How To Better Verify Scientific Research 197
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Michael Hiltzik writes in the LA Times that you'd think the one place you can depend on for verifiable facts is science but a few years ago, scientists at Amgen set out to double-check the results of 53 landmark papers in their fields of cancer research and blood biology and found only six could be proved valid. 'The thing that should scare people is that so many of these important published studies turn out to be wrong when they're investigated further,' says Michael Eisen who adds that the drive to land a paper in a top journal encourages researchers to hype their results, especially in the life sciences. Peer review, in which a paper is checked out by eminent scientists before publication, isn't a safeguard because the unpaid reviewers seldom have the time or inclination to examine a study enough to unearth errors or flaws. 'The journals want the papers that make the sexiest claims,' Eisen says. 'And scientists believe that the way you succeed is having splashy papers in Science or Nature — it's not bad for them if a paper turns out to be wrong, if it's gotten a lot of attention.' That's why the National Institutes of Health has launched a project to remake its researchers' approach to publication. Its new PubMed Commons system allows qualified scientists to post ongoing comments about published papers. The goal is to wean scientists from the idea that a cursory, one-time peer review is enough to validate a research study, and substitute a process of continuing scrutiny, so that poor research can be identified quickly and good research can be picked out of the crowd and find a wider audience. 'The demand for sexy results, combined with indifferent follow-up, means that billions of dollars in worldwide resources devoted to finding and developing remedies for the diseases that afflict us all is being thrown down a rathole,' says Hiltzik. 'NIH and the rest of the scientific community are just now waking up to the realization that science has lost its way, and it may take years to get back on the right path.'"
Slashdot for scientists (Score:2)
So basically they want to introduce a Slashdot for scientists..
Prepare for a brand new style of flame-wars!
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So basically they want to introduce a Slashdot for scientists..
Prepare for a brand new style of flame-wars!
Since Popular Science [popsci.com] dropped the ball, the government had to take over.
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And in Soviet Russia, science disproves YOU.
problems (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the real problem is that scientists aren't lending any prestige to reproducing experiments so nobody bothers. Journals want to publish new results, not confirmation. Advisors discourage students from reproducing experiments, which makes sense since they won't be published.
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This. No one wants to read: "We've confirmed this."
Actually, I might want to read it, and even write it, but good luck getting it into ieee or acm.
Re:problems (Score:5, Interesting)
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No, it's not the journals' problem. It's a funding problem.
Nobody wants to pay for scientists to reproduce and verify each others' work.
Re:problems (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not the journals' problem. It's a funding problem.
Nobody wants to pay for scientists to reproduce and verify each others' work.
It is both: a funding problem AND the journals' problem. They are not contradictory (far from it, actually).
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Re:problems (Score:4, Insightful)
1. How much money they have brought in through grants.
2. How many papers they have published.
3. The prestige of the journals they have published in.
4. How many times their papers have been cited by other researchers.
So, if you keeping your job depends on those 4 things, where is the incentive to check the work of someone else? Especially large, difficult, and expensive experiments. At best, you get a quick "Comment on XYZ" paper that questions some findings and the authors reply with a "Reply to Comment on XYZ" telling you why your comment is rubbish and you didn't understand what they were saying.
Re:problems (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone tack an insightful to that guy? Why don't get I Modpoints when I need them?
Because this is exactly the source of the problem: All the credit, all the fame, all the limelight and of course in turn all the grant money goes to whoever or whatever organization publishes it first. Adding insult to injury, since they also got the patents, of course.
We need to put more emphasis on proof. I keep overusing the "Assertion without proof" meme lately, but it fits in science as much as it fits for the NSA, just because you say so doesn't make it so, unless someone else who has an interest to debunk your claims has to confirm that you're right your assertion is essentially worthless.
And yes, a confirmation from a buddy isn't much better either.
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The problem that comes along with that approach is that if you give someones paper a negative review, and your name is attached, they will then see it, and when they get your latest paper to review, they may give you a negative review as retribution.
That's why the current anonymous reviewer system exists for many journals. Your 'solution' may lead to more rubber stamping, instead of less, for fear of reprisals.
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I think there are two ways to write a negative review: without scientific rigor and logical arguments, or with them. In the first case, the reviewer would just be making an ass of him/herself and casting doubt on both his/her scientific and personal integrity. I
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I'm inclined to interpret that as humans are involved, with their own motivations and bias, and there is no real way around that except in some unrealistic idealized world. The world is not ideal, and neither is any review process I've seen suggested.
There are always additional experiments that could be done by the primary researcher. The cut off as to what is reasonable to publish as a single paper, and what could be put put aside as part of a second paper can often largely be up for debate. Antagonisti
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The whole idea of "scooping" someone in science is sickening. If there is competitiveness, it should be competitiveness for greater thoroughness and rigor, not quicker results and headline-grabbing. But the type of predatory behavior you describe is not prevented by the anonymous s
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#1) Yes, scooping is bad, but until you can fix the whole grant/citation/patent-system/publish-or-perish issues, that's going to be an issue.
#2) I never claimed scooping was prevented by the current system.
I was pointing out that there are ways for reviewers with a grudge to give a negative, and damaging review, without looking malicious. Your ideal system does not prevent this.
The current anonymous system doesn't give them a name to hold a grudge against for a previous bad review.
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I think the real problem is that scientists aren't lending any prestige to reproducing experiments so nobody bothers. Journals want to publish new results, not confirmation. Advisors discourage students from reproducing experiments, which makes sense since they won't be published.
It's not just about prestige, it's about cash. The NIH (etc) should offer grants for reproducing results, not just coming up with new ones.
Then again, it would help if the NIH offered more grant money, period. The sequester is killing American science.
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I think the real problem is that scientists aren't lending any prestige to reproducing experiments so nobody bothers. Journals want to publish new results, not confirmation. Advisors discourage students from reproducing experiments, which makes sense since they won't be published.
Which is sad, because that's the exact kind of study that any graduate student should have for a first project. Only after you've proven your abilities should you be given the resources for original work.
Re:problems (Score:4, Informative)
and getting the grant $$ to repeat a published experiment may be all but impossible.
This is especially true in medicine, where clinical trials can run into millions of dollars.
Peer review isn't about validation (Score:5, Insightful)
Follow-up studies are where the validation/replication/testing happens. This is not new. Any decent scientist knows this. Peer review is a filter, but it's a pretty basic sanity check, not a comprehensive evaluation of the work. Once published, that opens a paper and the ideas within it to critique by ALL readers, not only the reviewers. Thus, post-publication is when the real scientific review happens. Peer review merely removes the stuff that isn't formulated, measured, and organized well enough to bother reading it in the first place (i.e. it gets rejected). It's an imperfect process, so sometimes stuff slips through anyway. That's what the follow-up papers are for.
Re:Peer review isn't about validation (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is exactly the problem. Nobody's doing follow-up papers. Follow-up papers aren't sexy, don't get published in top-line journals and don't get a lot of cites. In short, they don't advance your career. So scientitsts don't do them.
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Which is exactly the problem. Nobody's doing follow-up papers. Follow-up papers aren't sexy, don't get published in top-line journals and don't get a lot of cites. In short, they don't advance your career. So scientitsts don't do them.
Follow-up papers are the usual things that a doctoral student starts out their career writing. Sometimes even masters students (depending on the discipline and the difficulty of conducting the experiments). The grad-school grunts don't have a lot of expectation of being heavily cited, so the risk to them is much lower. Once they've duplicated someone else's results, they can start thinking about what they'd do differently...
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But the problem with this model is that there's no way for a grad student to publish a negative result if they fail to replicate the results. To compound the problem, if a student starts getting negative results, they will quickly change their course of research to something that may produce results. PhDs are not granted for negative results - there is little incentive to pursue research paths that aren't fruitful.
In the end, the student will know original the result is questionable, but the scientific co
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But the problem with this model is that there's no way for a grad student to publish a negative result if they fail to replicate the results. To compound the problem, if a student starts getting negative results, they will quickly change their course of research to something that may produce results. PhDs are not granted for negative results - there is little incentive to pursue research paths that aren't fruitful.
In the end, the student will know the original result is questionable, but the scientific community will not.
Since being first-to-publish would not come in here, can't they keep the results and write them up afterwards?
For the sake of completeness or furthering science :-] , or to pad their C.V. :-[ down the line?
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There's never a point where some
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I can't speak for the life sciences and social sciences, but as a physicist, I reproduce results all the time. You don't usually have follow-up papers that only reproduce results because pretty much *any* follow-up paper will have to do this as a minimum.
If a paper is interesting (relevant), others will want to do research that builds off of and extends it. The first step in this is usually to ... reproduce the original results. This is necessarily not because you are skeptical of them, but so you can ma
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To do the grunt work on the projects the scientist they're working for wants to do.
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To do the grunt work on the projects the scientist they're working for wants to do.
Replicating others' work is usually the introduction to that. After all, if you can have your minion show that a rival falsified their results, that'll be one less group competing with you for the money in the next call for grant proposals.
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But for that to be worth it you have to have reason to believe that your rival's results are invalid. Just randomly replicating results in the hope of stumbling on such a case consumes a lot of time, money, and lab space that could instead be focused towards advancing your own projects, after all replicating an experiment can take as many resources as the original experiment did.
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And don't you think that's a tad bit dangerous? Imagine you're building your research based on the findings of antigravity, only to find out (after investing a lot of dough into the whole process) that your foundation is completely bogus?
Now imagine the danger inherent to such an approach when it comes to human medicine.
When you build upon a foundation, you don't test the foundation beyond the obvious points, i.e. whether it can hold your building, you don't really stress test it. You neither have the time
Replication (Score:2, Insightful)
The best way of checking spurious, biased, or erroneous results is for someone else to independently do the same experiment. However there's no money or glory in replication. So nobody does it.
I wonder which will be most amusing, Fox's interpretation of this story or the tardbaggers' interpretation of that. I've already assigned "herp", "derp" and "6,000 years" to hotkeys.
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Yes, there's no money in replication. More importantly, there is no money for replication. Who's going to fund replication studies? And it wouldn't be small amount of money.
Maybe what is needed is a tax on research to fund replication studies. That opens up another can of worms, is one replication study enough? Who decides? Whether the Tea Baggers like it or not, this seems like an area that will require government intervention. Taxing research is unlikely to bring in enough money. Taxes will have to be rai
Funding for replication (Score:5, Informative)
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Invalidating shoddy research would be a bonus.
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Fox's interpretation of this story or the tardbaggers' interpretation of that. I've already assigned "herp", "derp" and "6,000 years" to hotkeys.
Right... so believing that the federal government is too big and out of control, equates, in your mind, to a complete lack of scientific understanding to the point of mental retardation.
Got it.
Just about everyone believes in something nonsensical and unscientific. Whether it's the 6,000 year nonsense of the religious wingnuts, or th
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There's a lot of money in replicating results that big business has a vested interest in disagreeing with. Chew on that the next time somebody tells you that climate scientists only support global warming to get grant funding.
in vivo biology is not all science (Score:4, Insightful)
Half right (Score:5, Interesting)
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If scientists want to restore integrity to their field(s) -- and I applaud their efforts to do so -- why aren't they using an experimental approach to do so? I think they should try several things and collect data to find out what actually works.
That's exactly what's happening. Different groups of scientists, journalists, university-groups and so forth are trying to implement a variety of systems. [arstechnica.com]
Of course, like real science, each group tends to only focus on one approach with the hope that their results will emerge as the best amongst the competition. You're not referring to "scientists" as some kind of monolothic entity, are you?
Biology's problem (Score:2)
Re:Biology's problem? Hard sciences, too. (Score:3)
Physics is not immune to parasitic and mercenary research phenomena either, especially in more exotic areas with great funding potential, such as quantum computing & crypto where exaggerations and self-puffery are common. One might say the whole field is of that kind, since their whole theorizing (which is all they got) rests on the speculative aspects of quantum measurement theory, the foundations of which are still awaiting unambiguous experimental demonstration (such as the "loophoole free" violation [arxiv.org]
It's all about incentives (Score:4, Interesting)
Other sciences are less susceptible because there is no incentive to hype the results, not because those scientists are more ethical. There is two solutions for the problem. One is to remove incentives, which would mean overhauling the whole system of scientific funding. The other is to mandate raw data sharing. This would make it easier for people to reanalyze the data without actually redoing the experimental parts.
A good example of this is Reinhart-Rogoff controversy in economics, where they claimed one thing in their widely publicized 2010 paper (high debt levels impede growth), but their statistical analysis was shown to be riddled with errors, skewing the data to the desired conclusion. This was discovered the when they shared their raw data with a University of Massachusetts grad student. While data sharing would not eliminate these issues it would make is harder to perform "statistical" analysis that introduces biases.
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Insightful, but I think your two solutions aren't. Solution 1 wouldn't work well - you can't remove incentives, only change them (which is admittedly what you really suggested by a funding overhaul). The trouble with this approach is you trade one set of problems for another set, which could be worse or just different. It's not a solution if it doesn't actually make things better, and that's hard. Solution 2 wouldn't work because you gave an example of a very powerful disincentive: the risk of being exp
There's a reason for that (Score:2)
Really there is a simple reason for this. (Of course, it's not the only one but presumably the primary one.)
Tenure-track positions and funding are to a large extent determined on the basis of the number of publications weighted by the reputation of the journals, not by the quality of publications.
The idea is that good journals will reject bad papers, which doesn't work as well as is desirable due to the extreme amount of submissions the journals receive, which have to be reviewed by relatively small numbers
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In my experience good journals aren't about rejecting bad papers - once you get above a certain level in a subject each journal is sending its papers to the same reviewers - but that good journals reject unimportant papers. That's why things like publications in big-name journals are significant, they imply important work. Not, necessarily, correct work, but anyone who's unwilling to publish research that turns out to be wrong shouldn't be a scientist in the first place.
Science isn't broken. (Score:4, Insightful)
The correct take-away from this kind of study is not that a specific field of science is "broken" (also, cancer research is not all of science), but rather that there is room for improvement.
There is no question whatsoever that cancer research has made leaps and bounds over the last few decades in terms of improving the lives of many people with cancer, both by helping them to live longer, and by helping them to live better. What this kind of study shows is that we can do even better still, if we can find ways to fix the flaws that remain in cancer research.
Papers may wrong but truth is decided by consensus (Score:3)
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If you do your statistics right, the likelihood of a Type I error is unaffected by sample size. When you use an arbitrary threshold for determining a significant effect (typically 5%), the number of papers attaining that threshold "by chance" (=5%) is independent of sample size.
http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/full/nrn3475.html [nature.com]
Maybe I phrased it badly. Also I gave the wrong link. The correct one is: http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/full/nrn3475.html [nature.com] and is worth reading.
The point is that the error being made in research isn't purely a statistical one. It originates in various bad practices, such as "flexible" study design and an ignorance of statistical power. The smaller the sample size, the greater the standard error of the mean. Thus, studies with small sam
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In part. But there are frequently hard to quantify systematic errors that can be corrected for by using a larger sample size with more diverse representation. For example, a study might pick up a spurious correlation due to focusing on white men of western European descent between the ages of 20-29, and that correlation may not hold when a larger study uses a more diverse group of people.
There's also the issue of smaller studies being quicker and easier, which reduces the desire to publish even if the fin
The problem is FAR, FAR deeper than peer review (Score:2, Interesting)
The problems that plague science today are much deeper than the simple, solvable problem of peer review. If you actually listen to the critics who have been speaking out on the issue for decades now, the problems start in grad school. See Jeff Schmidt's book, Disciplined Minds, which exposes the details of how consensus actually forms in science today. The public likes to imagine that consensus is decided by individuals who are aware of alternative options for belief. The truth is that the consensus is
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. The notion of "professional scientist" is actually an idea with internal conflicts. It's a contradiction out in the open which apparently few have put any thought into. But, once you look at the way we train professionals today, it becomes apparent that we are not training them to actually think like scientists.
But science has never been done the "pure" way. It's been decided by consensus all along, this isn't a new thing related to training in grad school. You can see this is so because the phenomenon (science by consensus) is world-wide, yet the grad school works differently in different countries. e.g. in the UK you don't even have "grad school." A graduate student enters a PhD lab after their first degree (MSc not necessary in most cases) and gets on with it. In a good university, the first year or two are de
It gets sorted out (Score:3)
It's true that the system can be gamed in the short run. And sometimes someone can be game it enough to get tenure. But without follow up and citations, they'll just end up in academic limbo of being an associate professor with no funding.
Verification of Science Like Man Made Climate C. (Score:2)
Get rid of the big money and political interests funding it.
(i.e. Exxon, BP Global, Al Gore Carbon Exchanges.)
The people are not interested in climate change man made or otherwise, they are interested in profits.
To avoid this, government in the past was usually employed to carry out science. In the golden age of scientific discovery, (50-60's) gigantic paces in scientific and technological progress were made, not because it was profitable to do so, but because one country in the world, the United States dec
Build threads for science (Score:2)
Not a bad idea, just be sure to post lots of pictures to keep people interested :-P
Seriously (Score:2)
Re:Scientists == Always Right (Score:5, Insightful)
Science is infallible.
More like science is always wrong. Scientists always set out to be less wrong than the last guy, though.
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Every great scientist's career is built on the cold, dead corpses of his peers' and antecedents' own work.
Re:Scientists == Always Right (Score:4, Informative)
Scientists always set out to be less wrong than the last guy, though.
No they don't. TFA lists many examples of scientists choosing to advance their careers rather than trying to be "less wrong".
The Economist Magazine had a cover story [economist.com] on this issue just last week, that in my opinion covers the issue better than TFA.
Basically, the current system of peer review and replication is failing. Peer reviewers actually miss many errors, rarely check statistics, and almost never re-run any software. The current publishing system has little interest in printing replication, and spending time replicating experiments is a dead end career path. The existing system doesn't work well in the era of "big science" and "big data".
We need to move to a system where all publicly funded science is required to be disclosed when it is initially funded, so negative results cannot later be buried. We should also move to online publishing, with a permanently active area for comments, so if the research is later refuted, or even questioned, that is immediately visible. A portion of public science spending should be set aside for replication. There also should be negative consequences for researchers that publish papers that cannot be replicated, whether because their results are wrong, or because they failed to disclose enough information about how the experiment was conducted. Scientists accepting public funds should be required to make their data and software available.
But the biggest obstacle to reform is researchers and publishers that have prospered under the existing system. Many of them treat the current system of peer review as some sort of holy ritual, and refuse to even admit that the system is broken.
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You've got a good point about negative results, but I don't think I agree with the rest.
There's nothing wrong with peer review as such, but the current research climate doesn't help it at all. In many countries, research grants are tied to "measurable, objective results", e.g. articles published, preferably in highly-ranked journals. And so researchers want to publish as much as possible, in as highly-ranked journals as they can get into. (Leading to an explosion in research, so no one really has the time t
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A portion of public science spending should be set aside for replication.
This was the first thing that came to my mind as well.
It seems one group does something and everyone else relies on that, until something falls down at some distant point in the future.
At the very least, someone building upon a work that was not replicated should include replication in their proposal as the first step.
Often expensive, but not nearly so expensive as finding out later that the original was wrong.
(As for re-running the software, that seems risky at best, especially if the results could have be
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Basically, the current system of peer review and replication is failing. Peer reviewers actually miss many errors, rarely check statistics, and almost never re-run any software. The current publishing system has little interest in printing replication, and spending time replicating experiments is a dead end career path. The existing system doesn't work well in the era of "big science" and "big data".
No, it's not. Peer review isn't meant to catch all errors, just errors in logic. You're assuming that the review process that goes on in mathematics is the same as the review process in all other fields of science, which just isn't true.
Replication is given to grad students -- if they succeed, you know they learned the method, and if they fail, it goes into a chapter of their thesis -- if they're a crappy grad student and they can't get anything to work, they wash out, and if they're good grad students th
Re:Scientists == Always Right (Score:5, Insightful)
There's also plenty of data and models out there if you wanted to run your own experiments to confirm or disprove a particular paper or claim. I'd be very interested in reading your counter paper.
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In addition to questioning "Climate Change", one could also look at the "Science" of may other fields as suggested. Especially crucial for examination are the many psychological and sociological studes that are used to "guide" public policy. I venture that many are complete loads of crap designed specifically to influence public policy.
Re:Scientists == Always Right (Score:5, Interesting)
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However, social choice theory is a fairly precise discipline with a number of marvellous impossibility theorems, new voting procedures, etc., and there are also many socialogists who make fairly good statistical research. In a nutshell, your friend chose to focus on the crapiest areas of her discipline.
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These are not fields of science other than as repositories of anecdotal evidence. The vast bulk of each discipline's studies and experiments cannot be reproduced. You venture correctly.
Re:Scientists == Always Right (Score:5, Insightful)
He neither said that nor implied it. What he said was that any criticism of AGW is met with a defense akin to a religious fervor. This is a true statement.
As demonstrated.
Re:Scientists == Always Right (Score:5, Insightful)
He neither said that nor implied it. What he said was that any criticism of AGW is met with a defense akin to a religious fervor. This is a true statement.
As demonstrated.
No. Scientific criticism of AGW is fine. But coming up with inane conspiracies, casting aspersions, or character assassinations are NOT valid forms of scientific criticism. Worse, the people often spouting such nonsense have little if any knowledge of the actual science and DON'T WANT TO KNOW IT.
Don't equate denialisim with legitimate skepticism. There are legitimate skeptics, but they aren't the ones claiming that the entire world's population of climate scientists is on a mission to murder Jesus and create a socialist utopia. Deniers make the real skeptics look bad, and actually serve to drown out real scientific skepticism with their idiocy.
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Like I said it's fine if you don't agree with it, but what ends up happening is people go on message boards and start screaming and making outrageous claims against the popular literature and data, but then have absolutely nothing to back them up other than "F
Re:Eyeballs and Bugs (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with the present method is that each paper is scrutinized before publication only by a very small select cohort of experts. And once this decision is taken, its 'published and stays published for ever' (in most cases, discounting the outright fraudulent ones that are retracted)'.
I am a professor of pharmacology and we do critical appraisal of scientific papers in our department all the time for symposiums. You won't know what kind of mistakes my undergrads pick up in journal clubs, of papers published in prestigious journals.
By enough eyeballs, I do mean qualified eyeballs. Not just eyeballs.
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I think the point of the PubMed Commons pilot is to experiment with providing a forum where "the kinds of mistakes my undergrads pickup in journal clubs" *do* get shared.
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I think the point is that *some* of those eyes will have the requisite expertise to catch subtle flaws. And perhaps just as valuable *lots* of those eyes will have enough expertise to catch the simplistic flaws - the sorts of things so obvious that the real experts aren't even looking at that area because they assume no expert would make such an obvious error. But since we're all human, occasionally we do.
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...and all the while leaving out that their claims don't even offer any kind of falsification chance, i.e. being nonscientific in the first place.
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It is amazing how much "it's settled science!" sounds like "God said so!" isn't it?
I know people who regularly drop the "settled science" quips on social media (average intellectual level: ZOMG AGW is totally fer realz!!) -- people I personally know who could not even define the word "science". It's important to remember that there's a gulf between those who understand the method, and those who mindlessly parrot whatever is popular. The latter we call religion.
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It's more like "you'll need to provide counter-evidence at least as strong as the concensus".
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Most of the time, however, I'm not. I am not impressed by the consensus of large groups of people who spend half their day on Facebook proving what vapid idiots they are. Since when has consensus ever been an indication of truth, anyway? Everyone once agreed on geocentrism.
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...except about something like catastrophic anthropogenic global warming :)
Oh man, you are totally right! How could I have been so blind! We should be more skeptical about shit like evolution and gravity too! Down with close minded dogma!
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Evolution (or more specifically, natural selection), and gravity have necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statements.
Astrology does not have a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement.
Intelligent design does not have a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement.
AGW does not have a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement.
If you want to understand how to discern pseudo-science from science, look for the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothes
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...gravity [has] necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement[s]...
Oh, yeah? Prove it.
Now that you have opened my eyes about this global "science" conspiracy, I cannot live in darkness anymore. The path you have laid for me is clear. Everything must be equally called in to question until I get personally satisfying answers.
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Okay, Newton's law of universal gravitation states that every point mass in the universe attracts every other point mass with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
This statement is clearly falsifiable - all we have to do is find two point masses (say, two planets for sake of argument), and show that their pattern of motion violates this law.
The "if the surface temperature gets warmer or if the surface tempe
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>Remember, first and foremost, science is a way for us to prove ourselves *wrong* - it's a way of knocking down ideas, and only grudgingly giving acceptance to the ones that survive the contest. The best scientists ruthlessly try to find every possible hole in their ideas, rather than glossing over contradictory evidence or alternatives.
Yes it is, which is why I'm inclined to take seriously steadily expanding body of data that almost entirely supports catastrophic AGW. Are there occasional points of con
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The same can be said about astrology.
A "consistent with" model isn't science - hell, the bible gives us plenty of "consistent with" observations...the key to science is falsifiability, period.
If your model predicts that a coin flip will be either heads or t
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Having lost the argument on GW and then AGW, denlialists have now invented catastrophic AGW as their new talking point? Good grief.
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Wait, are you saying you deny the last 17 years of no statistically significant warming? (GW)
Or are you saying you deny the last 150 years of natural warming coming out of the little ice age? (AGW)
Or are you saying that AGW is true, but we don't need to worry about it, because on the whole increased temperatures are better for the biosphere? (CAGW)
What part of "climate always changes" don't you understand?
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I can't say that I, personally deny any of those things, as I'm unqualified. However I have the sense to side with a broad spectrum of independent, competing researchers in a wide variety of fields with decades more experience than me whose work all points in a direction contrary to the argument your furthering.
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So, you've now reduced your argument to an appeal to unnamed authorities :)
Sounds like religion to me :)
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Ah, so you would have believed the sun revolved around the earth, at least until around 1514 or so. Or, that eggs were good for you, oh wait, they're bad, oops, nevermind, they're good again. Or maybe that until 1982 most believed that gastric ulcers were caused by stress and spicy foods instead of bacteria.
Personally, I choose not to believe experts without some basic evidence that can be explained in layman's terms. Not doing so is to follow those who believed the experts when we were told Iraq had wea
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Have you ever met a single person ever that denied the planet had warming and cooling trends? Of course not. From the very beginning, it was u
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You understand that you're basically calling for the elimination of explorational science, right? No more observational science, no more materialistically inventive science, no more methodologically inventive science, no more science but that which can be boiled down into a child's pat hypothesis-test-result-conclusions science lesson.
You're basically saying that we should obliterate science as a creative endeavour.
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I'm not for denying creativity - but calling astrology science doesn't do anyone any favors. The creativity of science lies in the novel creation of insightful necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statements. The creativity of say, using a shotgun approach to discovering new material syntheses, or exploring the bottom of the ocean can be an implementation of science, but simply because alvin may be loosely related
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Yes, in fact, Popper was right - falsification is the bedrock of science.
Without falsification, you simply have religion, no matter how fancy the lab coat you dress up in looks like :)
Just because you use maths doesn't mean it's not religion.
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Or do you not believe in the theory of gravity either?
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