The Band of Debunkers Busting Bad Scientists (wsj.com) 122
Stanford's president and a high-profile physicist are among those taken down by a growing wave of volunteers who expose faulty or fraudulent research papers. WSJ: An award-winning Harvard Business School professor and researcher spent years exploring the reasons people lie and cheat. A trio of behavioral scientists examining a handful of her academic papers concluded her own findings were drawn from falsified data. It was a routine takedown for the three scientists -- Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson and Uri Simonsohn -- who have gained academic renown for debunking published studies built on faulty or fraudulent data. They use tips, number crunching and gut instincts to uncover deception. Over the past decade, they have come to their own finding: Numbers don't lie but people do.
"Once you see the pattern across many different papers, it becomes like a one in quadrillion chance that there's some benign explanation," said Simmons, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the trio who report their work on a blog called Data Colada. Simmons and his two colleagues are among a growing number of scientists in various fields around the world who moonlight as data detectives, sifting through studies published in scholarly journals for evidence of fraud. At least 5,500 faulty papers were retracted in 2022, compared with 119 in 2002, according to Retraction Watch, a website that keeps a tally. The jump largely reflects the investigative work of the Data Colada scientists and many other academic volunteers, said Dr. Ivan Oransky, the site's co-founder. Their discoveries have led to embarrassing retractions, upended careers and retaliatory lawsuits.
Neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne stepped down last month as president of Stanford University, following years of criticism about data in his published studies. Posts on PubPeer, a website where scientists dissect published studies, triggered scrutiny by the Stanford Daily. A university investigation followed, and three studies he co-wrote were retracted. Stanford concluded that although Tessier-Lavigne didn't personally engage in research misconduct or know about misconduct by others, he "failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record."
"Once you see the pattern across many different papers, it becomes like a one in quadrillion chance that there's some benign explanation," said Simmons, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the trio who report their work on a blog called Data Colada. Simmons and his two colleagues are among a growing number of scientists in various fields around the world who moonlight as data detectives, sifting through studies published in scholarly journals for evidence of fraud. At least 5,500 faulty papers were retracted in 2022, compared with 119 in 2002, according to Retraction Watch, a website that keeps a tally. The jump largely reflects the investigative work of the Data Colada scientists and many other academic volunteers, said Dr. Ivan Oransky, the site's co-founder. Their discoveries have led to embarrassing retractions, upended careers and retaliatory lawsuits.
Neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne stepped down last month as president of Stanford University, following years of criticism about data in his published studies. Posts on PubPeer, a website where scientists dissect published studies, triggered scrutiny by the Stanford Daily. A university investigation followed, and three studies he co-wrote were retracted. Stanford concluded that although Tessier-Lavigne didn't personally engage in research misconduct or know about misconduct by others, he "failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record."
The claim was no fame in replicating results. (Score:1)
Re:The claim was no fame in replicating results. (Score:4, Funny)
Replicating results is cool again, because of the scene in Oppenheimer where they immediately reproduced results in a mere 15 seconds of film.
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It works (Score:1, Funny)
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Proving the peer review process works!
No it doesn't. It proves that data review and reproduction works. Peer review should but does not include these things. When it doesn't, its pretty useless.
Re: It works (Score:3)
It's not useless, it's intended to serve a different purpose. That of establishing whether methods and interpretation exposed by a publication meet typical quality criteria for a specific field. In ther words, to exclude that a publication consists mostly of "technobabble".
Replication of results comes at a later step, as it's usually associated with completely different time frame (months/years instead of days), and, more often than not, nobody except the original group even has the necessary equipment and
Publish or Perish? (Score:3)
Re:Publish or Perish? (Score:4, Interesting)
Verification research is undervalued. Checking stuff is often more important than original discoveries. The problem is it doesn't generate notoriety for labs and universities. It's like plumbing: unglamorous but necessarily, and creates chaos when broken.
Correction: "necessary" (Score:1)
> unglamorous but necessarily
Should be "necessary".
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Possibly spotted data fabrication recently (Score:5, Insightful)
section editor was notified, and will be following up to sort it out. Hope I am just being paranoid, but with all the press around how often this happens, better to be safe than sorry.
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Cool of you to notice and to start questioning. Big fan of Data Collada. They are way over my head, but it's brilliant that they do this work gratis.
Can we stop posting news backed by pay-walls. (Score:1)
Bad Science? So, all of Psychology then. (Score:2, Informative)
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Soft sciences are notoriously coopted by people to push political agendas. The Nazis, for example published a lot of eugenics garbage.
Kudos to these guys (Score:2)
This is hard, intensive, difficult work.
We live in a post truth era.
We can't trust the documents we find online, as they are likely ginned up by someone with an agenda somewhere. If they're not outright lies, they're lies of misinformation and framing.
AI generates music, conversations (the arguments between Trump, Biden, and Obama playing Age of Empires 2 are hilarious), and whole news articles.
We can't trust even the images we see, as AI image generators are able now to convincingly portray just about any
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We live in a post truth era.
No we don't that's the slogan of those that don't wish their propaganda to be bound by truth (even though effective propaganda often is) nor do they want an educated population who can see through their BS. We can detect AI and to date there really hasn't been any big AI generated scandal. I have news for you, reality is like gravity. Nobody escapes it forever, only for a time. And most of the time reality comes back and wins. Just ask these professors that have just lost their jobs. If you do, you wi
Evidence (Score:1)
These days the bias surrounds politicized topics and there are definitely agendas being pushed. There needs to be unbiased review of scie
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All social "science" research is pushing an agenda, and that includes cognitive psychology, where it has already been shown that most results cannot be reproduced. There is nothing new about researchers in these fields pushing agendas; what is new is that these agendas are motivated by politics.
Is goat paste one of them? (Score:2)
Would hate to see them find the reports of goat paste "curing" covid were false because that would set up an infinite loop for the deniers.
"These guys are great because they show all the fake science out there. This is why we can't trust scientists."
"These guys are frauds because they debunked every single study showing goat paste "cures" covid. This is why we can't trust scientists.:
Does it rise to the level of criminal? (Score:2)
Some long jail sentences would probably slow down the volume of fraud.
Peer reviewed publications aren't the final metric (Score:2)
Link to their blog - worth a look (Score:1)
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The Band of Debunkers Busting Bad Scientists (Score:2)
People that say "Believe the Science" are trying to replace science as a religion, you only trust it when you have no other choice. (But dressing up in funny costumes, waving your hands, and declaring "Deus Vult" is placeboism -- and not even trying.)
We have TWO problems, not one (Score:3, Interesting)
We have TWO problems on our hands.
Problem #1 is using "FOLLOW THE SCIENCE!!" as a cudgel to shout down disagreement. Some very highly placed politicians (I'm thinking specifically of Dr. Fauci) have done exactly this, to their shame. It's easy to ignore obvious partisans who swing this club, but not 50-year veteran bureaucrats in charge of multi-billion dollar budgets.
Problem #2 is arguably much worse: the exploding number of experiments that cannot be reproduced. Thousands of papers retracted. Reputations ruined. Entire dependency chains of studies now suddenly shown to be based on unsubstantiated claims. This is the problem being addressed by the trio of researches being discussed here.
Let's not forget Harvard's earlier "Oopsie" (Score:4, Interesting)
A University of Massachusetts student caught a couple of Harvard "trickle down" economists putting their thumb on the scales to favour their corporate-friendly conclusions. They were allowed to pass off what appears to be bad faith cherry picking as an oversight, though it takes a real stretch to believe they weren't doing it on purpose.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22223190 [bbc.com]
Debunkers need to take on Covid (Score:2)
Re:Trust but verify. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, put it in context. If you don't leave it to the scientists, who do you leave it to? What's the alternative? Lots of people are in favour of ripping away the trust from the scientists and putting it in the hands of the loudest, most obnoxious blowhard in the room. I fail to see how that's "better".
I'll give you the fact that there are shady, irresponsible shitty scientists out there. But even given that, it's STILL better to trust the scientists. The alternative is... stupid.
I invite those that believe otherwise to walk down to the pub, find the loudest asshole, and put their mom's breast cancer treatment in whatever that person has to say.
Re:Trust but verify. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not a new problem. Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that washing one’s hands before delivering a baby substantially lowered infant mortality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] . His results were empirical and reproducible. Yet they were rejected by the medical community at large in his lifetime, to the point where Semmelweis was committed to an asylum where he died. Which science should people have trusted? The “quack” Semmelweis with his data, or “the medical community at large” that rejected it?
Scientists must rigorously police fraud and rigorously investigate error. If they form gentlemen’s agreements that allow fraud and error to propagate, then we get a reproducibility crisis, which we have. In 2005 John P. A. Ioannidis published the landmark meta science paper “Why Most Published Research Findings are False,” https://journals.plos.org/plos... [plos.org] showing how easy it is, between fraud, error, and luck, for a given research paper’s findings to not be reproducible knowledge. The “rationalist” community made a lot of hay over the years (e.g. SlateStarCodex) rigorously critiquing science for its reliance on exploitable metrics that make science untrustworthy.
One doesn’t need to be a “science denier” to see the currently grave and systemic faults in scientific research today. However, if they continue then the average “science denier” will have just as reliable knowledge as the average “science fan,” that is, none.
Re:Trust but verify. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Trust but verify. (Score:4, Interesting)
The 1800s didn't have a fully developed (Score:4, Interesting)
The Sci Method was floating around in the 1800s, but it wasn't crystalized in academia the way it is today.
So back then if you asked me that questions and I had somehow figured out the scientific method I'd have sided with Ignaz. By the 1920s (I think, I'm not the greatest historian here) Academia was aware of and applying the scientific method as it actually exists. By the 60s it was introduced into pop culture and general education curriculum (albeit in a simplified form) such that the "common man" would likely side with Ignaz (at least in the absence of modern day political propaganda pushing against it).
Now, politics has eroded the scientific method in popular culture in recent years. Climate Change denial and anti-vaxx were both useful political tools for a certain class of politician and businessman.
But I can tell you that in academia they still know what they're doing and have for at least 100 years. There's work being done here in America (especially Florida) to stop that, but people are pushing back.
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Sort of like how Elon Musk forced design changes to the launch pad of Space X that likely caused the last explosion, although I suppose at least in Elon's case he was just being a cheapskate and didn't want to spend the money on a proper pad.
This is not at all what happened. The pad that was used was by all measures commonly understood to be "proper" as you put it, and indeed at the time had already survived a static fire test that was more powerful than any that ever came before it. Cheap was NOT the problem. As a matter of fact, a new water-cooled pad design was already in development but wasn't ready in time for the test. The problem came from Starship having more than twice the first stage thrust of the rocket with the second highest first
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I fail to see how the statement you're responding to is false. As stated, nobody had ever launched with that much thrust before. If you have data to the contrary, please present it.
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Re: I'm not familar enough with the story (Score:2)
TBH I don't think he has any idea what he's saying or even knows what he replied to. Basically like what a parrot does, except parrots usually don't fuck up the sentence structure of whatever they're repeating.
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Re: Trust but verify. (Score:3)
Nice decent rant, but you emphasize too much the social aspect of "science".
"Science" is not what a selected group of people does - established or otherwise. It's a process. If the group stop adhering to that process, it's not science. That the only person who did in your anecdote ended up in an asylum is unfortunate (and typical, I admit), but that doesn't make "the others" the scientists, and him the not-scientist.
The problem is that claiming "I am a scientist" and being a scientist are not the same thing
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Re: Trust but verify. (Score:2)
In the real world, research is done in two places: universities and government labs. With a few tiny exceptions, companies are completely out of research. At least in the US, the voters have made the tax code incredibly punishing for companies to spend $ on research.
In the academic worl
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This is not a new problem. Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that washing one’s hands before delivering a baby substantially lowered infant mortality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] . His results were empirical and reproducible. Yet they were rejected by the medical community at large in his lifetime, to the point where Semmelweis was committed to an asylum where he died. Which science should people have trusted? The “quack” Semmelweis with his data, or “the medical community at large” that rejected it?
Semmelweis the tormented handwashing genius is a myth in the same way that 'Columbus discovered the Earth is round' is a myth. Both people believed something totally and obviously false, but later writers in search of a martyr projected a different (and modern) belief upon them to make a better story.
Semmelweis' actual belief was "childbed fever is caused exclusively by corpse pieces getting into women, and therefore is only spread by doctors who do dissections before treating women, therefore handwashing
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Medical doctors, as a general rule, are not scientists.
They generally do not follow the scientific method. But are more of a reasonably accurate intuitive heuristics and inference engine that, for the most part, supports a best-practices approach to problem solving using domain-specific LLM communication.
That isn't to say that they shouldn't be trusted. That they have a great deal of domain-specific expertise is why we go to them, and should listen the vast majority of them.
And, for the most part, they sh
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That said, much of a medical doctor’s reputation *is* based on their scientific reputation. Some doctors may be able to open a small practice where they simply
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The fact that there is a term "evidence based medicine" is unfortunate, because it implies that there is a significant amount of medical practice that is not evidence based. Ideally it would all be evidence based, and then the term would just be "medicine".
Re:Trust but verify. (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you ever read a medical paper? We literally don't give doctors the educational background necessary to correctly interpret most medical papers because while they do have medical jargon, they are mostly written i the language of science and statistics. Most of the doctors I know will ask me (someone with a stats background) to tell them what they mean when they have a tough case. When the doctor gives a patient those same papers, that's basically them saying that they don't know what these mean either. In my family are 3 doctors but when someone gets really sick, I'm the one that gets the call to review the medical research even though I have absolutely no medical background (college bio I). Yet its the interpretation of the stats in the medical paper that matters, not the medical knowledge. Pretty scary huh. It makes me uncomfortable too.
PS I have helped several family members survive various cancers including an n-stage liver cancer. Most of the time, I actually overrule the doctor although not always. You wouldn't believe how happy a doctor is when they find someone to help them with the stats, its a big source of stress for most of them that they know they can't do this stuff. But they will never admit this in front of a patient and that I can understand even if it worries me.
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Doctors do seem to have a tendency towards good memories but not particularly strong math skills. We are talking about a profession that has allowed the usage of of garbage like the body mass index to evaluate individuals, for example. It's interesting that one of the screening courses for pre-meds is organic chemistry, a class that you can do well in through one of two methods. One is by having a deep understanding of how chemical bonds work and the other is just being really good at rote memorization. Cle
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If you don't leave it to the scientists, who do you leave it to?
Why, the engineers, of course!
Engineering is literally _applied science_. Engineers have to take the theoretical work of scientists, and make it do things. They're the ones who _test_ the theories, thus proving whether they are correct or not.
If you can't do something with scientific theory, harness it in some way, it's still just theory.
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I'm pretty sure engineers aren't out there building stuff based on unproven scientific hypotheses. The hypotheses are tested by scientists first, and then used by engineers once they check out. Unless you can point to a scientific theory that was (somewhat recently, since the widespread adoption of the scientific method) generally accepted until an engineer disproved it.
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As an engineer, this is not really true. Science is about observing the world. Engineering is about changing it. Engineers are not scientists and don't use the scientific method for most of their work. I'm a research engineer, so I use the scientific method to develop engineering methods, but that's pretty niche. Yes, engineers take the basics of science and build on that, but in most fields, as much as scientists would love to claim that every other discipline is just applied science (as Wikipedia doe
Science is self correcting (Score:2)
This means you constantly have people on the edges pushing the envelope and other folks pushing right back on it.
Meanwhile you can't actually "prove" anything with science (outside of mathematics). The goal of the scientific method is to find a way to disprove something, and if you can't it's accepted tentatively on the basis that whatever it is has utility in the form of predictive power.
There
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That was likely me. I think my point was more nuanced than that, though. I argued that it takes education and knowledge to work well with that data, but it's easy for anybody to pluck isolated data points out of it and prove anything they like. That's an inherent property of complex data. So my question was, what's the upside of giving it to everybody? The downside has real harm associated with it. I also said that qualified people absolutely should get access.
I know nothing about the data pouring off a pro
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The key phrase in your argument is "I'll prove to you to my satisfaction". Of course it'll be to your satisfaction, because you're the one who believes in 1500mpg out of a 400hp engine. And then follows "And I'll find believers."
I understand where you're going with this, and that it applies to most people. What frustrates me is that I never get to scrutinize some finding that comes my way. It is seldom that I take something I read or hear at face value.
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Points taken.
My only add on is that I don't believe in blind trust either. But I believe there enough honest, ethical scientists that the people watching can be qualified scientists as well.
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"Let me put it another way. Say you're a nuclear physicist. Does the fact that you're a nuclear physicist somehow make you more fit to read and verify a paper on earth's climate? If not, then should only climatologists be allowed access to the paper and the data behind it?"
The nuclear scientist is marginally better than a layman because they at least understand how to work with data in general, and how the scientific method functions. Methodologies have commonalities. But... I would hope that the nuclear s
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" STILL better to trust the scientists. The alternative is... stupid."
There are more options than a generalized "trust the scientists" vs. "loudest, most obnoxious blowhard in the room"
A few words: "Trust but verify."
Remove trust when verification fails. For not just scientists and "obnoxious blowhard(s) in the room", but any claim you come across. You'll have fewer
"shady, irresponsible shitty scientists" and you'll soften the loud blowhards.
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So I'll reiterate the question. Who's verifying, if not the scientists? And does that make sense? Obviously not the exact some ones making the claim...
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Makes me wonder how much stuff we believe to be true but really is just lies and distortions.
Probably more than you want to know. For the last several years the motto has been "follow the science." I'm distrustful of this because scientist are people too. They are just as susceptible to being bribed and blackmailed as any one else.
Infact some of the worse damage done in the last 100 years was done by scientist. Two of them I'm thinking about is Thomas Midgley Jr and Clarence Cook Little. The first one developed lead gasoline and the second said that there was no evidence that cigarettes c
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What idiot gets mod points these days. That is not a troll. Those two scientists are probably responsible for deaths and human suffering in the history of the planet. Get real.
Re:Trust but verify. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they probably just realize that anything humans do is fallible and while scientists arent any different in this regard they are the experts in their field and so better to put trust in them than anybody else in regards to science.
In other words, just because you can name some bad actors doesnt mean we shouldnt "follow the science" as that's still better than any alternative as it's not realistic for people to develop that level of expertise on every conceivable topic they run into. It's certainly better than listening to politicians or some random political commentator who likely have zero expertise when it comes to any topic science related.
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Let's be clear here. Nobody is saying not to follow the science. I'm saying not to blindly follow the science. When these two bad actors, and there have been more, people did blindly follow the science. An it turns out the scientist and the companies that sponsored the science were evil.
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That's fair. In that case I think your original post came off a little differently than you had hoped.
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Both myself and the person who modded them down had the exact same interpretation, not to mention the people who modded me up. You're an idiot, take a hike.
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Hahaha. No you're very clearly still the idiot, you don't even understand what I just told.
If at least a half dozen people in a thread this small read the post as meaning something that was not intended by the author then said misunderstanding is hardly unreasonable and at the minimum blame should be shared by the author.
Of course none of this is a big deal one way or another except seemingly to you. I was happy just having the miscommunication cleared up.
Re:Trust but verify. (Score:5, Insightful)
>>Infact some of the worse damage done in the last 100 years was done by scientist. Two of them I'm thinking about is Thomas Midgley Jr and Clarence Cook Little. The first one developed lead gasoline and the second said that there was no evidence that cigarettes cause cancer. ...and thankfully there were plenty of other scientists who discovered that leaded gasoline and cigarettes were damaging to human health (and equally important, government agencies that were willing go against commercial interests and regulate those industries, based on the recommendation of scientists). The solution is not to distrust scientists, but encourage broad scientific review and verification.
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The solution is not to distrust scientists, but encourage broad scientific review and verification.
I agree, and that system works well. It works well until you get that one scientist whose word is above questioning. As in the case of the two I cited. At the time there was plenty of evidence that leaded gasoline and cigarettes here health hazards. But you had these two, that were sponsored by the companies who bottom line would have been hurt, that where the undisputed word on the issue. I took decades to reverse the damage these two have done.
Re:Trust but verify. (Score:5, Informative)
>>I agree, and that system works well. It works well until you get that one scientist whose word is above questioning.
I question your historical interpretation of these events. Midgley was fired from his VP position at GM chemicals in 1925 after the tetra-ethyl-lead plant was shut down by the state. The federal government got the plant reopened it in 1926 because the high octane fuel was important to the military. C.C. Little was a genetics and cancer researcher who became a shill for the tobacco industry in his later years, reversing earlier statements he made about tobacco (also he was a eugenicist in case you need more reason to hate him). Neither of these men were above questioning even in their own lifetimes. Neither were household names to the public and even in their respective industries there were plenty of scientists who questioned their research. The reason leaded gasoline and tobacco took so long to be taken seriously as a health concern was the advertising and lobbying efforts of the companies that profited off them and the public demand for those products, not some misplaced belief in the infallibility of scientists as you seem to imagine.
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Don’t forget about the USDA food pyramid being upside down because of the grain and sugar lobby causing the fattening of the west.
Re:Trust but verify. (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you follow the science, you'd have followed it to what they said and then continue to the present day (well actually years ago), when it moved on from them and proved them wrong. Following the science ultimately ended up in the right place.
Following the science doesn't guarantee you'll be correct right now, but following something else is far stupider.
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here is the final word on the subject. scientist are human, they are fallible deal with it. you think i'm trolling you, then fuck you. i'm done.
Re:Trust but verify. (Score:5, Informative)
Thomas Midgley Jr ... developed lead gasoline
Credit where credit is due: Thomas Midgley also pioneered the use of freon as a refrigerant. So not only did he flood the environment with lead, a potent neurotoxin, but he also caused the depletion of the ozone layer.
People who work on time machines often plan to go back and kill Hitler, but perhaps they should kill Thomas Midgley instead.
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Thomas Midgley Jr ... developed lead gasoline
Credit where credit is due: Thomas Midgley also pioneered the use of freon as a refrigerant. So not only did he flood the environment with lead, a potent neurotoxin, but he also caused the depletion of the ozone layer.
People who work on time machines often plan to go back and kill Hitler, but perhaps they should kill Thomas Midgley instead.
Lead in petrol was one of those things where even though it was bad, it was something that replaced a bigger issue. Namely the amount of horse poo (and corpses) building up in cities spreading various diseases like TB.
Lead was added to petrol to stop pre-detonation (knocking), for the uninitiated. It was one of the things that made the motor car viable.
Midgely Jr. contracted Polio later in life, built a machine to hoist himself out of bed was found in 1944, strangled by that machine.
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Freon was an improvement over its predecessors in that a leaking fridge was no longer likely to kill you.
It's easy to judge with the benefit of hindsight. It would be decades before the drawbacks of freon became apparent.
Re:Trust but verify. (Score:5, Insightful)
I was told we needed to trust the science (scientists). Makes me wonder how much stuff we believe to be true but really is just lies and distortions.
It was about trusting scientists as a group, not trusting any particular individual scientist.
And the claim was never that scientists were infallible and incorruptible. Just that they were a more reliable source of information on scientific matters than politicians, pundits, or podcasters.
Evidence of that fact? Groups of scientists like the following do go around trying to weed out lies and bad data. In contrast, the people who are the loudest critics of scientists rarely even admit mistakes and will happily repeat long debunked falsehoods.
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The total number of scientists doing things like this can be counted on your fingers and toes. The total number of scientists in academia is in the 10s of 1000s. Combine that with the fact that 80% of the academic medical research papers are wrong and trusting an individual paper or conclusion becomes more of an article of faith. Hopefully we can trust the overall output of fields but given the amount of politicization of academia, it makes it pretty hard to take anything outside of math and CS seriously if it is from the last 20 years or so. Before that, I have much higher confidence but perhaps that's misguided too.
Specific fraud hunters, sure those are rare. But groups pretty regularly try to replicate another groups work in some fashion or try to build upon it. The typical reaction with a dubious result isn't accusing someone of fraud (that's a really damaging accusation to make if you're wrong), it's "hmm, no one has been able to replicate... maybe it was a fluke and I'll try something else".
There's a few big examples where an incorrect fraudulent result it did influence some future research direction, mostly in ar
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This is why you need to hold off on accepting a result until it's been examined and confirmed by other scientists.
It's not science until it's confirmed.
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Truthful, well researched, objective science is not afraid of detractors and naysayers -- it is able to stand on its own merit, without the efforts of information police.
Here's the thing though, science is a process, that's the very definition of the word. Science is more than open to detractors but it has to follow the process and that's where the "naysayers" get it wrong, they engage in rampant speculation, conspiracy, conjecture and hearsay.
Let's look at the controversial case of Ivermectin. Those initial scientists even though they were from what many consider an "alternative-science" group they got the attention of everyone because they did research and published wor
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No matter what anyone has told you, science is never settled. It's always just "the best guess we can make on the available evidence". Anyone who claims it's more shouldn't be trusted.
OTOH, it's better than any alternative I've seen.
Re:Follow the Science (Score:5, Funny)
No matter what anyone has told you, science is never settled.
Maybe in the most strictly pedantic sense, on the grounds that philosophically you may be nothing but a brain in a jar and the person feeding you stimuli could change the rules of the universe you are forced to inhabit.
Outside of that, there are plenty of things that are for all intents and purposes are settled. For example:
* Whether the earth is flat or a globe. It's a globe.
* The laws of thermodynamics. If someone is showing something in apparent violation of these, then no, they are wrong.
If anyone is trying to tell you the science is not settled on those they are respectively insane or trying to sell you something.
Generally "settled" means that there is a vast amount of supporting evidence, and you (as in whoever it's being directed at) are not going to be the one to overturn it by "researching" on 4chan message boards, your garden shed, the local flat earth society meeting room or whatever. Relativity and quantum mechanics are settled: we know the underlying laws and they are not changing. We also know they are going to break down at some limit of scale, but that's going to be far in the extremes, outside of what we can measure today. But the laws at the scales we currently use them are here to stay, just like relativity and quantum mechanics didn't over turn Newton's laws at human scale.
If you're not working at/with CERN/JWST (etc) it it ain't gonna be you. The breakdown isn't going to be, for example, for a roughly person sized copper cone with moderate amounts of microwave power dumped into it.
You know what's a good word to encapsulate all of that? Settled.
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Counterpoint, QM is over 70 years old and there is still good reason to think we got something wrong there.
That's not really a counterpoint: I said "We also know they are going to break down at some limit of scale, but that's going to be far in the extremes, outside of what we can measure today. "
So settled depends on your required level of engineering accuracy and the exact phenomena you are utilizing.
Yes, but so far QM and Relativity have defeated all attempts to find the holes. They will exist somewhere,
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Yeah don't be moron and quote a fragment out of context.
An honest quote would include what I wrote to address that in the same paragraph.
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The best evidence is that climate warming is caused by human interventions. Specifically burning fossil fuels, but also various things that caused methane releases. If you want to argue differently, you'll need some decent evidence.
Yeah, the science isn't settled. But I'd put that one as a probability of over 95%. Probably well over.
OTOH, there's LOTS of details that are a lot less certain. E.g. how recently was Greenland free of it's major glaciation? And what was the residual level of ice? There se
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