Most Science Studies Tainted by Sloppy Analysis 252
mlimber writes "The Wall Street Journal has a sobering piece describing the research of medical scholar John Ioannidis, who showed that in many peer-reviewed research papers 'most published research findings are wrong.' The article continues: 'These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. [...] To root out mistakes, scientists rely on each other to be vigilant. Even so, findings too rarely are checked by others or independently replicated. Retractions, while more common, are still relatively infrequent. Findings that have been refuted can linger in the scientific literature for years to be cited unwittingly by other researchers, compounding the errors.'"
Oh yea baby... (Score:3, Funny)
Yup. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Actually, it is. According to the scientists who reported in "The Great Global Warming Swindle", the concept of CO2 warming was a fairly small area of research that wasn't taken very seriously (and actually seen as a benefit to combat Global Cooling!) until Margaret Thatcher decided to fund CO2 warming research. She was a big proponent of Nuclear Power and saw the CO2 warming research as another bullet point for the advantages of nuclear power. Once there was mone
I came here for the global warming ref (Score:3, Informative)
And I wasn't disappointed. You also managed to please me with your inclusion of the bogus "The Great Global Warming Swindle", "Global Cooling", and conspiracy theories. Excellent!
As an interesting aside, I thought that this argument had been dropped because it was a little too easy to shoot down:
The interesting thing is that, despite warming temperatures, the oceans are holding more CO2 than before (which lowers their pH level as CO2 + H20 = C2H03, ca
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This is a rock solid fact but it's absolutely useless to predict anything about the temperature, because increase in CO2 do *not* happen ceteris paribus. There are so many feedback loops involved (growth of vegetation, oceans for example) that short of historical correlation there is little we can know or say about the effect of CO2 on temperature. Even something as simple as the ceteris
New tactic (Score:2)
10 years? (Score:2)
10 years?!? Here are a couple links you might want to look at:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20113753/site/newsweek/ [msn.com]
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/etc/cron.html [pbs.org]
You'll note this bit from 1979 (nearly 30 years ago):
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Just to be somewhat relevant - while there are negative feedba
Devastating the world's economy (Score:4, Informative)
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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The CO2 lag (Score:3, Informative)
According to the scientists, the program misrepresented what they said.
>the concept of CO2 warming was a fairly small area of research that wasn't taken very seriously
On the contrary, it goes back to Arrhenius and is generally agreed to be the reason the oceans aren't frozen over. The existence of a "greenhouse" effect was in science textbooks decades ago.
>CO2 levels rose about 800 years AFTER the temperature rose.
After the temperature BEGAN to rise. Temperature and CO2
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There are other feedback mechanisms that act in the other direction. Higher temperatures mean the air can hold more moisture, which leads to more clouds (reflects sunlight back into space), and more rainfall. More rain and more atmospheric CO2 leads to more plant growth, which sequesters the surplus CO2 into biomass and eventually counteracts the CO2 release from the oc
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You probably don't care, so let's go to the refutation of your claim:
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: "Carl Wunsch, professor of Physical Oceanography at MIT, was originally featured in the programme. Afterwards he said that he was "completely misrepresented" in the film and had been "totally misled" when he agreed to be interviewed.[23][5] He called the film "
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Actually, you got a chance to attempt to discredit it publicly. Which is what the process is about. Scientists argue back and forth on the exact causes, and correct each other as necessary. Now I'm reviewing the data you provided that swings the other direction.
Unfortunately, that's one point you didn't make with your links. I've read through them and I don't see where the scientist who were pr
Here it comes... (Score:4, Funny)
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as a phd student (Score:3, Insightful)
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Fairly common knowlege (Score:5, Informative)
1. A good number to shoot for is 15 journal articles in your first 6 years. If you don't have tenure in 6 years chances are you are never going to get it. The point of being published is to get the name of the university out.
2. Should be self-explanatory. You need to bring in $$$ to the university. The more you bring, the more profitable you are and the more they need to keep you around. But publishing is still more important.
3. Teaching, while as students we all feel is important, is actually the least important thing towards tenure. A mediocre or even bad teacher who writes papers (that get accepted by excellent journals) at a rapid pace will get tenure where an excellent teacher who can't write for the life of him will not. This is why you often see people from industry teaching. They teach for the love, tenured professors are there for the research and for the higher level teaching (where it is more a relation of facts, not an educational process).
The 'sloppy analysis' referred to is not 'fraud' as you cite. There is a difference between fraud and sloppy analysis. The rush to put out papers (between 2 and three a year, by this guide, for tenure) causes some slop to occur. As a reference, I've been working on a paper with my advisor and a (yet-to-be-tenured) professor for almost a year already, and we are just submitting it to a major journal. And the paper is based mostly off of my thesis work completed a year ago! A good paper and good research takes time. But please, do not mistake sloppy analysis for fraud. Mistakes are one thing, deception entirely another.
SOURCE: Advice to rocket scientists: A Career Survival Guide for Scientists and Engineers. Dr. Jim Longuski, published by the AIAA in 2004. But again, this is fairly common knowlege and can be found anywhere you look. As a postdoc (I am too) I'm suprised you didn't know
I think teaching might come fourth (Score:2)
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Sensationalist... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sensationalist... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Medical research != all scientific research; it's much more prone to errors due to how it's performed and analyzed. I hope your point doesn't get buried amongst all the charges of corruption.
Sloppy analysis (Score:3, Insightful)
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Thbbb (Score:2)
Irony police... (Score:2)
Irony police, your analysis?
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Consensus (Score:3, Interesting)
What's interesti
Medical research vs. basic research (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Medical research vs. basic research (Score:5, Interesting)
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Out of curiosity:
1) What is the usual failure rate for replication?
2) Do the letters routinely get published?
3) You just do that for work you're following up with experiments, not for ever
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1) What is the usual failure rate for replication?
2) Do the letters routinely get published?
3) You just do that for work you're following up with experiments, not for everything you cite, right?
Unfortunately, I'm not in a hypothesis-driven lab [wisc.edu], so I can't speak to any of these from direct experience. I know that I routinely see such letters published (frequently as "technical comments"), and I know that I go to seminars and routinely see people get raked over the coals for not having verif
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Epidemiology is almost always done retrospectively, and while it may have its uses, there are *always* going to be possible confounding variables when patients are not randomized before receiving a treatment.
So ple
What About this Study? (Score:5, Funny)
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According to my research (Score:4, Funny)
My experience (Score:3, Insightful)
Well use the Scientific Method then (Score:5, Insightful)
And one of the first rules is, "Never take a single study as proof of anything! Wait till the results are replicated before you even think of moving to a conclusion."
The major problem is really poor reporting on science research. The news media routinely blazon some **NEW * Scientific * Discovery!!!**. Then you read the story and somewhere around the 10th paragraph you might see that this is based on only one study - and oftentimes even before peer review.
Every scientists knows this. It's a shame the public doesn't. They wouldn't worry so much.
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1) Funding agencies will fund new research, but will not fund research to confirm previous research.
2) The competition for funding, tenure, etc has led to an ever increasing specialization of expertise. Gone are the days of the gentleman scientists where anybody with a tower could replicate Galileo's experiments.
Wait for the meta-study (Score:2, Insightful)
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Slashdot taints article study finds (Score:4, Funny)
Authorities are also investigating the connections between Malda, Bush Laden, Bill Gates, Dvorak and Borat [mit.edu] SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.
o the irony (Score:4, Funny)
pot, meet kettle
"Most science..." (Score:5, Insightful)
His work seems to focus on population genetics and epidemiology, which is notorious for having unreproducible claims due to a combination of uncorrected multiple testing, publication bias and statistical incompetence. This "gender and genes" is a perfect example: someone does a study, finds nothing, slices and dices the data until he gets p = 0.04 for females or Asians or smokers and publishes his breakthrough finding. I'd have been surprised if he hadn't found almost all of those to be wrong.
If you look at more in-vitro molecular biology and biochemistry work, I doubt if nearly as high a percentage of it is clearly "wrong", although quite a bit of it is worthless.
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And as math goes, statistics can be pretty darn counterintuitive.
(I speak from experience - I worked for a few years in a university computer center's "academic support group", where among other things I help faculty and grad students with running statistical analysis packages. Some of the experimental designs were pretty bad, too.)
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Actually you need more math for a PhD in psychology or sociology than you do for molecular biology, unless you're in a really math-heavy specialty.
The biologists, being generally smart, can usually pick up what they need (math, programming, equipment building) on the fly. The problem is that, as you say, statistics frequently is counterintuitive.
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Double checked (Score:3, Funny)
No Money in Replicating Results (Score:4, Insightful)
That being said, it's my understanding that most scientists work off of grants, and those grants fund novel research. Replicating results is of obvious importance in validating those results, but doing so seems at odds with the funding mechanisms that are the reality for what I would believe to be most researchers.
Are researchers supposed to replicate the experiments of others in their spare time and on their own dime?
(As rhetorical as that might have sounded, I actually welcome those with first-hand experience to respond to it)
Plenty of collisions (Score:2)
Now, to answer your questi
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You are correct that no grant money is specifically allocated for reproducing other's results, nor for generating "null results" (showing that somethings isn't the case, e.g. that a particular methodology *won't* work). This is a problem, because it means that some important findings that are "uninteresting" don't get studied (or, worse, the data exists but never
Bad Dates (Score:3, Informative)
It must be so... (Score:3, Insightful)
TFA
Since the criterion is that the claim is published, someone had to find the study new and interesting. Most new ideas are going to be wrong, especially true the more significant it is. After all, how many crackpot theories were postulated between Newtonian and Relativistic physics? On the other hand, most things easily verifiable, etc, are too obvious to me considered new and interesting. Note, while I find this interesting, I did not come up with this idea. Some economists published a similar study over a year ago postulating this as a reason. Of course, it's probably wrong.
More classes in statistics needed! (Score:2)
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I think life science majors got a much better education in statistics than physical science majors.
I think every science major should required to take a class i
strong variation with fields (Score:4, Interesting)
Is WSJ academic? (Score:2)
[The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined.]
[No one knows how much shoddy research is out there.]
I'm not sure what the point of this article is besides fear mongering. The goal of most scientific research is to prove a set of assertions - and sure this set may not be fully encompassing or comprehensive - but you've got a model and you try see what fits - and its not always exact.
Take for example the recent debacle
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good science and bad reporting (Score:2)
But come on... 90% of everything is crap. This is no more or less true in medical research, which is a fraction of the $50 billion total spent on research. OMG that's like "One MILLLLIIION DOLLLLARS". That's like 0.5% of GDP so don't be surpised when it's bunk, it's drop in the bucket compared to development costs. If you haven't figure this out you're still a little naiv
Cargo Cult Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Feynman spotted them over 30 years ago. He called them Cargo Cult Scientists [wikipedia.org]. They put on the appearance of science, but have none of its substance. They give a good performance, like an actor playing a scientists on TV. They wear the clothes, speak the language, seemingly apply the methods. But it's all empty. There's no rigor. There's no insight. There's no real testing going on. It's all just people waving around graphs, and lines, and their qualifications, and formulae they don't understand, to support the theories they want to be true, regardless of whether they are true or not.
It's because in this day and age, you can't be a witchdoctor. You can't appeal to spirits, or gods, or karma, or any of the other philosophical reason thrown up in past ages. We live in "The Age of Reason", and people expect things to be proven to them "scientifically". So all the people who in the past would have risen high by browbeating, appealing to authority and writing great prose, are forced to dress themselves up in white coats and go through the motions of an experiment before they proclaim their great revelations to the world. The experiments however, are just as empty as all the old techniques, and bear only superficial relation to actual science.
Personally, I think it's gotten worse over the last 30 years. The unwillingness of actual scientific communities to challenge the misapplication of their methods by unscientific ones has lead to a dilution of the authority of science as a whole. Under the current regime any half baked psychiatrists can show pictures to 20 undergraduates, record a few squiggles on an MRI, run the numbers through R over and over until he gets what he wants, and proclaim to the world just about whatever he likes, and still be called a scientist! No wonder it's all too easy for the Intelligent Design movement to pose as "real science". Just look at how low the threshold for real science is.
There's only one way to deal with Cargo Cult Scientists. You have to call them out. You have to show how flimsy and false their supposed science really is. You also need to learn all the old rhetorical techniques, because faced with someone who actually knows what they're doing, the Cargo Culter will fall back to very old and time honored methods which enable him to win from a weak or false position. I think the real scientific community owes it to itself to show up these charlatans for what they really are, Con men. If they don't, science will just become more diluted in the long run until the public regards it in the same way it regards homeopathy.
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I agree with you. There are two reasons why your method does not happen more often.
The first is that failure in science is perceived to be a failure of reason. Almost
PhD != Research Scientist (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's my problem. Only a fraction (I'm guessing 1 out of 5) are actually capable of doing good research. The rest are competent employees for developing other people's research into useful products, but aren't terribly original thinkers, nor show a lot of initiative, nor show the rigour and clarity of thought one wants to see in a researcher.
Frankly, when I "unleash" employees on open-ended problems without much guidance, the majority soon begin to flounder.
There is nothing wrong with getting advanced degrees, but many then feel they are obliged to do original research when in fact they really aren't up to it. This may be one reason why the quality of papers isn't where it should be.
An invitation to physicists and mathematicians (Score:2)
yeah but... (Score:2, Funny)
A scientific study published that most scientific studies are wrong... therefore there is a good change of it being wrong.... Which means that most scientific studies are right... But if most studies are right then this one is also right... which means...
c.. an.. t take
[Head explodes]
It's been said (Score:2)
Flawed medical studies != all of science (Score:3, Informative)
I'd expect the rate of error for physics experiments to be much lower than that of, say, sociology.
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I'm not sure what depth of statistical analysis you're talking about, but I've found statistical analysis to be exceptionally difficult when applied to Electrical Engineering, and I know I'm not alone here -- it was by far the most difficult post-graduate class at my school.
I can confidently say that nobody who's graduating with me has a complete grasp of all of the statistical tools we were taught. Enough to get by, yes, but most of the things are extremely counterint
Pot. Meet kettle... (Score:2)
Said the WSJ editorial board...
I'm sorry (Score:3, Funny)
a pointless statement (Score:3, Insightful)
There are almost no areas of science we're "done" with. The most recent paper on a subject almost always points out where previous papers have gone wrong. Thus, the previous papers have some mistake such as a miscalculation, poor design or incomplete analysis. If you pick any paper published in a peer reviewed journal this month, there's a very high probability that at some point in the future it will be amended or improved by some other paper.
What Ioannidis *has* shown in his recent reports is that in genetics, not enough people are publishing on the same subjects. There are not enough "other papers" out there to check on the previous ones. The result is that papers which in other fields would be recognized as needing improvement are instead treated as the final word.
Summary (Score:3, Funny)
and
Most WSJ Articles Tainted by Sloppy Analysis (Score:4, Insightful)
But Dr. Ioannidis has a very narrow definition of science - he only includes statistical studies that use p 0.05 as a threshold for significance. There are, of course, lots of papers that do not show p-values - the purification of a protein, the determination of a genome sequence, the identification of a new fundamental particle. In many cases, p-values are not provided because they are not considered informative - something that happens when the p-value is much much much less than 0.05 (I like my p-values less than Avagadro's constant. With that p-valuep, I think most of my results are correct.)
And, of course, the WSJ misses all of this. The point of the research paper is that you can do everything right, and still be mislead with marginal p-values (0.05). Not sloppy, just not significant enough. We could, of course, require more stringent values, but then we would miss the genuinely rare, but important results.
As the research article points out, results that are reproducible are, in fact, quite likely to be correct. It is perhaps useful to distinguish between science as a paper and science as a process. Most results that stand up to scientific scrutiny over a period of years (that any one cares enough about to validate), are (probably) correct. In some disciplines, which rely heavily on modest thresholds for statistical significance, many results cannot be confirmed.
Uncomfortably close to the truth (Score:4, Interesting)
I have worked in a biotech / pharmaceutical environment for over five years now, and I don't trust the average medical researcher or biologist to accurately calculate the weight of a kilogram of stuff. I would say that their data analysis is habitually poor, if I were not convinced that it is actually habitually awful.
I have been trying to change this for five years. My success in this has been such that it contributed strongly to my recent decision to start searching for another job. The reality is that biomedical researchers simply do not believe in doing mathematical analysis of data properly. They consider it an eccentric habit, forgivable but socially objectionable, like smoking. By common consensus, it is considered much too complicated to expect that any of them can be expected to understand. Your average biologist is innumerate to the nth degree, and proud of it.
I blame their education, which seems to stress naive and antediluvian (excuse the word) analysis practices, if at all. I have seen course materials which in their expression of basic mathematical formulas, betrayed that they had been left unchanged since the days when people used slide rules and logarithmic tables for calculations. Most of their other training is strictly qualitatively, not quantitatively, and focussed more on memorizing that on understanding.
If necessary, they will find a crutch to help themselves to stumble along: Find a paper that defines a formula that looks relevant, and then fill in the numbers. They would not bother doing their own analysis, or trying to understand how the calculation works or whether it is relevant at all. The notion that a good statistical analysis of mathematical modeling can actually contribute to the scientific understanding of an issue, is well beyond most of them.
I am frankly, sick and tired of their attitude, and I still have to work with these people every day. And in my experience, my colleagues are actually better than most. I strongly suspect the WSJ is correct on this one.
Actually, headline should read: (Score:3, Informative)
This is a *very* small number of claims from a subsection of a single field of one small bit of science. Tarring all of science based on some potentially dubious epidemiology is badly out of line. It would be like claiming that since some spinach has made people sick, all food is unsafe to eat. Absurd.
Epidemiology itself has a bit of a reputation of having a hard time finding really solid effects, partly because the effects that are measured are frequently multi-variate with lots on confounding effects, partly because you need huge numbers to have very much analysis power, partly because such studies are generally more observational then experimental. This guy has published a bunch of papers in the past arguing (and presenting models [plosjournals.org] for) exactly this kind of problem. He comes up with the logical (if rather obvious) suggestions that amongst others: 1. Smaller studies are less likely to be true. 2. Smaller observed effects are less likely to be true. 3. The greater the financial interests there are in the study, the less likely it is to be true. 4. The "hotter" a topic is, the less likely a study is to be true. Largely these are no shit, sherlock kinds of things.
So, to sum up, there are lots of epidemiological claims in published articles out there that might not be right. This represents neither a new idea, nor a meaningful comment on anything but epidemiology.
-Ted
Please try to remember that (Score:3, Interesting)
So yes, this might be a problem, but when other peers review it the problems are likely to get pointed out.
A peer review paper isn't a paper that HAS been peer reviewed, it one that is being peer reviewed.
Yes, I know that war redundant, but people for get to all to often.
Another reminder - Scientist live to disprove hypothesis and theories.
"Do Scientists Cheat?" (Score:4, Interesting)
`Abstract: This video examines the troubling question of scientific fraud: How prevalent is it? Who
commits it? And what happens when the perpetrators are caught? Factors contributing to "bad science"
include sloppy research, personal bias, lack of objectivity, "cooking and trimming", "publish or perish"
pressure, and outright fraud. The limits of peer review and other quality control systems are discussed.'
The results of the study determined that 48% of all published data was fraudulent. The data was trimmed, cooked or outright falsified. Some cases made famous by public exposure were analyzed.
While recieving a lot of lip service from the establishment science, the two government researchers who made the report were reassigned to worthless tasks in isolated areas. One was sent to shuffle papers in Alaska, IIRC. So much for whistle blowers, even government whistle blowers.
In the last 19 years it seems nothing has changed. Besides this latest report how can I tell? Simple. The news is filled with stories of drugs being recalled because they are more dangerous that the problems they are supposed to treat. How would they ever have gotten on the market in the first place if their FDA "studies" weren't rigged? And you don't wonder about the revolving door policy between Pharmaceutical employees and FDA employees? Corporate influence in research is as corrupting as Microsoft influence in ISO standards voting.
What really burns me is that MUCH of our basic research is done at academic institutions by professors funded by government grants, i.e., tax payers. But, thanks to the best congress that money can buy (because most of them have been bought off) OUR research is "monetized" (sold to special interests) for pennies on the dollar. These interests then reap HUGE license profits for decades. To make matters worse, many of the "special interests" are the very academic researchers who were paid to do their work. Having discovered key facts, without reporting them, they resign academia and begin a corporation to capitalize on what we paid them to learn.
IF we had a congress worth what they are paid there would be a law which prohibits recipients of gov grants, or their families relatives, or former business associates to personally benefit from what they learned using that grant money for a period of 15 years. Secondly, the ONLY corporations which should be allowed to receive IP licenses from the gov should be NON-PROFITS, whose board, management or employees cannot include the professor or his family or relatives.
Another thing that this recent study shows is what the NOVA film revealed: Peer-review is worthless for vetting research. Replication is worthless for vetting research. Obviously, personal integrity is also a worthless indicator of research quality.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Funny)
After all, studies show that most studies are wrong.
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Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Clever.
The fact is, good science is hard work. In fact, it is damn hard work, requiring not only a supremely keen intellect but a very high tolerance for tedium, great attention to detail, and usually a big fat wad of cash. Also, it requires a profound lack of ego (and the ability to cope with failure and keep trying), given that a trememdous amount of effort could (and frequently does) wind up being completely discounted by a peer-review or another study.
The endeavor of scientific research obviously provides us tremendous benefits, and is furthering the evolution of our species at a blindingly fast rate (depending on how you look at it, of course). It is very important, very hard, and very expensive.
There are many, many people who would like to be scientists but really don't have the brain for it (as I stated above, it isn't just intelligence that matters). Unfortunately, a lot of them wind up doing research anyway, and they cause problems. Hopefully there are enough good scientists with enough funding to clean up their mess.
Excellent contribution to the discussion! (Score:3, Informative)
The media often contributes by being dishonest and over-interpreting results.
Most "scientific" papers aren't really scientific. The first clue is that they are poorly written, suggesting that the writers want to hide their poor contribution behind bad expression.
Slashdot editors often are fooled by "junk science", I notice. For example, this article was fraudulent in my opinion: Imaging Breakthrough "Sees" Lung Disease [slashdot.org].
The Slashdot artic
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Funny)
You'd think a postdoc would have known this.
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Bingo! One guy comes out with a paper in which he says that the majority of scientific studies have flawed methodologies, and the /. crowd jumps on the bandwagon saying: "See, you can't really believe scientists on anything." It may be that many scientists use flawed methodologies or make calculation errors and whatever else he is alleging. However, as I have been a peer reviewer and know the time it takes to properly review a single paper in a field that I know, his claim to have somehow critically vie
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If I had the patience, I'd write two versions of each one of my papers, but th
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Corrections aren't read (Score:2)
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Personally, I think it's true. Between publish-or-perish, financial conflicts of interest, and various political and social movements trying to influence science, a lot of published science is worthless.
However, there's a difference between believing that and actually showing that. Anybody wanting to fix that needs clear and convincing proof first.
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1) Physicians are mostly trained to be healers (practitioners) not scientists.
I think that most physicians start out as "scientists", after all, most of us come from science majors. However the biggest mistake that medical students make is thinking in absolutes. Yes, anyone can memorize anatomy, or physiology, or pharmacology, etc. After all, there are only so many anatomic variations in the population, a person's nerves will always transmit a sign
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Someone pointed out once that much of the "scientific" studies in support of paranormal activities like ESP tends to come from MDs and not PhDs, but the general public will equate it to being "scientific" be
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