Ask Slashdot: Why Does Science Appear To Be Getting Things Increasingly Wrong? 320
azaris writes: Recent revelations of heavily policy-driven or even falsified science have raised concern in the general public, but especially in the scientific community itself. It's not purely a question of political or commercial interference either (as is often claimed when it comes to e.g. climate research) — scientists themselves are increasingly incentivized to game the system for improved career prospects, more funding, or simply because they perceive everyone else to do it, too. Even discounting outright fraud or manipulation of data, the widespread use of methodologies known to be invalid plagues many fields and is leading to an increasing inability to reproduce recent findings (the so-called crisis of reproducibility) that puts the very basis of our reliance on scientific research results at risk. Of course, one could claim that science is by nature self-correcting, but the problem appears to be getting worse before it gets better.
Is it time for more scientists to speak out openly about raising the level of transparency and honesty in their field?
Is it time for more scientists to speak out openly about raising the level of transparency and honesty in their field?
They dont; (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop watching idiots.
Incentives (Score:5, Interesting)
I've done biomedical research in the US and Sweden. The incentive structure is totally different. Swedish scientiests take baby steps and reproduce results repeatedly before moving on. American scientists are all trying to win the Nobel prize. They shoot for the big result and nobody gets a grant in the US for repeating results of someone else. Is it a surprise that people respond to the incentives before them?
Re:Incentives (Score:5, Interesting)
Swedish scientiests take baby steps and reproduce results repeatedly before moving on. American scientists are all trying to win the Nobel prize.
On a per capita basis, Sweden has three times [wikipedia.org] as many Nobel Prizes as America. So the American strategy doesn't appear to be very successful. Or maybe the Swedes have a home team advantage.
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> because less pepole means more per capita resources
You're assuming every country has the same ressources, independed from country size and population.
Re:Incentives (Score:5, Insightful)
If we want to improve, then we need to continue to make discussion of science fun. We need to continue to make sure people know that it's okay to be wrong. We need to only make the necessary mandatory, and never make people feel that we're forcing more upon them. What is necessary should become more advanced as technology advances, and casual discussion is already becoming more advanced. Aside from all this, we can only wait and hope that we don't end up with a government that hates science or businesses that intentionally corrupt it while we have a population that doesn't do either. Unfortunately, that previous sentence is a serious concern.
Re:Incentives (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Incentives (Score:5, Interesting)
Then you are modest in giving yourself a 0 score. Of course I did occasionally repeat work (or parts of work) while doing research in the US. But I never saw anyone in the US repeat an entire experimental protocol. In Sweden this was common, and it did not affect your ability to get funding. Also, in Sweden negative results were accorded the same standing as postive ones. In the US it was common to see researchers come up with a wild idea and give it a try, skipping many intermediate steps. In Sweden, all those intermediate steps would be exhuastively evaluated before moving on the the next level. I worked with several folks in the US who were publishing in Science Magazine and they were absolutely going for a Nobel.
I think the difference has to do with the social standing and security felt by Swedish University professors. They have guaranteed funding unless they really screw up. In the US you may have academic tenure but if you lose your funding from outside sources, you are not going to keep your labs. One can argue about which is the better system. Most American labs I saw were more productive in the sense of the data they turned out. But I would trust the work done in a Swedish lab over that done in an American lab/... as a general rule.
Re:Incentives (Score:5, Interesting)
When he says Americans are pursuing the Nobel, what he doesn't understand is that it is just a cultural difference in what is polite language. In Sweden admitting you dream of the highest award in your field might be presumptuous. In the US, a person without dreams might be presumed to be a dullard without any.
The whole thing could have been explained in a couple minutes by a person from Sociology or Linguistics.
Re: Incentives (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure what you mean. I've lived and worked in Sweden and the US. And I have collaborated in the US and Sweden with many researchers from Sweden, Finland, China, Holland, Japan, Czech Republic, India, Iran, Pakistan, England and probably several more. The most meticulous in my experience are the Finns but it's a small sample size. The Japanese tend to be hamstrung by hierarchy and status issues, the Chinese are befuddled by having to deal in English. Of course it's always dangerous to generalize because it's hard to tell what is an individual trait and what is a national cultural trait. I do know for sure that Swedes are reticent to tell you about their strong points and are embarrased by Americans who honestly describe their own good work. I think Swedes view many American researchers as "grand-standing" and skipping the hard work.
You're right and wrong. (Score:3)
You're absolutely right about incentives and grant money.
How you tied this to the Nobel Prize is beyond me, so let's drop that.
The incentives are all about grant money and outside (the campus) capital. As a result, the science takes a back seat to market economics, market-ing (both of corporate partners and of academic institutions themselves, which increasingly operate in a competitive marketplace for enrollments), management concerns, investors, etc.
This incentive structure is increasingly becoming the no
Politicans don't understand science (Score:3, Interesting)
I tend to blame the modern political mindset rather than capitalism. I think the problem is that politicians tend to treat "science" as just another political party. I better explain that a little...
There seems to be an idea in political circules that perception == reality. i.e. whatever people believe to be true is effectively true, at least for purposes of governemnt and re-election. Because of this, politicians tend to state as truth whatever they want the truth to be, in the hope and expectation that
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Science is suppose to get things wrong. It is part of the process. The problem is the media keeps on touting the current hypothesis as the newest theory. So the average slob thinks this is some new breakthrew while it is just an idea to test out.
Because of this poor media coverage it makes the impression that the process is so flawed.
Now the problem is in how science is funded, means the scientist need to market their idea to people with money. Now these guys want to the science not marketing. So they do t
The fallacy of labels (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we are just beginning, more and more, to recognize the inherent limitations of terms like 'scientist'. Media outlets have to struggle to be the most clicked-on, first to break every story no matter how poorly researched or even conceived. The average citizen has access to resources that can verify the accuracy of almost anything. Unfortunately this tends to get lost among the increasingly noisy media. It also requires discipline, patience, and focus to actually apply such methods to anything. Most of the time we just take what we hear at face value - this has always been the way of things. Now, however, we feel somehow betrayed by our own conceptions when they turn out to be wrong.
Re:The fallacy of labels (Score:5, Informative)
If it is not Chemistry, Physics or Math, it is not science.
If it involves an experiment designed to falsify a hypothesis, then it is science. That includes far more than just the hard sciences. Also, Math is not a science, any more than a hammer is a bookshelf.
Re:The fallacy of labels (Score:5, Insightful)
Math is THE science. Everything is about provability and reproducibility.
No.
Math, for all of its beauty and power, is not a science. Why? Because it does not rely on experimental observations to arrive at conclusions. Instead, it relies on axioms extended by logical reasoning.
The empirical side of mathematics (Score:3)
It may be far less prevalant, but I do believe it is there; consider that one almost never knows the consequences of assumptions before hand with any certainty (although good mathematicians have intuitions of course). Mathematics is an exploration of structures which are not completely understood. Ever. In this sense the study of highly complex human made structures is still science because we don't necessarily get even close to understandi
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Math isn't science at all, though it has tremendous value in its application to science. Science is all about falsifiability rather than provability-- science is the process of developing descriptions of the world, testing the validity and limits of those descriptions, and then extending the descriptions and testing further. Without comparisons to reality it's not science (yes, I *am* looking at you string theory).
Math lets you prove assertions based on a logical framework and derive things that are true w
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Problem is... (Score:2, Interesting)
... short term thinking. The mindset of our era is corporate heads wanting quick turn around for profit. This is what Harper did to canada, he re-oriented the science division towards the oil sands "supporting industry" any serious research that requires any length or depth gets cut.
Re:Problem is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Problem is... .. short term thinking. The mindset of our era is corporate heads wanting quick turn around for profit. This is what Harper did to canada, he re-oriented the science division towards the oil sands "supporting industry" any serious research that requires any length or depth gets cut.
I agree that is "a" problem, but not THE problem. OP pretty much states it, even though stated more in the form of speculation or a question. The problem is a combination of "corporate capture", and corporate short-term thinking.
Slate TFA states it pretty much up-front in their conclusion: the FDA has been commercial-captured. This has been evident for decades but Congress has been unwilling to do anything about it. Because, let's face it: much of Congress has been commercial-captured, too. Not all of it, but some of it for sure.
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It is the prime example of the problem. Australia, did much the same with all research being required to generate a profit and Conservative political parties. As such all research that was for the public good but that could only be given away free was cut off. The problem is corporate psychopathic greed entering into science as other areas have already been exploited and there is a massive drive to do to universities and science, to match what was done to news organisations and pharmaceutical corporations,
seems about the same (Score:5, Insightful)
Also worth recognizing that science papers are not an attempt to define absolute truth, and people who use it as such (saying, "this paper says X, therefore X is true") are likely to be disappointed. Science papers are essentially correspondence between scientists, saying "hey, look what I did and how it turned out." It's a form of dialectic, and a good one, but not every paper will be equally good, or even true......nor is it intended to be.
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The real issue is science journalism.
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Journalists are people who flunked calculus, and then couldn't even get into the English department. They get their revenge on the world by going to J-school and then becoming 'science journalists.'
No, you can't do your masters thesis on those leaflets they pass out on the mall.
Re:seems about the same (Score:5, Insightful)
I think there are two other related issues at play here:
1. There has been a proliferation of relatively shoddy low-impact papers. Thanks to the Internet and the large scientific community, many of these are quickly flagged, but it's still a drag. Part of the reason for this is that the developed world (and more recently, aspiring nations) has been over-training scientists for a few decades, and a PhD is typically an essential requirement for most decent careers - which creates a big incentive to publish no matter how crappy the results.
2. Because of our f***ed-up incentive system, there is an additional huge incentive to publish in ultra-selective high-profile journals, which means the result has to be sufficiently exciting (and "citation bait"). Naturally, this leads people to either cheat or (more often) be sloppy and careless. These failures attract the most attention for obvious reasons.
Basically it's a natural side effect of the "democratization" of science. When basic research was just a gentleman's club centered at a relatively few elite institutions, there was much less incentive to game the system.
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I'm not sure #1 has changed in terms of proportion of papers, though there are certainly more total papers. If you read through 19th-century scientific journals and conference reports, there is a lot of really mediocre stuff, not only mediocre in retrospect but just kind of filler at any time. Someone saw a thing and wrote it up and well here it is hope this helps. And then writes in again a few months later with an update on how it's going, no results but promising some results later. The proportion of pap
Re:seems about the same (Score:5, Insightful)
To clarify: I don't necessarily think the proportion has changed. But the absolute quantity of bad papers has certainly increased. I'm also wondering whether the incidence of truly incompetent work has gone up due to lowered standards; the average PhD student isn't a towering intellectual giant. (Hell, even I graduated.)
Re:seems about the same (Score:5, Insightful)
PhD student isn't a towering intellectual giant. (Hell, even I graduated.)
"The closer I got to PhD, the less I respected PhDs."
Re:seems about the same (Score:4, Insightful)
Definitely true, although having had the misfortune to sit through and then TA classes full of pre-meds, I now respect MDs even less.
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One of my professors said that he wanted a bracelet with all of his pre-med students' names on it and instructions to never let any of them treat him. After a few semesters of TAing them, I have to agree!
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The question of teaching quality is a part of the problem. Almost no university in the US judges professors based on teaching. They claim to do so, but the tenure decision is primarily a judgement of publications and external funding. In my case the quality of publications was largely irrelevant. I assume that better universities judge quality of research, but I haven't been there. We need to seriously consider having teaching positions for PhDs in addition to research positions. I am not sure if the
Re:seems about the same (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll add to this.
We have to separate 'science' from 'scientists' in a similar way you have to separate any practice from its practitioners.
Science is a really good methodology to get at the *truth* mainly by testing your hypothesis (scientific method).
In the end though, scientists are just people, as in any other group. They can and will be influenced by pride, status, money, power, politics...as any other group of people.
It's a tough line of argument where people end up talking about 'true science'
It's not just scientific journals, people will sometimes dismiss entire areas of 'science', especially in the social sciences/economics. Yet, from the outside perspective, its the same voices of experts touting studies and reports to get at the *truth*.
In the end though from a social perspective, how can we guarantee scientists adhere to the scientific method and search for truth, any more than catholic priests adhere to their creed (while raping little children).
I don't they will as scientists are just people. Put more power, money, politics, institutions under the scientific banner, and I think human behavior will take precedence over the adherence to the scientific theory.
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Starting in the a 1940s people starting disproving a "null hypothesis" rather than "your hypothesis" or "my hypothesis".
And that change was a huge leap forward. It didn't get us to perfection, but the shift indicated a significant (yet still insufficient) increase in statistical literacy in the sciences.
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I disagree. Disproving chance is redundant, this is already built into the scientific method. Collect data, come up with some explanations for it (model, hypothesis, theory), then test these on new data. Any time the data is capable of distinguishing between multiple "real" explanations then chance will also be ruled out.
"Disproving the null hypothesis" is a rudimentary statistical method for implementing the scientific method in cases where null hypotheses can exist (in particular, used in a sea of phenomena where correlation happens, but most phenomena are relatively independent of each other). It's not a complete waste of time, but it is an avenue for introducing crap research via confirmation bias. Nutrition research is chock full of studies that claim to show all sorts of irreproducible results that happened just becau
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Science needs to be vilified in the press in order to maintain a complaint following. We are seeing fanaticism (religious, political, economic, etc.) desperately drawing every breath to keep itself in the forefront against all odds.
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Remember when you learned the scientific method in primary school? (assuming that hasn't been dropped)
Reproducing results is a large element of science. Our media loves spiting out garbage as soon as it is produced. (Before it is independently re-tested)
I tend to view the first article of something as a "hmm, curious." If adopting it is (or seems to have) a minimal negative impact (like isolated stereographic input to treat lazy eye), I might try it. Otherwise I will see if I still hear about it 5 years lat
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A disturbing trend I've seen is the tendency for a conference or publication to ask the author's recommendation for suitable people to peer review the paper! This largely defeats the purpose of the review, since the author can cherry pick reviewers he knows will vote to accept. Say, a colleague or associate. I don't think the "cherry picking" isn't even conscious most of the time. I mean, who else would you recommend? Someone you don't know?
The justification given by the publisher is that they need someone
Re:seems about the same (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone (I forget where) once claimed that editors are disinclined to actually use these suggestions - instead, they'll remember the names for the next time they receive a manuscript on a similar topic from a different group. I doubt most scientists would complain if these recommendations disappeared entirely. What we're usually much more worried about, instead, is that the editor will send our paper to our arch-enemy who constantly bad-mouths us at meetings and is working on a similar project. (Or a notorious pedant who will dismiss any research that doesn't conform to his ideas about theory.)
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^This^
/. articles like this one are basically stalking horse stooges - a paragraph of well-known minor concerns that together add up & appear to be 'truthy' evidence of a major problem, and an 'honest' question tacked onto the end.
The whole point is to sow FUD...
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Re:seems about the same (Score:5, Informative)
If you're interested in reading papers outside of your area of expertise, this is what I'd recommend. Firstly, don't read the paper from front to back. Contemporary journal articles are way too dry for that and you likely don't care about all of the sections (eg, the experimental methods).
Read the abstract to determine if you are actually interested in what the paper is going to discuss. The abstract will also give you a decent idea of who the writer considers to be their audience; if the abstract is completely and totally over your head, you're not likely to understand most of the paper.
After that, you can skim the introduction to get a grasp of the context (and read any introductory subsections that you aren't familiar with or are fascinated by).
In my field (and many/most others?), the story is generally told through figures of data and their captions. Generally, you can inspect the figures and captions and get a very good idea of what the paper is saying and what they're basing their conclusions on. You can jump to parts of the discussion section if you want more information than the captions are providing.
The conclusions section ties it all together, but too often that section is just a wordier restatement of the abstract. The conclusions are also where you're most likely to find the speculative crap that excites journalists and potential sources of funding.
If you're really into the topic, or it's in your field, you can dive in and read the sections that interest you, but a well crafted scientific paper should be able to tell the whole story through the figures and captions.
Conclusions is also where lies may lie. (Score:3)
The conclusions section ties it all together, but too often that section is just a wordier restatement of the abstract. The conclusions are also where you're most likely to find the speculative crap that excites journalists and potential sources of funding.
When a subject has been politicized, the conclusions section will often conclude things that are somewhat divergent from, or even directly contradictory to, the actual results of the paper. This is because, in a politicized environment, the funders may p
It is selling the sizzle with no steak (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It is selling the sizzle with no steak (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just companies and politicians. University PR departments can be just as bad as their corporate counterparts, as witnessed by the proliferation of press releases claiming that "State U researchers discover possible cancer cure."
Because there's so much more of it (Score:3, Insightful)
There are more scientists today at work than at any other time in the past. They produce better results than at any time in the past. Better tools and education have improved things to the human race in general and scientists in particular.
So if we assume that scientists are just as likely as a percentage to falsify work, we can safely assume that with more scientists today at work, and the good results better than previous results, there are more errors today and they appear to be more obvious.
Re:Because there's so much more of it (Score:5, Interesting)
As a publishing scientist, I can completely agree with your assessment. If you have followed anything in science recently, especially the life sciences, then you'll know that we are doing things routinely that were impossible just 10 to 15 years ago, with excellent reliability and reproducibility. Take whole genome sequencing as just one of many examples. There is a lot more science being done around the world now, and a lot more bad science along with it. I don't know of studies that have looked at trends on this, but my guess is that the percentage of bad science probably has not changed too much. But countries like China have entered basic research in a big way, and that means lots more scientists working at more projects. However, the squeeze on scientific funding in places like the US, which has become increasingly difficult to obtain even for very worthwhile projects, has certainly increased pressure on scientists, with negative results in terms of quality and reliability.
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If you are judging the success of science by the number of treatments being produced, you're doing it wrong.
Science is study of the unknown. That may lead to practical results, it may not. It may lead to practical results quickly, but often you need quite a long time to get to the point where you are manipulating things which is a precondition for a 'treatment'.
because of reasons... (Score:2, Informative)
1. difficulty: problems are getting harder to solve
2. error margin: and the demand for correctness is increasing
3. everyone's a scientist: but most are not really. there's a lot of charlatans out there
4. substitution: tons of stuff we thought we knew turned out to be wrong, because now we think we now better
5. mass: there's just so much "information" out there, there's bound the be something wrong. and the more there is the more will be wrong.
really... most things are just self evident.
Runaway capitalism. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Runaway capitalism. (Score:4, Informative)
This is exactly what happened in Japan at the Riken Institute [phys.org]. A lead researcher made claimed to make a fantastic breakthrough, but it was unreproducible. Clearly the pressure to be a winner overwhelmed good scientific practice.
The FDA had to crack down on Big Pharma, because they were not reporting negative results from clinical tests. If you can pick and choose so that only positive outcomes are used, then it's as bad as not doing any tests at all. The motive was greed, and the public be damned.
The phrase "Publish or Perish" sums up the pressure that results in this behavior. It's exactly the same as predatory capitalism; if you can make money, then nothing else matters, even killing people.
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and has progressed now to where various political factions essentially 'buy off' people with college degrees (I won't call them scientists) to get up in front of people and publicly throw support behind their positions
Let's discuss these factions for a bit. There're obvious capital factions like Big Oil or tobacco companies. But then there're environmentalist and labor-oriented NGOs. There're political parties and government bureaucracies. There're reli
It's jsut step 11, (Score:2)
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
https://www.google.ca/search?q... [google.ca]
The rest of the steps are in place so the shit is gonna hit the fan soon.
Not science (Score:2)
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I agree. "Science" isn't one giant blob of the black arts. And it isn't a black art. Many believe so but for different reasons.
As someone above mentioned, there are no more scientists working than ever before. Any pop. of humans will have its proportion of hucksters. Given the 24 hour news cycle, new organizations willing to generate news, everyone and their brother's dog with a web site thinking their opinion is somehow information, etc., and it would appear from the outside that science is being drowned b
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But that's the problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
The post attempts to criticize scientists using assumptions not scientifically examined themselves. "Increasing inability," "appears to be," "as is often claimed," "increasingly incentivized," "widespread." Such terms don't even pass muster on Wikipedia, let alone actual scientific journals.
Really? Show me the data. Like a scientist. Is the number of retracted articles increasing in a statistically significant way? Is there a statistically significant change in the types of funding incentives? What is the level at which you call something "widespread?" Prove to me that science itself is actually getting things "wrong" at any rate higher than before. But if you want to attack science, you need to do it on their terms.
Phrasing the question in this way shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. It assumes a narrative and then rapid-links a bunch of anecdotes before asking a direct question about the character of an entire profession.
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It is difficult to give exact figures because there are so far few formal studies quantifying the extent of the problem. We know that for example psychology retractions have quadrupled since 1989 [retractionwatch.com], a rate higher than the growth in the number of publications in the same period. It is also likely that most scientific misconduct remains uncovered or unacknowledged. It seems that few scientists admit misconduct, but many more know someone else who is committing it:
How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Resea [plos.org]
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Only problem with your link is meta-analyses are shit.
What. (Score:2)
If it was always getting things right then it would be prophecy, not science. Science is the art of getting things wrong in order to figure out what's correct.
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Even things that seem obvious can sometimes break down completely when put in the crucible. And things that you thought before broke down may really not have. No less of an intellectual powerhouse than Feynman famously said that you a
Science is fine... (Score:4, Interesting)
... it's the media messing things up. The endless race to publish something, anything, leads to headlines like "XYZ is bad for you!" Then you read the actual study, and it turns out the "reporter" is talking about a minor study on a different topic that had a mere handful of study participants. Of course, no effort is made to actually interview the study authors, or "the authors did not respond to our request for an interview." I find that Gawker and HuffPo are among the worst offenders.
Re: Science is fine... (Score:2)
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Obligatory XKCD. [xkcd.com]
Journals and Universities are mostly to blame (Score:3, Insightful)
The structure of University research is a huge part of this. Researchers don't care about truth or quality of their research. They care about keeping their jobs and their pay, which means several things:
1) Publishing something that's "interesting" is more important than being accurate.
2) Giving your funding providers the results they want is more important than being accurate.
3) Null-hypotheses get avoided at all costs, so results are fabricated to avoid that case.
As long as these goals are present and more important to scientists and the scientific community at large than doing actual science, this will always be a serious problem.
Re:Journals and Universities are mostly to blame (Score:5, Interesting)
As long as these goals are present and more important to scientists and the scientific community at large than doing actual science, this will always be a serious problem.
Having worked in academia for a while, I don't entirely disagree with your diagnosis, but I think you're mischaracterizing the motives of scientists. Most of us really want to do actual science and not have to worry about money, and no one actually gets excited about grant writing the way they do about a successful experiment. The problem is that our incentive system is so screwed up that dealing with it occupies an increasing amount of our time. Even very thoughtful, scrupulous, and dedicated scientists whom I greatly respect get sidetracked by these practical concerns. It's incredibly depressing to watch, and one reason why I desperately want out.
Citation please on "increasing" (Score:5, Informative)
"I've noticed several incidents of this happening" doesn't constitute a trend.
And science isn't immutable truth. It's defensible belief.
Science (Score:3)
Science isn't even that. Science is a method. What you put in is behavior that hopefully complies with the method, and what you get out is data, broken into empirical and behavioral observations, to which we can apply some measure of confidence. The method -- science -- is quite solid. It's the rest that is error prone. All of it. In fact, as soon as "belief" replaces carefully restrained confidence, you're already screwing up.
Re:Citation please on "increasing" (Score:5, Funny)
The notion that "science is getting things increasingly wrong" is so misguided, it's not even wrong [wikipedia.org]. Let me illustrate what I mean when I say "science is defensible belief" with a parable.
Suppose God knows that X is true. At first Alice doesn't believe X but Bob does. Later on she changes her mind to agree with Bob (and God) that X is true. Then they both die and are brought before the throne of God to prove they've been good scientists.
"I am a good scientist," Bob says, "Because I got to God's truth before anyone else."
"I am a good scientist," Alice says, "Because I believed whatever was best supported by the balance of evidence."
Then God says, "Alice has better scientific judgment, but you're both going to hell because you didn't publish."
Didn't you get the memo? (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't need independent verification and reproducibility anymore. The science is settled because we have consensus.
Yes, I realize that's a bit of cherry-picking examples but all too often logical fallacies are used to justify when these things happen. I'd suggest it's an ethics crisis rather than a science crisis.
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We don't need independent verification and reproducibility anymore. The science is settled because we have consensus.
Independent verification happens as part of the common practices of science. Not by reproducing studies, but by extending them. Such extension requires some repetition of previous steps, thus providing verification. If something was wrong with a previous result, those who try to extend it can uncover the error.
And let's be careful about the loaded word consensus. Scientists don't arrive at a consensus through some kind of vote. They arrive at it by examining experimental evidence and sharing insights on tha
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Well, you could try making a solid, robust scientific argument that accounts for existing as well as new data. But if instead you want to put your faith in PR firms that are paid to manufacture public doubt on behalf of industries with vested interests, then you're building a political controversy and not a scientific one.
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Not yet (Score:2)
Not until every scrap of food on earth is covered by intellectual property laws. Then we can discuss your "transparency and honesty".
But it's Friday night, and that means the weekly open meeting of the Royal and Ancient Society of Slashdot Breitbarters has been called into session, so please proceed without further interruption.
[Note: the phrase that pays for our drinking game tonight is, "
Finally. (Score:2)
We are finally asking the right questions. Bravo.
it's the system (Score:2)
There are two answers to this, the first is the easy answer:
Science is often "wrong." This is how science works: you come up with a theory or some measurements, support it as best you can, but expect someone to do it better in a few years. Often "better" means results so different from what was seen before that the prior work is now considered "wrong." As we get better at science, this happens faster.
The second answer is a bit more complicated and acknowledges that there is a real problem.
To me, this is
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Don't be absurd. Of course I've heard that F!=ma. That's well covered by the time you finish a Physics PhD.
Newton's laws are perfectly good approximations for most cases, but they're not always valid. Newton was wrong, that was the point of relativity. And yes, we're looking forward to correcting relativity when we do figure out dark matter and energy. Einstein had the intelligence to know he was wrong when he formulated general relativity; no one has figured out how to fix it yet.
Well duh! (Score:2)
Stupider scientists.
Footnote: THe smarter people being driven to do something else.
Yep science doesn't work anymore (Score:2)
Short Memory (Score:2)
20/20 Hindsight (Score:2)
"Why Does Science Appear To Be Getting Things Increasingly Wrong?"
Probably because you have more difficulty looking at things that are in the future and near term but don't understand that the past has been largely settled.
To put it another way, your perceptions of the past being more accurate is caused by the filters of history and time. You aren't seeing all the chaff.
Re: (Score:2)
The Media (Score:2)
This answer can be easily answered. Science appears to be getting worse because of a increased media coverage on the topic. To proof this, you may count the number of such media reports over time.
The article itself provides some hypotheses on the topic of "Is science getting worse?" That might be. However, I have not seen any data to support that. Even though I would also assume that present day funding methods could increase bias and negligence. But this must be tested before the assumption becomes a valid
It's the media that's increasingly sensationist (Score:2)
In the information age, reasonably well trained scientsts are probably better than they have ever been. However, a lot of anti-science politics and an increasing list for sensationalism in the media shed more light on scientific failure than in the past.
Science is built on failure. And incrementally correcting it. It's how we learn. If you have enough brains to accept that all of science is to some lesser or greater degree "probably approximately correct" based on what we know, and what we know will cha
How meta (Score:2)
"... problem appears to be getting worse..." [emphasis mine]
Anybody want to bust out some science and actually try measuring something, or just wanna sit around and whine?
Maybe -- just maybe -- you're hearing about it more because thanks to the Internet, there is more info about everything in front of you at all times. So perhaps that explains why you're seeing more bad science? (And everything else.)
Or maybe you could ask the tiny fucking supercomputer that's in your pocket with instant access to 98% of al
"Science" is often wrong, and that's ok (Score:2)
one could claim that science is by nature self-correcting
That is rather the point, isn't it? Take gravity, for example. From Galileo's models of uniform acceleration, to Newton's Universal Gravitation, to Einstein's Relativity theories, etc. each of these guys knew that their models for gravity were incomplete. Yet, each of them served as increasingly accurate tools to observe the universe and make predictions about its behavior. Someday, somebody will figure out how to make a model that ties gravity out between quantum and classical mechanics, which will be
We're getting better, not worse. (Score:2)
> that puts the very basis of our reliance on scientific research results at risk
Utter nonsense. Science is about applying our findings and building new tec
Simple Answer: Lack of Quality control (Score:3)
Basically, I suspect that science that is not evaluated scientifically loses precision and credibility.
Take the headline in the original post: How many people actually read the headline, saw the modal argument, and realized that the presupposition was leading to a straw man argument?
Now take an hypotheses with lots of data and present it to multiple administrators, legislators, politicians and the public: How many will subject this presentation to even the most rudimentary argument mapping such as a Toulmin worksheet? How many are even capable?
Science is not "wrong" or "right"; hypotheses are supported or unsupported. Conclusions are never actually true or false, just justified by the evidence subject to the limits of experimentation so far.
So, the sooner some of you software geniuses create something to quickly and efficiently evaluate and sort the arguments, the quicker we can weed out the crap and improve on the quality scientific endeavors.
No substitute for your own mind... (Score:2)
For those that say you should just trust scientist X on anything, this if further evidence as to why that is fallacious thinking.
If the scientists can back up what they're saying and prove it, then fine. Proof is proof.
If they can't really prove it in a way that anyone can understand but they want you to trust them?... Ehm... depends on what that means. If they tell me something about a distant solar system that doesn't really effect anything on earth one way or the other... then sure... whatever guys. It d
Science Mafia (Score:2, Flamebait)
I'm sick of this (Score:2)
By definition - science can never be wrong - it is the definition of reality.
We need to defend the word because it represents an important idea. People who wrongly use the term need to be corrected.
And don't get me started on math - its a language - just because the grammar is correct doesn't mean the idea expressed is true.
It's part patents (Score:2)
Re:Probably not acceptable to the hive mind (Score:5, Informative)
It's intellectually dishonest to post that letter without giving the APS a chance to respond, so I'll briefly quote them [aps.org]:
Re:git orf that high horse (Score:4, Informative)
He accused the APS of being corrupt. The APS says he's full of shit and they're not getting any money to talk about climate change. If you're going to hype the "controversy", be honest and quote both sides.
Re: (Score:2)
The science is "settled" when you can make falsifiable predictions. Which makes climate deniers the people that cannot explain the current (not predicted) 15 plus year "pause".
Re: (Score:2)
The underlying problem is a stronger and stronger tendency in society to disregard reality
I don't think that's the issue, for many people the problem is twofold A) Information overload B) Inability to determine trustworthy sources of information. With the amounts of propaganda and marketing spin sent people's way can you really blame them?
Re: (Score:2)
Judging by the content of your post, the only thing the "negroid race" has to fear is slipping down to your level of intelligence.
Seems unlikely, though.