You should go first..
Science is not Neutral
- Thread starter Blackking
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You should go first..
Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.
Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis (see article). A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.
What a load of rubbish
Even when flawed research does not put people’s lives at risk—and much of it is too far from the market to do so—it squanders money and the efforts of some of the world’s best minds. The opportunity costs of stymied progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising.
One reason is the competitiveness of science. In the 1950s, when modern academic research took shape after its successes in the second world war, it was still a rarefied pastime. The entire club of scientists numbered a few hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled, to 6m-7m active researchers on the latest reckoning, scientists have lost their taste for self-policing and quality control. The obligation to “publish or perish” has come to rule over academic life. Competition for jobs is cut-throat. Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012—more than judges did. Every year six freshly minted PhDs vie for every academic post. Nowadays verification (the replication of other people’s results) does little to advance a researcher’s career. And without verification, dubious findings live on to mislead.
Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the cherry-picking of results. In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page. Little wonder that one in three researchers knows of a colleague who has pepped up a paper by, say, excluding inconvenient data from results “based on a gut feeling”. And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, the odds shorten that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a freak of the statistical noise. Such spurious correlations are often recorded in journals eager for startling papers. If they touch on drinking wine, going senile or letting children play video games, they may well command the front pages of newspapers, too.
Conversely, failures to prove a hypothesis are rarely even offered for publication, let alone accepted. “Negative results” now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing what is true. The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.
The hallowed process of peer review is not all it is cracked up to be, either. When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested.
http://www.economist.com/news/leade...it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong
Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis (see article). A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.
What a load of rubbish
Even when flawed research does not put people’s lives at risk—and much of it is too far from the market to do so—it squanders money and the efforts of some of the world’s best minds. The opportunity costs of stymied progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising.
One reason is the competitiveness of science. In the 1950s, when modern academic research took shape after its successes in the second world war, it was still a rarefied pastime. The entire club of scientists numbered a few hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled, to 6m-7m active researchers on the latest reckoning, scientists have lost their taste for self-policing and quality control. The obligation to “publish or perish” has come to rule over academic life. Competition for jobs is cut-throat. Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012—more than judges did. Every year six freshly minted PhDs vie for every academic post. Nowadays verification (the replication of other people’s results) does little to advance a researcher’s career. And without verification, dubious findings live on to mislead.
Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the cherry-picking of results. In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page. Little wonder that one in three researchers knows of a colleague who has pepped up a paper by, say, excluding inconvenient data from results “based on a gut feeling”. And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, the odds shorten that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a freak of the statistical noise. Such spurious correlations are often recorded in journals eager for startling papers. If they touch on drinking wine, going senile or letting children play video games, they may well command the front pages of newspapers, too.
Conversely, failures to prove a hypothesis are rarely even offered for publication, let alone accepted. “Negative results” now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing what is true. The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.
The hallowed process of peer review is not all it is cracked up to be, either. When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested.
http://www.economist.com/news/leade...it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong
Brown_Pride
All Star
this is akin to saying "because ISIS cuts people's heads off for Allah religion is evil". Incorrect, narrow minded and devoid of the ability to differentiate a part from the whole.
Nobody is making an wild crazy baseless opinion here though. your post uses a weird and invalid example.
I just posted a couple articles.. and many actual scientist agree.
This isn't a diss to science...it's a diss to the institution that people like you all refer to as science and the bs ideas some refer to as facts, until they become false.
- Form a question and posit a Hypothesis
- Make a prediction based on the Hypothesis
- Experiment/Testing of the Hypothesis
- Objective Analysis of data from the Experiments
- Make a Conclusion
- Verify that the steps above can be reproduced independtly
This doesn't all happen by itself . A computer isn't behind the method.
Humans are... and they aren't neutral making that process not neutral..... and their motivations sometimes more than curiosity or problem solving.
Also.....
A New Yorker report outlines the conundrum:
The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts are losing their truth. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.
In medicine, the effectiveness of antipsychotic meds are called into question as are cardiac stents and Vitamin E. Facts are eroding quickly. One analysis will show that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.
According to the New Yorker report---read in full via Amazon's Kindle---numerous fields are suffering from the decline effect. The New Yorker highlights the following issues with the scientific method.
- Replicating an experiment and getting the exact same findings is difficult. Why? Regression to the mean. As an experiment is repeated statistical flukes get tossed out.
- The peer review process is flawed. Peer review is ultimately tilted to positive results.
- Publication bias. Journals and scientists aim for being statistically significant and this leads everyone aiming for positive results. We don't want to see a null result. Researchers are "significance chasing," or interpreting data so it passes the statistical test of significance.
- Money. For instance, pharmaceutical companies have little interest in publishing results that aren't favorable. Validating a hypothesis is all the more gratifying if there's financial gain to be made.
- Selective reporting. The New Yorker notes that selective reporting isn't fraud, it's just that researchers may make subtle omissions and misperceptions as they try and explain their results. One example cited was the testing of acupuncture. In the West, acupuncture effectiveness is questioned. Not surprisingly, studies so acupuncture’s effectiveness isn't all that great. In the East, the effectiveness is deemed higher. Scientists look for ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis.
Fillerguy
Veteran
bias as fukk
Why is it biased?
I blame the Muslims... for allowing CAC to but science in a box
The Muslim Influence On the History of the Scientific Method
The early Islamic ages were a golden age for knowledge, and the history of the scientific method must pay a great deal of respect to some of the brilliant Muslim philosophers of Baghdad and Al-Andalus.
They preserved the knowledge of the Ancient Greeks, including Aristotle, but also added to it, and were the catalyst for the formation of a scientific method recognizable to modern scientists and philosophers.
The first, and possibly greatest Islamic scholar, was Ibn al-Haytham, best known for his wonderful work on light and vision, called 'The Book of Optics.' He developed a scientific method very similar to our own:
His other additions were the idea that science is a quest for ultimate truth and that one of the only ways to reach that goal was through skepticism and questioning everything.
Other Muslim scholars further contributed to this scientific method, refining it and preserving it. Al-Biruni understood that measuring instruments and human observers were prone to error and bias, so proposed that experiments needed replication, many times, before a 'common sense' average was possible.
Al-Rahwi (851 - 934) was the first scholar to use a recognizable peer review process.
In his book, Ethics of the Physician, he developed peer review process to ensure that physicians documented their procedures and lay them open for scrutiny. Other physicians would review the processes and make a decision in cases of suspected malpractice.
Abu Jābir, known as Geber (721 - 815), an Islamic scientist often referred to as the father of chemistry, was the first scholar to introduce controlled experiments, and dragged alchemy away from the world of superstition into one of empirical measurement.
Ibn Sina (Avicenna), one of the titans in the history of science, proposed that there were two ways of arriving at the first principles of science, through induction and experimentation. Only through these methods could the first principles needed for deduction be discovered
Other Islamic scholars contributed the idea of consensus in science as a means of filtering out fringe science and allowing open reviews. These contributions to the scientific method, and to the tools required to follow them, made this into an Islamic Golden Age of science.
However, with the decline in the Islamic Houses of Knowledge, the history of the scientific method passed into Europe and the Renaissance.
The Muslim Influence On the History of the Scientific Method
The early Islamic ages were a golden age for knowledge, and the history of the scientific method must pay a great deal of respect to some of the brilliant Muslim philosophers of Baghdad and Al-Andalus.
They preserved the knowledge of the Ancient Greeks, including Aristotle, but also added to it, and were the catalyst for the formation of a scientific method recognizable to modern scientists and philosophers.
The first, and possibly greatest Islamic scholar, was Ibn al-Haytham, best known for his wonderful work on light and vision, called 'The Book of Optics.' He developed a scientific method very similar to our own:
- State an explicit problem, based upon observation and experimentation.
- Test or criticize a hypothesis through experimentation.
- Interpret the data and come to a conclusion, ideally using mathematics.
- Publish the findings
His other additions were the idea that science is a quest for ultimate truth and that one of the only ways to reach that goal was through skepticism and questioning everything.
Other Muslim scholars further contributed to this scientific method, refining it and preserving it. Al-Biruni understood that measuring instruments and human observers were prone to error and bias, so proposed that experiments needed replication, many times, before a 'common sense' average was possible.
Al-Rahwi (851 - 934) was the first scholar to use a recognizable peer review process.
In his book, Ethics of the Physician, he developed peer review process to ensure that physicians documented their procedures and lay them open for scrutiny. Other physicians would review the processes and make a decision in cases of suspected malpractice.
Abu Jābir, known as Geber (721 - 815), an Islamic scientist often referred to as the father of chemistry, was the first scholar to introduce controlled experiments, and dragged alchemy away from the world of superstition into one of empirical measurement.
Ibn Sina (Avicenna), one of the titans in the history of science, proposed that there were two ways of arriving at the first principles of science, through induction and experimentation. Only through these methods could the first principles needed for deduction be discovered
Other Islamic scholars contributed the idea of consensus in science as a means of filtering out fringe science and allowing open reviews. These contributions to the scientific method, and to the tools required to follow them, made this into an Islamic Golden Age of science.
However, with the decline in the Islamic Houses of Knowledge, the history of the scientific method passed into Europe and the Renaissance.