad science would be cherry-picking your data to fit your original hypothesis (or perhaps your ideology or world view).
Since it's the money outside science, not money in science, that causes most of the problems, quite what do you propose to "fix" by following the money, and what do you mean "fix that first"?
Not pay scientists? Get them to pony up the cash for the equipment?
Or pay them no matter what their paper is for?
What?
Given that most of science has a problem not because it's poor quality but because lobby and money corrupt the *political process* of doing anything about the conclusions, the much vaster problem is the money corrupting the democratic process and making science meaningless unless it makes a claim big money and big power (in a capitalist system, they are the same thing) likes. That's not a problem to fix in science, it's a problem to fix in democracy.
Getting people killed? How much lost time do you think the AHA's healthy eating recommendations caused over the past 60 years due to fraudulent studies of heart disease wrt saturated fats and cholesterol?
Gets me every time people are still howling about vaccines, while the AHA's policies of sugar over fats made a much larger percentage of Americans obese and extremely hearth *un*-healthy for two to three generations. Not to mention cancers, strokes, and severe depression from being unable to fit behind the wheel of a prius.
Can't see the forest for all the trees.
If a methodology is flawed, it is not scientific. It is not of the Scientific method. That is not to say that science sometimes gets it wrong. But if inadequate sample size, sloppy experimentation practices, lazy peer review, financial agenda confirmation, lack of experiment repeatability, etc. are part of the process, it's not science.
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v499/n7457/full/nature12213.html
Specifically, this paper shows that the mutational spectrum of lung cancer is distinct from that of other tumor types and constant with mutations caused by the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons present in tobacco smoke. This explains the common causative mutations observed in p53 in cigarette smokers. Just because you don't know it, doesn't mean it isn't known.
The next generation is going to have much bigger problems because they won't have been exposed to many of them when they were young
Insofar as everything you stated is true -which I cannot judge- wouldn't the logical consequence be that the next generation get the colds as an adult which previous generation had as a child? Why is that bad? I would expect adults to handle this better than children, and maybe even recover faster.
Mann is somewhat of an outlier, but I don't see Gleick and Hansen pushing to strip dissenters of their credentials and their jobs. I also don't see them writing off every proposed solution and insisting that only a Stone Age existence will satisfy the climate god.
The null hypothesis is NOT "things don't have a relationship".
The null is that your conclusion is false. Do everything possible to show that your conclusion is false. If it still survives that, then it passed the null hypothesis.
For example, the "pause" hysteria from deniers is a good example of your incorrect null. The null here is NOT "there is no relationship between CO2 and temperature" but "The IPCC prediction is still valid". Why? Because the claim wanted is that the IPCC are wrong. Therefore your null for that MUST be the IPCC are still right.
And when you do that, the cherry picking is damn obvious, because the short timescale taken indicate that the IPCC have not been shown to be wrong.
Taking a longer series only stops the "mean trend" being "close" to zero and be closer to the IPCC trend.
Which is precisely what would happen if your selection was done incorrectly. And why the null is not "the trend is flat", but "the IPCC are proven wrong".
I'm a chemist, and have kids. Damn near none of the "chemistry" kits break a covalent bond. Very few ionic; most of them are just hydrating starches and gelatins. The rest are fizzy tablets that make fizziness. Ooh, Ahh, bullshit.
Careful! You're get foo-foo'ed by someone reward-seeking professional paper-pusher who can't even tell you what a confidence score is or why it's important in their data..
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Climate scientists have been making predictions for decades. Compare their predictions with what actually happened.
Thank you. This is an interesting paper and I will study it further. In the meantime, how do you explain the 4 orders of magnitude variation in point mutation rate observed for different lung cancers? If you use this point mutation rate to predict the age of maximum cancer lung cancer incidence how would you calculate that to make it consistent with the data?
There is a great deal of evidence that smoking in some way increases the risks of lung cancer. I don't think there's much room to deny that.
BUT, now look at nicotine use without smoking. Look at all the studies that have the test group smoking and yet claim to draw conclusions about nicotine use.
It's very hit and miss in medicine and we sometimes spend billions on the misses (and then wonder why the U.S. has the world's most expensive healthcare but only achieves mediocre results).
Since nothing has really fit and we know that their predictions are crap, I guess the Science sucks.
There are over 200 different cold viruses. ... The next generation is going to have much bigger problems because they won't have been exposed to many of them when they were young ... (like good old soap and water isn't good enough - you have to have an antibacterial soap).
I think we found someone that has caught a brain bug.
Or in the case of the last 18 years the worse the fit the (according to the climate change denier deniers) the better.
If it fits its good. If it doesn't fit it is still good. Trust us. The models will work. Even though we used to say 15 years with no temperature increase would invalidate them, we now realize we where wrong. It will take more like 50 years to invalidate them. Really. The science is good. Really really good. Because the models tell us that the science is good.
Hansen, Mann and Gleick have proved themselves to be (very good) political activists first and scientists a (distant) second.
Total budget for doing absolutely everything the IPCC says we ought to do about climate science ? You say "trillions of dollars" but that's just a big scary number without context.
Actual context ? It comes down to 0.02% of the global GDP over 20 years (for which the budget was calculated).
That's about 2 orders of magnitude LESS than we'll spend on fossil fuels over the same period (without counting subsidies).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
We're not talking about fucking one of your committee members slutty daughters.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
>Make no mistake..."Climate Change" is an agenda driven science with a predetermined outcome.
Even if that was true, which it is not, that wouldn't make the results wrong or false.
Frankly everything you say is completely irrelevant. Those things matter to academics. They are details that ONLY matter to academics - they have no political or business impact whatsoever.
In terms of policy only this part matters:
Is CO2 a greenhouse gas ? We've had proof of that since the mid 19th century.
If it is, and we know it is, then it means that increasing CO2 levels = less energy leaving the earth.
Does less energy leaving mean things get hotter ?
Well there you go - either prove that the ENTIRETY of chemistry is bunk, or disprove thermodynamics and conservation of energy.
You need both those to be ENTIRELY false, not a single shred of truth to them - for global warming to be false.
Which would be ironic because it means that for global warming to be false, all the stuff the deniers are defending would have to be false too - if global warming really was false, fossil fuels would be utterly worthless since neither power plants nor internal combustion engines would WORK if we were THAT wrong about chemistry and thermodynamics.
And besides - all that stuff you said are lies, told to you by professional liars - the SAME professional liars who spent years telling you smoking was healthy and lead in the air was both natural and harmless. They are very, very good at lying, and you are very, very gullible.
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The MMR vaccine fiasco was nothing more than a journalism fiasco. There never was any study done by Andrew Wakefield to prove MMR was linked to autism. He intended on doing such a study, but never got the chance as a result of the journalists blowing the mere suggestion of the hypothesis out of proportion.
Pretty much everything you just said applies to an equal or greater degree to the theory of evolution. Do you also think THAT isn't science enough ?
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That's a really, really stupid thing to say since you are completely ignoring how many WOULD have died without the vaccine.
That's not hard to calculate - and it's a LOT more than 100...
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"Is CO2 a greenhouse gas ? We've had proof of that since the mid 19th century"
Untrue. It was hypothesized by Arrhenius but then Robert Wood showed that greenhouses do not warm because of the "greenhouse effect"
"If it is, and we know it is, then it means that increasing CO2 levels = less energy leaving the earth."
Bunk. Even if CO2 worked the way you think, the effect would be logarithmic, not linear. In any case, studies of ice cores have shown consistently that CO2 enrichment is a centuries delayed response to climate warming, never preceding that warming.
"Well there you go - either prove that the ENTIRETY of chemistry is bunk, or disprove thermodynamics and conservation of energy"
Untrue. Your poor grasp of science is not an excuse for anyone else to believe it. Despite CO2 rising during the 20th and early 21st Century, temperatures have risen, fallen, risen and now stabilized for more than 18 years.
"And besides - all that stuff you said are lies, told to you by professional liars - the SAME professional liars who spent years telling you smoking was healthy and lead in the air was both natural and harmless"
Again, hyperbolic nonsense. But why let facts get in the way of your millenarian beliefs?
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
The predictions are bunk. Already climate models have no predictive power whatsoever.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
it was a perfect storm. The original paper had only one author come out against the MMR, and originally, before he probably realized how much money he could make becoming a vaccine denier, he only came out against the triple vaccine and suggested reverting to individual ones until further study was done. Then of course he realized a fool and his money can be easily parted, and he became a real issue. Had he not walked down that path, and stuck to only saying the triple may be problematic and moving back to the individuals was fine, he wouldn't have been quite as ostracized.
Considering how troubled the MMR triple roll out was (see problems with the vaccine in Japan for example, a strain issue) it compounded an already worrisome issue. And of course, Measles had been mostly removed from the population as the inidividual vaccine had been around quite a while, and a generation of parents hadn't experienced it, so when the triple hit in the early 90s, it was a "new" vaccine for a disease people hadn't experienced in decades.
A lot contributed to the fear mongering, and now lots of bad information exacerbates the problem.
> In any case, studies of ice cores have shown consistently that CO2 enrichment is a centuries delayed response to climate warming, never preceding that warming.
Aww you read a little research and didn't understand what it meant. That's cute. No those studies did NOT show what you think it showed, in fact they showed the exact opposite - ice cores are one of the strongest pieces of evidence FOR climate change theory, if they were radically disproving it - you really think thousands of scientists across thousands of disparate fields would ALL have missed that... yet somehow YOU saw it ?
>Despite CO2 rising during the 20th and early 21st Century, temperatures have risen, fallen, risen and now stabilized for more than 18 years.
This is about climate, not temperatures - climate is an AVERAGE and the average has CONSISTENTLY gone up - and there is no pause, just more lies you believe and misrepresentations of scientific results which actually prove the opposite of what you've been told they proved.
>Again, easily verifiable historical fact.
FTFY.
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If you follow the same pie in the sky maths that are used to calculate the mythological green technologies that will save them from the energy crunch curbing CO2 expenditures is sure to generate.
You can easily verify it's true - you obviously have internet access.
Kids drugged out on cold medicines don't drive cars or operate heavy equipment. Also, do you want adults taking 5-10 sick days just for colds?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
If people were proposing massive new taxes, etc. based on Darwinism, I would be looking for more evidence. As it stands, who cares? I mean, when Darwin was alive, it was thought that life regularly spontaneously erupted. Pasteur proved that to be not the case, and in fact, mankind has never seen this theorized phenomena. The theory of cellular structure was infantile in Darwin's day; they simply had no concept of the extreme complexity of the simplest of life forms. Now that we know some of his underlying assumptions were pure poppycock, I am sure you can agree we can cast some healthy skepticism Darwin's way.
Great, that's not what we're discussing.
Just another day in Paradise
Very much this. The assumption is that papers only cite good research, but is something is really off, I have personally cited papers saying that the people that wrote it have no clue (with evidence of course). I have very rarely seen it done by other authors though, but that may be due to my field (CS).
The other thing is that if you do good research and explore interesting side-aspects, you are never getting a permanent academic position. Those go exclusively to people with a lot of publications (which is a bad sign in itself...). The system promotes bad scientists into positions where they can do and supervise more bad science. It is really a complete mess. And I do understand why so many industrial CS people have an utter disdain for published research, most of it is just so terribly bad it is staggering. To make matters worse, much of these terribly bad publications look good on the surface as that is required to get them accepted. But I have found outright fraudulent publications at Tier-1 conferences, misleading ones and ones that claimed findings without any proof whatsoever. I also know several people that should have their PhD removed, because they did not have the results they claimed they had. They were just clever enough to publish in a venue where the reviewers were impressed by the names on the paper or the writing, but failed to spot the often subtle but critical errors. (No, anonymous review does not help. People that want to benefit from the names of their advisors just publish a technical report that is the same as the paper and make sure Google finds it. Many reviewers even at first-rate conferences are too lazy to do a real review and instead first check whether they can identify the authors and just decides on the names if they are successful.)
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Yes, the keyword "half" was there in the phrase "more than half" which adequately covers your entire post does it not?
Thanks for the "correction", but it wasn't needed as you would have seen if you had done more than focus on keywords.
If you see the above as being related to political bias in any way then I can only conclude that you have a truly fucked up worldview that sees political bias everywhere - and your projection of than onto me and my comment above is deeply insulting.
Now that is completely out of left field and fighting words. I'm supposed to find myself evil for working with applied science in private enterprise? How dare you build such a ridiculous strawman in my name.
Also if you are depending on an unidentified youtube link to express what you cannot yourself, well that's about ten shades of pathetic isn't it? Can't even bother to write three words to distinguish it from a goatse link - why bother at all?
Sweet :-) Download link here.
Caption from the first photo: "This is what a test firing should look like. Note the mach diamonds in the exhaust stream."
Thanks for the idea of searching for a download, I'm looking forward to reading this.
Quote where I wrote about "academic labs performing undirected research" and not the strawman in your head stating it.
If Bell labs was "academic" you can eat MY lunch, delivered by a supermodel if you desire.
Right, I'm in the humanities and there is this running joke that you only need to publish one really bad and obviously flawed paper on a really popular topic, and your career is certain. It's true, one bad paper, a followup book that is even worse published at 'prestigious' publisher like Oxford UP*, and you will get cited
We're talking abourt science, not the humanities.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Then why did you jump in with your strawman attack game?
I'm sorry I didn't just roll over and feed you ego, but I'm not playing some silly game here like you are with your offtopic "ivory tower" insults.
WTF is it with this childish shit, don't you have video games to play instead of putting words in the mouths of others?
Healthy scepticism is trusting the evidence - and this is why modern evolutionary theory has changed quite a few things about Darwin's original theory, the crux of it is intact. And the social upheaval it caused at the time was, in fact, MUCH larger than what climate change is demanding - at a time when religion was fundamentally woven into the political process all over the world - it threatened that religion to the core.
There's a reason creationists are STILL going crazy over it, but they aren't being scientific.
You're not BEING A healthy sceptic - you're being a denier and by your own admission just now, your reasoning is pure argumentum-ad-consequentum - an outright fallacy. Scepticism is wanting evidence and ACCEPTING it when it's presented - and changing your mind for NEW evidence.
This has allowed evolutionary theory to be refined and improved over time - but those refinements never replaced the theory, they merely improved it. Climate science is the most scrutinized science on earth, because well funded opponents are desperate for any way to discredit it - scientific or not. Like evolutionary theory it has been refined over time (in fact - almost as much time), faced enormous opposition from dominant social forces which forced it to be rigorous.
All the sceptics are supporting the climate change theory right now because sceptics believe only that which has evidence. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence for climate change, no evidence whatsoever for any of the ideas the deniers have proposed - sceptics are with the evidence. The other lot are deniers.
The definition of a denier is one who insists on his position REGARDLESS of the evidence.
There is no difference between a climate denier and a creationist - indeed this is why they correlate so strongly. The vast majority of people who are one are also the other. That correlation has only gotten stronger over time too. In 2008 56% of republicans denied climate change. Today it's a mere 28% - these are people who share your political theories and the concerns that climate change proposals raise for people who believe those political theories - yet have ultimately yielded to the overwhelming evidence. That remaining 28% are made up almost entirely of the batshit insane religious right and a few basement dwelling Randians like you who think that believing something unpopular makes them smart because they think they are so special.
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Com on, I'm doing research in belief revision theory, epistemic logic and social choice. Not every science is empirical. Surely there's a lot of crap in the human sciences, but there is also some good and serious science. Admittedly, much of the better research could be considered applied mathematics but, then again, the same could also be said about many fields in the natural sciences.
...it has become a cult.
This article has some more details on the specific error modes. The examples given in physics involve processing collider result data. When the researchers knew what they were looking for they found it reproducibly. When they didn't have any preconceived notions it was discovered that it was a false positive. Some of these biomed and psych studies were the basis of policy and went un reproduced for years. This is a real problem, we should look for solutions.
http://www.economist.com/news/...
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Mann, I think he honestly believes his stuff, but is on some kind of a Narcissistic-Messianic complex; so you can't really blame him for being who he is. Hansen, man oh man you have to give him props for turning off the Air Conditioners during congressional testimony on global warming, definitely an A+ for theatrics and he's been arrested at environmental protests, I'd have fired him, but I respect him.
Gleick, chairing an ethics committee while committing pretexting, copyright infringement and possibly forgery!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The use of the word "denier" shows you to be a true believer in the religion of AGW. You deny that climate has *always* changed. Look, I have a degree in physics and minors in math and chemistry. I read the original research and find lots of least squares curve fitting, cooked computer models, lack of error bars on graphs, massive leaps in logic, and assertions of precision where there is none. Tell me, which paper convinced you beyond any doubt that AGW is "true". And don't waste my time with this "body of work" nonsense.
Examine your belief that it is possible to do good science in sociology and how long it takes to match reality.
How would you squeeze the perception bias out of that? Then again, so long as you select beliefs to revise carefully, you should get tenure. Just don't even consider trying to revise the beliefs of the department chair.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The blatant "science for sale" that has infested the FDA, USDA, EPA and most other government agencies is a huge problem. Here is how to fix it. Double blind the whole process.
Example: FDA and drug approval
Company A has a new drug they want on the market. They submit it to the FDA who then contracts a university to test it. Neither the company nor the university know of each other.
Second step it to get rid of the "me too" drugs. Currently you don't have to be better than the competition, just better than a placebo. Your drug can be much less effective or safe than existing ones but you still get on the market. This means that there is only competition between marketing departments.
Define the "allowed onto market" as safer and/or more effective and measure it the same way for all drugs (apples to apples please). Now you will get companies competing where it is needed.
Science is wrong way more often that it is right! This is not actually a problem. It is part of the scientific method.
Science is about observing. Creating a "hypothesis." Testing the hypothesis. Changing the hypothesis based on observations and tests. Until a hyptothesis can't be proven wrong, in which case it becomes a "theory." If a hypothesis can be 100% proven with no possible chance of altering, it becomes a law.
There are very few laws. For example, the law of gravity, even if we only have theories on how gravity works, gravity is itself a law.
So with gravity, a hypothesis was proposed that every item, despite the size and weight appear to drop at the same speed. Many tests made this a hypothesis. Then someone drops a feather, and based on observing the feather falling more slowly, the theory is called into question. Test are done. The theory is no longer in question because someone observes air and found evidence that while gravity acts on objects at the same rate, air doesn't. Add in the variable air and the theory of gravity still stands. We have the law of gravity.
However, there are many theories where when the theory is called into question, it is flat out proven wrong.
So for any given law there are multiple (mt) of theories. For any given theory theory their are multiple (mh) hypotheses.
So for every law that science comes up with, there are many incorrect scientific assumptions (isa).
Number of times science is wrong is vastly more than the number of times science is right,
Because something is the "currently accepted theory" doesn't mean it is correct. People often say things like, you are an idiot if you don't believe in the "Theory of Foo." However, the fact that the "Theory of Foo" is still a theory means that isn't proven yet. As a proper scientist, we continue to question everything until it is proven to such an extent that it becomes a law.
However doubting a theory because we don't have 100% evidence is different than doubting a theory because it doesn't jive with some religious belief. There are too many variable for either science or religion to make blatant, "your wrong, I'm right" statements. When either side does so, they look foolish.
I find it interesting that the scientific method is pretty much the same method as faith.
Faith = Believe something, act on it, if it is true, your faith is confirmed.
Scientific method: Hypthosize something. Test it. If your tests support your hypothesis, your theory is confirmed.
Also, sometimes results of scientific experiments don't always mean what one might think they mean. For example, science is trying to recreate the first moment when something moves from a lifeless element to a living thing (even if only a single-celled organism).There are many who say, once man can do this, it will forever disprove the idea of intelligent design. However, as soon as man does this, we also just proved the possibility of intelligent design. We proved man could use its intelligence to design and create life. At that point, all we proved is the necessary steps to create life. Further suppositions such as saying that since man can create life it proves that there is or there is no God are just suppositions are completely not part of the scientific method.
Happy contemplating . . .
Nothing has convinced me it's true. I support the theory with evidence. You may feel that evidence is weaker than I do. You may even be right but considering the opposition has no evidence whatsoever as a sceptic I still stand with climate change and will do so until and unless somebody presents an alternative theory with stronger evidence.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I work in academia so, here is the problem as I see it: Governments see things differently. They want large amounts of papers published at the cost of quality. And, this works to an extent, however, eventually all of the low quality work starts to pile up, and it becomes very hard to identify high quality work when it occurs. It's like they are trying to floor the gas pedal. The car will eventually break down. So, once again, this goes back to an issue with our broken government. And, I know science is an international endeavor, but I am speaking about the United States and government grants in particular.
In addition, I think a lot of the pressure comes from China and Chinese people that have infiltrated academia in the United States. They may mean well (or maybe not?), but the end result is too much pressure from the government. You can't rush science or you get low quality results.
Furthermore, due to this pressure from these outside forces, even people that would normally not have been inclined to produce low quality results have shifted their views due to peer pressure from colleagues.
I have noticed that most of this pressure comes from asians including Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Pakistani. In the end, it makes me wonder whether the "work ethic" of Asian people is not the reason they were so far behind the West prior to the 20th century. Maybe being "lazy" (in a computer science sense) is better?
One possible solution, as I see it, is to do "reverse science". Basically, take multiple papers and condense their results into a single paper. I'm not talking about summarizing or review/survey papers. I'm talking about applying logical thinking to actually compress and summarize multiple works into a single work where you actually "unpublish" the original works and "republish" them as "sub-papers" of the condensed paper. Of course, the condensed paper must cover every aspect of the substance of the original papers. Sub-authors can report to journals where the condensed paper is submitted if they find some important detail of their paper is left out. The condensed paper would then be retracted if necessary. One might even imagine condensed papers of condensed papers. In theory, all of science may be condensed into a single paper. The only requirement of a condensed paper is that it is shorter than the combined lengths of original papers it is condensing.
Now that is tiny impact of bad science. Want major global impact, that affected the majority of the human population and created a generation or two of stupidity, how about lead in fuel as bad science.
Bad science is idiotic lead head performance based science, science where idiots with money only want to pay for science that makes them more money and that insanely enough includes purposefully bad science.
Want good science, then you pay for people to do science and monitor the effort put in and the results are simply what they are, a relatively accurate answer to the question that was asked, the measure is how long it took to answer the question, what ever it was and how much it cost. Important salient point how many other questions were answered along the way and how many other interesting question were asked.
GREED is the most offensive word in the human language and fucks up everything it is associated with. Want a better world get rid of the high priests of greed, the ideological fundamentalist zealots who do far more harm than good in every human endeavour they corrupt and that especially includes science.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
CDC Annual Figures for American Deaths:- Heart disease: 611,105 Cancer: 584,881 Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 149,205 Accidents (unintentional injuries): 130,557 Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 128,978 Alzheimer's disease: 84,767 Diabetes: 75,578 Influenza and Pneumonia: 56,979 Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 47,112 Intentional self-harm (suicide): 41,149 Why the obsession with vaccines.It seems you are just another corporate whore.
Why the 24/7 publicity for less than 200 hundred terrorism deaths??????
Andrew Wakefield was right.Vaccines injure people.Look:-
http://www.naturalnews.com/049861_vaccine_racket_infographic_CDC_criminals.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/Infographics/Infographic-The-Vaccine-Racket-1280.jpg
Mann is right.The Hockey Stick is correct.
In which case, there will be thousands of people who looked into it and COULD find an error or lie and do not, then agreeing that the Hockey Stick is real.
This will cause you anguish in 3...2...1...
Yes, the scientific consensus was that CO2 would not cause global warming. That remained dominant until about the 1920's, when there were enough measures of high enough quality to discount many of the reasons for that conclusion. It remained the default position until in the 1950's when Callender showed that CO2 could cause global warming. After that it dropped from a large proportion to less than 1%.
Name me ONE scientific discovery that went from Majority Scientific View to Lunatic Fringe Faith?
And, no "the earth was flat" wasn't MSV, it's just LFF now.
"Is CO2 a greenhouse gas ? We've had proof of that since the mid 19th century"
Untrue. It was hypothesized by Arrhenius but then Robert Wood showed that greenhouses do not warm because of the "greenhouse effect"
Errm, do you actually believe what you just wrote there? Do you actually believe they called it "greenhouse effect" not as an analogy, but as an actual attempt at explanation? Are you a true moron who can't think for himself and repeats some silly explanation he heard from some moronic talk radio host? Or just a troll?
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2011/07/19/the-greenhouse-effect-is-not-t/
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Particle physics has a dogma (e.g, nothing with rest-mass NE 0 can travel at or above the speed of light) that makes a claim of faster-thjan-light neutrinos a claim that requires extraordinary proof, so any claim to have discovered faster-than-light neutrinos results in immediate scrutiny. Biomedicine and social science have much looser dogma, dogma that is often very much polluted by people whose world views are often much more driven by wishful thinking (unicorns for EVERYONE!), than by tested science. So I agree with the posters who claim that the problem is not throughout science, being more a problem at the left end of the scientific spectrum (a spectrum described XKCD).
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Is the cause of the problem.
Not to mention basic greed.
People who knowingly commit fraud love how the general public is so naive and gullible about the integrity of scientists.
No it is not.
You are being very simplistic and also getting things backwards. It's not a case of either close to 100% fraud or 0% fraud. Reality bites when people try to prove physical things that are not real so fraud in most sciences cannot be sustained for long since when experiments are repeated reality asserts itself.
I'm not worried, it's just a demonstration of something in one field that makes zero sense in another. Copying other people's work is not the problem and that's the only situation where your suggestion is going to work.
Sorry, you've been very poorly informed or are just guessing. Peer review is why it takes time to publish. Peer review is why it takes so long to submit a thesis.
Only when there are idiots intent on discrediting entire fields of science for political purposes.
I'll apologise after you apologise for your very insulting initial post. I've been very polite to you considering what you have written.
You've added a very large pile of ignorant bullshit yourself that cannot be attributed to that person or the Lancet. Show me where it says ANYTHING that is in your initial or following posts.
As to my motivations, so you're shifting to Ad hominem now?
And you call yourself a scientist?
Hahahahahahaha
I'm going to give you this because it is fitting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As to people not reading stuff... here is the fellow's full comment:
http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/...
If there is anything left of the good scientist and thinker your education system was supposed to make you into... try to be better than you are. You are a very disappointing figure right now.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Very funny considering your attacks on me above which are the real thing and not the imaginary adhom you are pretending I've been hitting you with.
Something else you've made up - I'm an engineer but I have done research work and I currently work with scientists.
So tell me, why is it I have to be an expert to express an opinion but you don't have to even have a high school level understanding of science to do so?
Wow. So you don't know what ad hominem means?
This is getting sadder and sadder.
Okay, I'm 99 percent positive you lied when you said you were involved in scientific peer review. I don't think anyone with that much education could be this ignorant.
Okay, so to explain how ad hominem works:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
""An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"[1]), short for argumentum ad hominem, means responding to arguments by attacking a person's character, rather than to the content of their arguments.""
So the key point here is not whether or not someone insults you but whether the insult itself is the argument used against someone... that is sans any other rational or evidence.
I have not done that to you. My insults are either the conclusions of larger argument. That is I say "because of X variables I conclude you are Y"... that isn't ad hominem. Or the insult isn't even relevant to my argument. Such as saying that the thermometer says the temperature is something other than what you said, therefore it isn't the temperature you said... and by the way you're an idiot. That isn't ad hominem either. The argument was based on the thermometer reading not your idiocy.
Your error is quite common from uneducated people... often high school students. So I'm hoping you're young and not just destined to be ignorant for the rest of your life. Truly. That would be sad.
As to why you have to be an expert to express an opinion? So now you're just descending into hypocrisy? YOU WERE THE ONE THAT STARTED TITLE DROPPING. Not me. Did I ever tell you my qualifications or pretend that I was privy to insider knowledge? Nope.
That was you.
And when I call bullshit on your claims, you respond with "and who says I need to have this special insider knowledge!?"...
Well, you did...
You've made so many fucking mistakes that its hard for me to keep track of them all.
You didn't read the original article or the supporting material which included an ACTUAL expert in peer review... the editor of the Lancet... basically backing up what I was saying.
You made a lot of specious claims about peer review being fine despite there being lots of evidence of being unreliable.
You made laughable claims of having insider knowledge.
You attempted to use "ad verecundiam" against me. Look it up.
Then you tried ad hominem saying that the only reason I would want improved standards in peer review is because I am against global warming research.
Side note, you didn't realize you just admitted that there might be a specific problem with the peer review process in climate change. If there weren't it wouldn't be specifically susceptible to the consequences of reform.
Then when I called bullshit on your credentials, you said "who says I need to have insider knowledge!?"... Well, you did. You tried to use your claims of insider knowledge to sustain ad verecundiam. I didn't do that. You did.
And then you outed yourself as not knowing either how ad hominem works or even what a logical fallacy is in the first place. This further undermines your claims to insider knowledge.
Let me explain fallacies for you as well because really it is the only thing you need to know on the issue. All specific fallacies are derived from this little nugget of wisdom:
Any line of logic that does not prove that some variable has a specific outcome 100 percent of the time is fallacious.
For example, if I said "tom isn't hungry so tom must have had a sandwich"... you don't why tom isn't hungry. You can't conclude that because he isn't that he must have had a sandwich. He could be sick, he could have eaten a fucking burrito. It isn't enough information.
Science is all about the attempt to make non-fallacious arguments. You say "well, this drug cures this disease because we did a test with 2000 people. Some were given our drug, some were given a placebo, and some were given nothing. Those that were given our drug improved. Everyone else died."
That's what you're trying to do. Make non-fallacious arguments.
Now... pay me.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Of course I do. Now why write a vast and long stream of shit when your first petty little insult ensures that the rest is not going to be read?
First, acknowledge that the editor of the Lancet backed up my position.
I'm putting that statement before anything else because you're using your FEELINGS to justify not reading things. Again, comical that you call yourself some kind of scientist or engineer when you believe your emotional reactions to things is justification to not have intellectual integrity.
So there you go. No more dodging, shithead. I quoted the article to you multiple times and you've been evading and changing the subject ever since. Face it.
You think my feelings made me want to read anything you said? You fucking disgust me. Talking to you is like taking a bite out of rotten fruit. I don't enjoy it. But I respond because the only way to deal with people coming into communities and speciously claiming to be experts while spreading misinformation is to deal with them.
You're a fucking cancer. And THAT is why I'm dealing with you. Not because of my "feelings". People like you are literally destroying Western civilization. You're narcissistic ideologically driven bullshit corrupts everything it touches. The very idea that you would think your feelings even began to fucking matter is baffling to me.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Your position of "cargo cult science"? Sorry but that is an outright LIE as you are very well aware. The editor of the Lancet said no such thing and sisn't back up any of your other points either - as you are very well aware.
What is the point of all these lies and attacks? Be honest. It will be a refreshing change.
By building the future instead of some stagnant swamp? What exactly are you doing for "Western civilization"? You demanded to know what I do - your turn. Are you in advertising? Political intern for radical politics? Or just a shit stirrer that is angry that other people get more attention?
First, I'd like to point out that you ignored the bit where the editor of the Lancet backed up my position. I challenged you to acknowledge that and you just ignored it.
I put it at the top of my post so you couldn't pretend you didn't read it.
So, your evasion on that point is completely confirmed and that destroys whatever intellectual integrity you might otherwise claim. You're now officially and verifiability a scumbag. I win.
Now that you have no intellectual integrity, lets go through the rest of your post. :D
So you say that you're trying to build a future based on deciet, poor research practices, and political bias? Because your lack of intellectual integrity makes it clear what you're all about.
The stagnant swamp I'm promoting is "STANDARDS", "INTEGRITY", "HONESTY", "IMPARTIALITY"... you know... little things that are utterly required to actually conduct any kind of real science.
Since you neither believe in any of that nor especially understand why any of it is important, you're incapable of doing more than grunt work for any new future. Everything you do will have to be checked and rechecked by people more honest and wise than yourself. Your contributions are dubious at best unless you're kept to fields of study or application that are so simple or have no outlet for your many biases.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I didn't ignore it, I called you an outright LAIR because the editor of the Lancet does NOT support what you have written. An appeal to authority has to be something from the authority and not just words that you pretend came from them.
Okay, lets go through his post bit by bit so it is extra clear to you.
""âoeA lot of what is published is incorrect.â Iâ(TM)m not allowed to say who made this remark because we were asked to observe Chatham House rules. We were also asked not to take photographs of slides. Those who worked for government agencies pleaded that their comments especially remain unquoted, since the forthcoming UK election meant they were living in âoepurdahââ"a chilling state where severe restrictions on freedom of speech are placed on anyone on the governmentâ(TM)s payroll. Why the paranoid concern for secrecy and non-attribution? Because this symposiumâ"on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research, held at the Wellcome Trust in London last weekâ"touched on one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.""
That is the editor of the lancet accusing the scientific establishment of covering up flaws in the peer review process for political reasons. He's saying there is a conspiracy to deceive the public.
He starts with saying someone said "a lot of what is published is incorrect"... and by published we mean what was peer reviewed and published. He is also saying he isn't allowed to tell you who said that. He then says that they're not allowed to take recordings of the event out of the event... for political reasons. He says the government has specifically told the scientists to not quote them when they make statements or give orders to them on this matter. The entire thing is kept secret.
Is that not what he's saying?
And that is the first paragraph which I'm guessing you didn't read.
But it goes on:
""The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, âoepoor methods get resultsâ. The Academy of Medical Sciences, Medical Research Council, and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have now put their reputational weight behind an investigation into
these questionable research practices. The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fi t their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of âoesignificanceâ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale. We reject important confirmations. Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent, endpoints that foster reductive metrics, such as high-impact publication. National assessment procedures, such as the Research Excellence Framework, incentivise bad practices. And individual scientists, including their most senior leaders, do little to alter a research culture that occasionally veers close to misconduct.""
First he says that a significant portion of what is published is untrue. The reasons for which are that studies often have sample sizes that render them unreliable, they are studying a tiny variation in variables that cannot be accurately attributed to anything, they start with inital premises that go unquestioned, the people conducting the studies sometimes are being paid, coerced, or profit in some manner by specific findings, and finally that certain conclusions are "fashionable" and so they are concluded at the expense of actual science.
You didn't read any of that. Because that's pretty much all
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
And as I proved in this post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
""
Okay, lets go through his post bit by bit so it is extra clear to you.
""ÃoeA lot of what is published is incorrect.Ã IÃ(TM)m not allowed to say who made this remark because we were asked to observe Chatham House rules. We were also asked not to take photographs of slides. Those who worked for government agencies pleaded that their comments especially remain unquoted, since the forthcoming UK election meant they were living in ÃoepurdahÃÃ"a chilling state where severe restrictions on freedom of speech are placed on anyone on the governmentÃ(TM)s payroll. Why the paranoid concern for secrecy and non-attribution? Because this symposiumÃ"on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research, held at the Wellcome Trust in London last weekÃ"touched on one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.""
That is the editor of the lancet accusing the scientific establishment of covering up flaws in the peer review process for political reasons. He's saying there is a conspiracy to deceive the public.
He starts with saying someone said "a lot of what is published is incorrect"... and by published we mean what was peer reviewed and published. He is also saying he isn't allowed to tell you who said that. He then says that they're not allowed to take recordings of the event out of the event... for political reasons. He says the government has specifically told the scientists to not quote them when they make statements or give orders to them on this matter. The entire thing is kept secret.
Is that not what he's saying?
And that is the first paragraph which I'm guessing you didn't read.
But it goes on:
""The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, Ãoepoor methods get resultsÃ. The Academy of Medical Sciences, Medical Research Council, and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have now put their reputational weight behind an investigation into
these questionable research practices. The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fi t their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of Ãoesignificanceà pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale. We reject important confirmations. Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent, endpoints that foster reductive metrics, such as high-impact publication. National assessment procedures, such as the Research Excellence Framework, incentivise bad practices. And individual scientists, including their most senior leaders, do little to alter a research culture that occasionally veers close to misconduct.""
First he says that a significant portion of what is published is untrue. The reasons for which are that studies often have sample sizes that render them unreliable, they are studying a tiny variation in variables that cannot be accurately attributed to anything, they start with inital premises that go unquestioned, the people conducting the studies sometimes are being paid, coerced, or profit in some manner by specific findings, and finally that certain co
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
So no response to my line by line proof that I was actually right and he was supporting my position?
No response to the fact that I wasn't lying and in fact you were just clueless because you either didn't read or worse didn't understand what you read?
Come on. You've made some bold claims there, junior. And I'd love to see you back fucking one of them up.
Do you know why you lose? Because all you care about is winning.
And because all you care about is winning, you fail to see that the easiest way to win is to be right.
I don't try to win. I try to be right.
The distinction is that you like to play rhetorical games to create IMPRESSION of being right. Where as I will actually change my position to fit the facts. So when push comes to shove... my feet are firmly planted able to bear the strain. Where as you fucking fall over in a heap.
You're a poser and not a very good one.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Sorry kid - that doesn't remotely come close to justify the shower of shit you've been pouring on this page of taking an outlier and pretending everything is like that.
Don't give up the day job.
IT DOES NOT
Take responsibility for your own excrement instead of blaming it on somebody else.
See above - and if I'm junior then dementia must be your excuse for your torrent of shit. What manner of creature are you? Are you some sort of cultist, a political intern, an advertising intern or a student at a bible college? How did you get to the point you are at with so much hate of entire professions but so little understanding of the world you live in? What creates an angry young man like yourself.
If you are over 19 - shame on you! Grow up!
I don't have hatred for scientists at all. I deeply respect the profession.
If one dislikes quack doctors that kill their patients and one says that bad doctors should be removed from the profession... does one hate all doctors?
I'm not the one that keeps saying all scientists are bad. That's just you desperately trying to breath life into your dead and rotting credibility by trying to retcon the argument with more strawmen.
As I said before... I know you know you're a fraud.
And now you know that I know that you know you're a fraud as well. ;)
Sleep tight sweetie, if you stay off the internet the bad man can't hurt your wuddle feelings.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Oh really? Your first post and the petty little spy tricks posts prove otherwise. You are clearly full of hate and venom as many examples above show.