New Stanford Institute To Target Bad Science

ananyo writes "John Ioannidis, the epidemiologist who published an infamous paper entitled 'Why most published research findings are false', has co-founded an institute dedicated to combating sloppy medical studies. The new institute is to focus on irreproducibility, waste in science and publication bias. The institute, called the Meta-Research Innovation Centre or METRICS, will, the Economist reports, 'create a "journal watch" to monitor scientific publishers' work and to shame laggards into better behaviour. And they will spread the message to policymakers, governments and other interested parties, in an effort to stop them making decisions on the basis of flaky studies. All this in the name of the centre's nerdishly valiant mission statement: "Identifying and minimising persistent threats to medical-research quality."'"

Re:Flashback

[HornWumpus]

http://www.jir.com/ [jir.com]

Appears to be the same dude.

Re:Pretty much useless and wasteful

[TheCarp]

Are you familiar with the original paper?

> Can they target anyone with power that control unlimited resources, yet fabricate data on a
> daily basis

Maybe I am wrong but that doesn't seem to be what this is about. It is less about fabrication of data than it is about poor study design that lead to false results. From the original abstract:

Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias

This isn't about people in power with control of resources or about data fabrication. It is about making avoiding errors that lead to genuine reports of bogus findings.

Re:This is where the money is short sighted.

[riverat1]

Is that your idea of science? "My cause is the right one, therefore it shouldn't ever be challenged."

No, if you want to seriously challenge climate science orthodoxy (or any other scientific orthodoxy) you need to put in the work first to really understand the science so you can intelligently challenge it in a scientific manner. Repeating past challenges that have been refuted many times already or not paying enough attention to what the orthodoxy is actually saying so you can address it directly just doesn't cut it.

For example the recent claims of 16 years of no warming. If you analyze the temperature records since 1998 statistically it's impossible to say whether the previous trend has continued unabated or if the trend is 0 increase in temperature. The period is just to short. But that doesn't stop climate science deniers from proclaiming it as evidence for the failure of climate science.

Same thing with the claim that climate models failed to predict the current pseudo-pause. If you understand how climate models work and how the results are presented as an average of many individual model runs you would know that they wouldn't be expected to predict such a short term deviation from the average.

So if you really want to challenge current climate science do the work, understand what the current orthodoxy is and come up with something that does a better job of explaining the evolution of climate. Otherwise it's just a bunch of hot air.