Dysfunction In Modern Science? 155
eldavojohn writes "The editors of Infection and Immunity are sending a warning signal about modern science. Two editorials (1 and 2) published in the journal have given other biomedical researchers pause to ask if modern science is dysfunctional. Readers familiar with the state of academia may not be surprised but the claims have been presented today to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that level the following allegations: 'Incentives have evolved over the decades to encourage some behaviors that are detrimental to good science' and 'The surest ticket to getting a grant or job is getting published in a high profile journal, this is an unhealthy belief that can lead a scientist to engage in sensationalism and sometimes even dishonest behavior to salvage their career.' The data to back up such slanderous claims? 'In the past decade the number of retraction notices for scientific journals has increased more than 10-fold while the number of journals articles published has only increased by 44%.' At least a few of such retractions have been covered here."
Grant whores and PR scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was in grad school there were always grant-whore and PR scientists around. Everyone knew who they were. They were the Chicken Littles who were always proclaiming the end of the world if their pet project wasn't funded. They were always the first to run to the press with GREATLY exaggerated claims and alarmism if it served their purposes (especially when they were looking for political support with funding). Their "science" was far less about scientific method than their own financial self-interests (including getting the precious tenure that they all craved like little lapdogs).
Of course, I have a friend who still won't accept that this EVER happens. "Science would never allow that," he says. His naivete is so endearing.
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That's because it's not a problem with science, but rather with the funding of science, which is an administrative and political problem, not a scientific one. Strictly speaking, your friend is technically correct - the best kind of correct.
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it's not a problem with science, but rather with the funding of science, which is an administrative and political problem
Absolutely. The extreme competition and unscrupulous behavior we see today is because there is not enough money to go around. When (if) funding is restored to historical levels I expect we will see a concomitant decrease in malfeasance.
Re:Grant whores and PR scientists (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Grant whores and PR scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Grant whores and PR scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
And what is "Science" (must capitalize correctly) without scientists? Including unscrupulous ones?
Way to posit "no true scientist." [wikipedia.org].
Science is a human artifact. Every human artifact is potentially susceptible to fraud, manipulation, trolling, marketing, and every other foible and evil humans are capable of. Almost any human intention and motive can be expressed through the manipulation and corruption of the scientific process. And scientific fraud is no less about science than financial fraud is about finance.
There is no great, glorious and impersonal "Science". Insisting otherwise is just another form of deism, one that gives rise to the criticism that science is just another religion. And I'm sure no one here wants that.
Science is a process, not a thing, damn it! (Score:2)
And what is "Science" (must capitalize correctly) without scientists? Including unscrupulous ones?
Way to posit "no true scientist." [wikipedia.org].
Science is a human artifact. Every human artifact is potentially susceptible to fraud, manipulation, trolling, marketing, and every other foible and evil humans are capable of. Almost any human intention and motive can be expressed through the manipulation and corruption of the scientific process. And scientific fraud is no less about science than financial fraud is about finance.
There is no great, glorious and impersonal "Science". Insisting otherwise is just another form of deism, one that gives rise to the criticism that science is just another religion. And I'm sure no one here wants that.
Wow, 12 mod points left, and I really wanted to mod you into oblivion. Instead, I'll just point out why you are wrong, and let some other mods go medieval on your ass. To answer your question, science is a process, not an artifact, so it doesn't matter if there are scientists around, unscrupulous or otherwise. It is a methodology, not a thing. If humans didn't exist, the process would still be there for some other species to discover and use. Since your premise is demonstrably false, your assertions
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To expand upon your great post, at the risk of getting modded down, since people confuse passion and integrity:
A fantastic read is "Myths of Skepticism"
http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/talk/talk.html [rpi.edu]
Feynman already warned about how Science was turning into a religion.
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm [lhup.edu]
He wasn't the first, Planck said it ~50 years earlier.
"Science advanced one funeral at a time", paraphrasing Max Planck's "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them s
Re:Grant whores and PR scientists (Score:5, Informative)
Science doesn't deal in truth -- and arguably, despite the name, deals only practically in knowledge -- science deals with understanding.
From science we build models of the natural world that are explanatory, but need not be true in any meaningful sense of the word. To declare something "true" is to make an unscientific statement as such a declaration denies falsifiability.
Consequently, science does not lead iteratively toward truth -- a popular misunderstanding. Such a goal is decidedly anti-science.
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Consequently, science does not lead iteratively toward truth -- a popular misunderstanding.
It isn't clear why this is considered a "popular" misunderstanding when smug ignoramuses have been responding to it with nonsense like yours for decades. Idiots saying, "Science is about building models..." are at least ten times more common than idiots saying, "Science is about truth..."
Science is Bayesian. If you understand that you can drop all your nonsense about "models" and similar pseudo-Cartesian gibberish. If you don't understand that you aren't talking about science, but some imaginary philosop
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Science is Bayesian. If you understand that you can drop all your nonsense about "models"
I love that you claim that "science is Bayesian" considering the known limits of Bayesianism as far as the young field of model selection is concerned. In a bit of fun, making such an assertion actually supports my post!
I'm still trying to work out what you mean by "pseudo-Cartesian gibberish" -- perhaps you can elucidate further. So far, your assertions have be rather helpful to my case. :)
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Science is about observing something and using multiple lines of evidence to assess the plausibility of various explanations for that something. The process is probabilistic and bayesian.
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Science is Bayesian. :)
Have you read your sig recently?
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Science is etc...
Wow an entire school of thought or two perhaps completely overthrown with three little words. You're amazing.
And to anyone else... if you don't know why he said what he or don't agree with it then it just proves that he's right and you ARE an idiot
Typical fucking asshole Asbergers case... I say it authoritatively, and with brevity somehow makes it true. ...
All those stupid philosophers and scientists who wasted their lives because they didn't understand that "science is Bayesi
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Re:Grant whores and PR scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem arises when this distribution of participants skews and the "expected" minority (the quantity of which you still try to minimize!) grows. So the question becomes: is modern science suffering from a growing problem of bad scientists? It's hard to say. While I'm willing to accept the numbers, the title "is modern science dysfunctional" is, itself, a tad bit sensational, making the rest of the article difficult to take seriously.
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"science shouldn't allow it, but as we know, theory and practice rarely align in practice"
It looks like science isn't allowing it, which isn't really surprising. The fakers are caught out eventually, whether it's being explicitly identified and their papers retracted, or their results disproved.
The problem is non-scientific - we'd like the system to work more efficiently by discouraging the fakery and other dirty tricks in the first place, using means unrelated to the scientific method.
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Th outright fraud will be exposed, but the real problem is the huge amount of selection and publication bias that goes on (at least in biomed), as well as misuse of stats. We need to start getting excel spreadsheets in the supplements.
Re:Grant whores and PR scientists (Score:4, Informative)
I have yet to see evidence that there is any publication bias, at least of the kind that most people talk about. There is an ANALYSIS bias - everybody (thinks) they know how to analyze for positive results, but few few researchers have any clue at all how to actually analyze negative results. When you hear the vast majority of (non-particle physics) researchers talk about "negative results" they're actually talking about inconclusive results - p-values that are not significant, with no discussion of beta, confidence intervals, or minimum significant effects. Inconclusive results shouldn't be published, unless it's to provide required sample size estimates for future studies.
Most researchers' poor stats skills are indeed a problem, but not a scientific method one. Errors due to poor stats will be discovered, in time, by the scientific method, just like actual fraud.
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All data is beautiful and should be published. "Inconclusive" is subjective. It depends on the prior probability you ascribe to the hypothesis.
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"All data is beautiful and should be published."
Almost all data is ugly, capricious and vile. Occasionally, with lots of work, you can dress it up to be moderately attractive. If you want to publish all data then start a Journal of Inconclusive Results and Lazy Statistics. The mainstream journals have too much trouble publishing what they get now.
"'Inconclusive' is subjective. It depends on the prior probability you ascribe to the hypothesis."
It is not. Your very next sentence suggests how it can be obj
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Ha, this is what I think is beautiful. I was kind of kidding though. Anyway, journal's have no problem with publishing 5 pages articles with 40-50 page supplements, I don't think space is an issue. For people studying very similar things having access to the (almost) raw data would be very useful. Of course it should be curated and organized somewhat.
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This. Dunno about other fields, but it's pretty routine these days in bioinformatics and biostatistics for authors to post their data either as supplemental material with the article or on their departmental web site. The problem is that the format for the data they post is generally "whatever format I have it in at the moment" -- if your lab chooses to keep everything in Excel, that's your business, but it's no fun for the rest of us. Microarray data all goes into GEO [nih.gov] or ArrayExpress [ebi.ac.uk] these days, but eve
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It really messed me up in first year to be inundated with crappy spreadsheets and "press the magic button to calculate the t-statistic!" in first year.
Gaaah. Yeah. As a statistician, I have a real hatred for that kind of "teaching."
Presumably that's why I've had four separate lectures on the FASTA format.
Heh. It kind of makes sense if you figure that a fair number of people in each class will be coming in without the necessary prior knowledge. But it does get a bit insulting, doesn't it? It's as if every biology class, at every level, started with an explanation of the Krebs cycle. FASTA parsing is really Bioinformatics 101 material, and at some point, I'd like to see teaching in the field mature enough that familiarity
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Interesting, I will definitely keep this in mind.
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Re:Grant whores and PR scientists (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually you are incorrect. I assume you are referring to "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." He never actually said or wrote that [bytwerk.com]. The link supplies the evidence, but the tipoff is that the quote is good to be true; real people never go around saying "hey, I'm evil!" because that's not how they see themselves.
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And you have no valid arguement except, "You act like a Nazi." Name-calling. Juvenile behavior. Not acting like a mature, rational adult.
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he has been caught, multiple times, fudging data or massaging his equations
No he hasn't. You made that up. Or more likely regurgitated lies because they agree with your world view.
You of course didn't provide any evidence for your made up claim, but anyway: http://www.nsf.gov/oig/search/A09120086.pdf [nsf.gov] for what I think is the latest of the never ending inquiries.
Re:Grant whores and PR scientists (Score:5, Informative)
>>> who are either malevolently trying to game the system
Example: The Penn State guy who produced a temperature that resembles a hockey stick. It was later discovered he had altered his numbers to give the result desired (and thus become famous to the public & funded by the government).
Or rather it was later *claimed* he had altered his numbers, etc. etc.
My understanding is that while there have been many criticisms of this work (the 1998 Nature journal Mann, Bradley and Hughes multiproxy study on "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries"), the vast majority of subsequent work has supported the majority of their conclusions, and all investigated claims of improper conduct have come to naught.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy [wikipedia.org]
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Yeah the hockey stick model has not been found to be wrong, and Mann definately was not discovered to have altered his numbers.
I really wish the denialists would quit with this talking point. The "climategate" thing was largely found to be nonsense, with the only misadventure found being that the CRU where not fully living up to FOI requests from a certain crank blogger. And even this not so much, since most of the data was under a commercial NDA and thus they couldnt release it even if they wanted to.
I'm s
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Example: The Penn State guy who produced a temperature that resembles a hockey stick. It was later discovered he had altered his numbers to give the result desired (and thus become famous to the public & funded by the government).
I don't suppose it bothers you at all that your description of this incident has nothing to do with reality?
Re:Grant whores and PR scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
Double edged blade. If you have tenure then you can hold off on publishing to make sure you're really, truly correct. If you don't, then you have no choice.
To my mind the real issue is that the notion of "debate in the literature" is being rapidly killed by the increase in complexity and cost of some experiments, and to a greater extent the very terse manner in which journals like to have their experimental methods published: I'd much rather read a rambling journal or logbook then someone's - effectively "opinion" - on what they think their important experimental variables are, since accusing someone of publishing false information is ridiculously difficult (and not to be taken lightly) whereas people simply missing things is common and to be expected.
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Debate in the literature is being killed by people (silly reviewers included) who think that everything should be perfect before it's published. Someone in the Slashdot story about cancer cures today posted that scientists shouldn't publish animal research because the results might not translate to humans. I had a reviewer on my last paper actually say "method should be perfect before it is published" because we mentioned some potential improvements we planned to look at as future work.
Re:Grant whores and PR scientists (Score:4, Insightful)
: I'd much rather read a rambling journal or logbook then someone's - effectively "opinion" - on what they think their important experimental variables are,
You think you would, but trust me, you wouldn't. This is what you get when you have a bad paper to review. A disorganised rambling mush of random, unconnected results mixed in with a bunch of rather peculiar and rambling experimental conditions where it is amazingly hard to figure out what's going on. It is really, really hard to figure out if the experiments are sane and the results even remotely interesting in a paper like that. Even getting past the first page will bore you to tears.
While your current opinion reflects an admirable level idealism in the dispassionate search for knowledge, unfortunately the world in all its messy glory has a habit of getting in the way.
Re:Grant whores and PR scientists (Score:5, Interesting)
You are either bitter, or were stuck in a bad department. While such sensationalist people certainly exist, few of them actually influence the broader debate. In my community such people are far outnumbered by brilliant and truly insightful researchers who work incredibly hard and whose contributions to our understanding of the universe are vastly undervalued by their pay. To think that some of the most brilliant minds in the world, working at the frontiers of science simply because they love it, are paid no more than a senior code monkeys, is the real travesty.
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It is "good communication". It does add a lot of value. Malcolm Gladwell famous because he's a great communicator. But it would be silly to call him a scientist.
Re:Grant whores and PR scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
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The climate denialists' poisoning of the wells has worked out.
Or rather, as the article suggests, it is merely that CAGW is cargo cult science and it is coming home to roost. Your use of the word 'denialist' shows your poor grasp of the debate and the range of opinions out there. Where do 'lukewarmers' fit into your simplistic world view?
Everyone believes by now that "they are only doing it for the grant money".
Such a crude strawman. Typical of this debate. If we insist on discussing motives, then subconscious drivers perhaps. I suspect that it is to some extent about social prestige and the desire contribute back to the human race. Afte
Re:Grant whores and PR scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news, HR people find out that when people are judged against a specific metric, those people will work towards that metric and disregard their actual job. HR and management is particularly shocked, and wants to know what metrics they can use to make sure people don't game their system.
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Yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Publish or perish is good. As a scientist you MUST communicate your ideas or you're a failure. What's wrong is the use of simple metrics like paper count or journal "quality." As usual, if you want to properly evaluate someone's worth you need to use your brain, not your calculator.
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Publish or perish is good. As a scientist you MUST communicate your ideas or you're a failure. What's wrong is the use of simple metrics like paper count or journal "quality." As usual, if you want to properly evaluate someone's worth you need to use your brain, not your calculator.
I agree with the latter, but as for the first sentence? Not so much. The reason why? We need look no further than a gent by the name of Jan Hendrik Schön [wikipedia.org]
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"The scandal provoked discussion in the scientific community about the degree of responsibility of coauthors and reviewers of scientific papers. The debate centered on whether peer review, traditionally designed to find errors and determine relevance and originality of papers, should also be required to detect deliberate fraud."
Nothing to do with publish or perish. The guy wasn't even faking things because he was up for review and didn't have any papers - he was faking things to get famous.
If that's the be
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Motivation isn't the issue here, only the environment and results. ;)
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If motivation isn't the issue, then what link are you claiming between publish or perish and Schon?
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Publish or perish is good.
This is correct! Just look at the difference in output between scientists in the Soviet Union and the US during the cold war. Our system, in which output is paramount, uses competition to drive scientific work. The USSR had a lot of brilliant, well-funded people, but because there was little pressure to publish the impact of their work was limited.
The problem today is that research is so severely underfunded that competition arises not from the desire for excellence, but because there is simply not enough
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Scientists who don't contribute shouldn't get funding.
Yes, there need to be reasonable limits. As I said elsewhere, if you want to evaluate a person you need to use your brain, not your calculator. But off the top of my head I can think of a professor (in life sciences) at a major university who didn't publish any first author papers during her ten year post doc, and hasn't published any papers as a professor. She's coming up on her five year review in a few months. She SHOULDN'T be funded and shouldn't
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Re:Yet... (Score:4)
But really, there's another way to solve this problem, and one that I'm sure at least some people make use of: Plagiarism.
To quote Tom Lehrer:
I am never forget the day I am given first original paper to write. It was on analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean metrization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifold. Bozhe moi! This I know from nothing. What I'm going to do? But I think of great Lobachevsky and get idea - ahah!
I have a friend in Minsk, who has a friend in Pinsk
Whose friend in Omsk has friend in Tomsk
With friend in Akmolinsk
His friend in Alexandrovsk has friend in Petropavlovsk
Whose friend somehow is solving now
The problem in Dnepropetrovsk
And when his work is done - ha ha! - begins the fun
From Dnepropetrovsk to Petropavlovsk
By way of Iliysk and Novorossiysk
To Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk
To Tomsk to Omsk to Pinsk to Minsk
To me the news will run
Yes, to me the news will run
And then I write, by morning, night
And afternoon, and pretty soon
My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed
When he finds out I publish first
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I'm familiar with the situation. Most granting agencies, and most universities, at least the ones I interact with, have reasonable limits for minimum productivity. If you're going multiple years without producing any publications you're not contributing to the scientific community and need to reexamine the way you do science. On the flip side, if you're publishing a hundred papers a year, the university needs to take a look at exactly how you're doing it.
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Most likely, you should call it a day. Very, very few people ever come back from yearlong productivity breaks.
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Not necessarily true. I know of labs where unfortunate students and post docs get stuck that only publish when they've got something Nature worthy. They have lots of publishable output, they just don't publish it. You can easily bounce back from that by... publishing.
Nature is overrated, and holding back until you have something to publish in it is silly. But lots of people do just that.
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If you have publishable results but don't publish regularly, I'd wager your mindset is such that you won't ever publish at all. The thing with waiting for something of Nature stature is that this is just a delusion. It certainly won't happen by not publishing in "le
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If you have publishable results but don't publish regularly, I'd wager your mindset is such that you won't ever publish at all. The thing with waiting for something of Nature stature is that this is just a delusion. It certainly won't happen by not publishing in "lesser" journals.
Emperically, it seems to me that to get something into Nature or an equivalent journal takes about 3 years of work from conception to publication, often involving multiple people. If you publish intermediate results, the the final
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And that's the problem. By saving up for three years you've done yourself, your students and the scientific community a disservice. Publishing originated in scientists sending each other personal correspondence along the lines of "look at this cool thing I found! What do you think?" Publishing in "lesser" journals can still sometimes be a little like this (and that's a good thing). Saving up for a Nature publication (which tend NOT to be the actual revolutionary papers) is more along the lines of "hey,
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I'm playing devils advocate here with a real example. I don't entirely disagree, but I don't entirely agree either. I think salami-slicing is even worse than saving it up for a big journal.
And that's the problem. By saving up for three years you've done yourself, your students and the scientific community a disservice.
I didn't have any students. It's also a trade-off. I got to concentrate on the science for 3 years, which I enjoyed, rather than the writing, which I didn't.
Publishing originated in scientists
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It's amazing how "publish or you're fired" can change your mindset.
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It's amazing how "publish in Nature or you are a looser" can be used as an excuse for not getting anything done.
Look, if you are not publishing regularly (by which I mean a comfortable quantity, not 50 papers a year), you don't even know how to publish. You don't know how to write stuff up. You are not interacting with people on the frontlines of research. You don't know how to deal with editors and referees and stuff. Actually, you probably
Naturally (Score:4)
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Haha, AC is guilty of questionable research practices.
Between 6.2% and 72% of respondents had knowledge of various questionable research practices (Table S3) (Figure 3, N = 23 (6 studies), crude unweighted mean: 28.53%, 95%CI = 18.85â"38.2).
http://www.plosone.org/article/slideshow.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0005738&imageURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0005738.g003 [plosone.org]
From Sup 3:
Indicate the number of IADR/AADR members you have observed/experienced exhibiting X within the last 5 years:
-Overlooking others' use of flawed data or questionable interpretation of data: 72% yes
IADR/AADR are dental research associations and the original source is from 1996. So that number doesn't really mean what you portrayed it to mean.
There's nothing wrong with science... (Score:5, Insightful)
...but people forget that "scientists" are not "science", they are simply people using the tools of science to seek the kind of knowledge that the scientific method and process can produce. As such they are subject to all of the same pressures, hopes, dreams, failures, etc. that the rest of us are.
But the process of science itself will always move forward, since science is only about reproducible experiments, so no matter how much bad (human) behavior might get involved, eventually the "truth" will win out. But the bad behavior can of course be extremely damaging to the process.
So there's nothing wrong with "science" or even its application I think. There are probably economic incentives that are promoting behaviors that affect the short-term reliability and the long-term costs of gaining useful scientific knowledge though, and hopefully we can come up with ways of improving the meta-processes.
G.
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The problem is that it is wasting a bunch of time and money. Both of the researchers publishing crap and those who have to sift through it.
Eisenhower's farewell adress (Score:5, Interesting)
Read the part after the one everyone always quotes about the 'military-industrial complex'.
Re:Eisenhower's farewell adress (Score:5, Informative)
Fascinating. For those who are curious:
In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
some issues only in life sciences, some insoluble (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of the issues discussed here are only relevant in the life sciences, and especially in medicine. Retractions are not a big phenomenon in the physical sciences. Ditto for publication bias (refusal by journals to publish negative results or failed attempts to replicate published results). This is essentially just because the life sciences are harder than the physical sciences. The life sciences have much more intractable problems with complexity of systems and difficulty in controlling variables.
Some of the problems they discuss are clearly insoluble. The uncertain career prospects for young scientists are a straightforward matter of supply and demand. There are many, many very talented people who would like to spend their careers doing fundamental scientific research. The number of such people is 1 or 2 orders of magnitude greater than the number of jobs available. This isn't a new phenomenon, although in the past the problem may have been hidden more, because, e.g., up until about 1950, only white, affluent, European and American males were considered prospects for a career in science.
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Could be that physical sciences have about two or three generations more experience with the concept of pounding the data set with computers for statistical analysis. Maybe give the soft sciences another generation or two?
A big factor might be that datasets are no longer handwritten in a lab notebook on the experimenters desk, but are living on flash drives, DVD-Rs, dropbox, ftp sites...
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Perhaps, but bioinfomatics is an up and coming field. The big, big problem is the inherent variability of biologic systems and our rather primitive understanding of same. The other problem is we're shotgunning science - we spend an enormous amount of money to study human biology (poorly, in general) whilst we should really be spending money on the back end - bugs and worms and the like that we might be able to understand better.
There are good reasons for this, of course, and 'science' doesn't really care.
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Some of the problems they discuss are clearly insoluble. The uncertain career prospects for young scientists are a straightforward matter of supply and demand.
This is not insoluble. We can and should increase demand for talented young researchers. Basic science is the best investment we can as a society, in terms of ROI. The problem is that the returns are enormous but infrequent, and not just limited to the funding body.
If we understand just how valuable basic research is, then our scientists don't hav
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>>Some of the problems they discuss are clearly insoluble. The uncertain career prospects for young scientists are a straightforward matter of supply and demand.
>This is not insoluble. We can and should increase demand for talented young researchers. Basic science is the best investment we can as a society, in terms of ROI. The problem is that the returns are enormous but infrequent, and not just limited to the funding body.
I disagree. One of the problems described in TFA is that there is a large number of researchers churning out papers that are either of low quality or simply unimportant. They're describing the life sciences, but this is also my experience in physics. There are already too many people scouring the same scientific hunting grounds at the same time.
The other reason I disagree is that I wasn't kidding about 1 or 2 orders of magnitude. Seriously. There are literally 10 to 100 times more people who would like thes
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This is essentially just because the life sciences are harder than the physical sciences. The life sciences have much more intractable problems with complexity of systems and difficulty in controlling variables.
That's certainly a possible contributing factor. I will grant you that.
Or, quite simply, they're not rigorously exercising the scientific method, as you have to in a more provable field such as hard science. (There's a reason why it's called hard science, you know.) It seems like every other week we read about some study 'proving' some new scientific principle which is plagued with logical and procedural fallacy.
OP is broken (Score:3)
The high profile journals weed out sensationalist claims more often than not (part of being high-profile is having a finely tuned bullshit meter). The number of retractions are also a sign of strength, as the mechanisms forcing people to correct their errors are getting better. This isn't to claim that the process doesn't have room for improvement, but the cited examples are rubbish.
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The number of retractions are also a sign of strength, as the mechanisms forcing people to correct their errors are getting better.
This is what I was thinking. Perhaps along with this, it is simply easier with today's technology to identify faulty or incorrect (whether intentionally or not) research? Communication is easier, so more people can look at your data, your analysis, your conclusions, and with a larger audience, the more likely it is that any incongruity will catch someone's eye. 100 years ago there was a much smaller audience for scientific research, and it could take a long time (months, if not years) for any interested
Re:OP is broken (Score:4, Insightful)
The high profile journals weed out sensationalist claims more often than not (part of being high-profile is having a finely tuned bullshit meter). The number of retractions are also a sign of strength, as the mechanisms forcing people to correct their errors are getting better. This isn't to claim that the process doesn't have room for improvement, but the cited examples are rubbish.
In my head the summary read "Modern science is dysfuctional, claims several modern scientists. See attached scientific statistics for details."
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Journals can't verify articles (Score:2)
You can't expect journals to vrify the claims of a paper. That's the job of the scientific community, to try to replicate the results and see what happens. Of course, accepting unreplicated results as facts is a serious problem in some sciences.
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One of the big problems I've been hearing about recently is that many journals refuse to publish replication papers, which means nobody wants to replicate the results of any paper to see if the original author was correct, because they themselves won't be able to publish it.
Replication is one of the most important part of the scientific process, it's how you find liars, cheats, and actual errors. If you discourage people from trying to replicate other's experiments you harm the whole scientific process.
Pseudo-scientist make .... (Score:2)
The primary work of pseudo-scientist is to make faux-science for personal, religious, corporate, and government purposes. ..., RU ..., CN ....
Sort of like the Iran-science of tits-&-earthquake relativity, USA proof of poof Iraq-WMDs, EU
Highly certified people accept lies as personally essential. Highly qualified people accept proof/truth as life critical.
Even at the basest level (Score:2)
Considering how many misinformed people there are on the internet, there are lots of people who aren't even taking a basic science requirement in school at the time they post random bull in youtube comments, their blogs, their facebooks, etc. all of which, while not an influential public claim to scientific research, creates loads of other spout-off-the-mouth misinformed folk who read the ridiculous e-diatribes. Crap is made up on spot it seems, all reactionary and without an ounce of "I might be wrong..."
Penalty for fraud & deception (Score:2)
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Your best hope for home science is in bio and astronomy, not so much physics.
Its a risk thing... you can't study something "at work" unless you can guarantee it'll pay off and feed you and your family with better odds than everything else you could do. However, at home, feel free to scoop up some dirt and look at it under a microscope during the day, or go variable star and nova searching during the night. If it doesn't work, that's OK, you still get paid and get to eat, and all you miss is an Oprah rerun
Re:Back to the Garage (Score:4, Informative)
Your best hope for home science is in bio
It depends on the sub-field of bio. Genetics of yeast or E. coli: easy and (comparatively). Structures of human neuroreceptors: difficult and expensive (particle accelerator required). Do-it-yourself will only take you so far: you can build your own thermocycler without too much struggle, but what about a system for purifying proteins? It may be tempting to do a half-assed job inexpensively, but the pros use equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars. (We have to - it would waste too much time otherwise, not just in the time lost by doing manually what a machine can do for us, but later when we discover that our exciting result was actually an artifact caused by a contaminating protein [nature.com].) You can find some of this equipment used if you know where to look (and know how to detect junk), but it still requires a significant amount of disposable income.
The one field where amateurs really do have a chance is computational biology/bioinformatics. However, "amateur" in this case means someone with a sophisticated knowledge of math and statistics, which generally implies an advanced degree (and/or extensive professional experience) in a technical field.
at home, feel free to scoop up some dirt and look at it under a microscope during the day
I cannot recommend this highly enough to anyone with an interest in the life sciences and a desire for independent learning. This was how I became interested in biology, and after more than a decade of higher education and professional research, I have done very few things that were as fulfilling as watching rotifers and protists feeding, and seeing how many species I could count in a drop of pond water. Even a cheap child's microscope is sufficient to get started, and you can buy higher-quality equipment (the kind that gets used in introductory bio lab in college) used for under $1000.
The problem, unfortunately, is that it's very difficult to do truly original and significant research like this. For the pure learning experience it can't be beat, and I suspect one could make some truly spectacular YouTube videos, but it's no substitute for doing science the messy way, with a real lab and real funding.
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Get some petri dishes, and try to purify a line of bacteria or protists or whatever from your backyard. Then using some mostly off the shelf gear figure out the optimum growth conditions. Or... do enviro research. Remember when MTBE was "new" well figure out how many ppm a off the shelf back yard fungi line can tolerate. Or modern pink slime.
Basically, you can do stuff at home that is not "profitable".
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So go do it.
Re:Back to the Garage (Score:5, Interesting)
My view of it is that there aren't that many basic concepts to discover in the back of your garage. Particle accelerators, high-field NMR machines, electron or AFM microscopes, huge ground-based or orbital telescopes are needed to make the next discoveries in their respective fields because the easy stuff, that could be seen with bubble chambers, low-field magnets, optical microscopes and small telescopes was already discovered. It's a matter of diminishing returns.
Scientists have been doing their jobs for hundreds of years, no one is going to discover an improved version of the laws of gravitation with a 100 dollar telescope. What may come out of observing dark matter was obtained with multi-million dollar equipment, collaborative effort and brilliant minds going over and over the same thing.
Granted, there may be things to discover that can still be attained in a garage. In hindsight everything is easy, but if no one is looking, there may still be amazing things still to observe in your kitchen lab. But expecting the cure for problems of the world to come out of a bunch of semi-amateur scientists is betting on the wrong horse... it may happen in a field or two, but it won't be the future of science.
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Higher education bubble without research bubble. If the government is going to create one they might as well just create both.