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Science Isn’t Broken (2015)
- Analemma_ 9y agoI think the most damning thing to come out of the replication crisis was when they asked a bunch of scientists to place bets on whether a given paper (with p < 0.05) would replicate, and it turned out these bets were right quite often (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-tell-good-studies-from-bad-bet-on-them/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-tell-good-studie...). That shouldn't be possible! Science is supposed to be the best possible epistemological methodology, and here it is being beaten in "success rate of determining true from false" by guessing. What's immensely frustrating is that it's not a question of whether we're just not smart enough to tell true from false, we clearly have the power (since the guesses were often right) but we're not using it. Whatever "truth compass" the guessers were using should be part of the scientific process somehow. That's what is "broken".
- whatshisface 9y agoThat "truth compass" they used was reading the method section, which is far from guessing and very close to the scientific process.
- Analemma_ 9y agoRight, I'm not chalking it up to mysterious psychic powers. What I mean is, it's frustrating in how it demonstrates that our truth-sensing capabilities, and the "pure" scientific method, are actually working just fine and we don't need to have any existential panic over whether truth is unknowable even in noisy data. But those capabilities aren't being used when it comes time to actually write the paper, which is exactly when you should be applying them.
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoIt shouldn't be, though. It may be easy for a scientist to look at the method sections of two papers that had p<0.05 results and say of the first "that looks like a solid study with a reasonable conclusion and robust controls" and of the other "that's bogus". The problem is that without this expert panel making these calls, both studies got published, were given the same credibility, and got consumed by non-experts. Peer review and the publishing process are supposed to weed out the obviously bad studies, but they're not doing so.
- haihaibye 9y agoScientists are familiar with the literature and are taking into account information from other papers when judging a particular one. Individual papers are not a source of truth, they're bits of cumulative evidence hopefully leading to the truth.
- mattnewton 9y agoI don't understand, isn't that really encouraging, that peer review might work to weed out the truth after all?
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoPeer review is supposed to be done before publishing, not in a separate meta-analysis.
- soperj 9y agoScience isn't broken... here's a bunch of ways that people cheat? Science itself can never be broken, but when people are cheating the system that makes it effective to actually figure out what is true and what isn't, for personal gain, then that system is broken.
- NobodyRalph 9y agoScience is a people-driven system of acquiring knowledge. If people can cheat the system, then the system (science) is broken.
- AstralStorm 9y agoThe answer then is "propose a better one". Unconstructive criticism is worse than non-constructive mathematical proofs, as those tend to further actual results later.
- graphememes 9y agoGlad to see journals finally omitting p-value cases for more substantiated findings.
- cmansley 9y agoSocial science isn't broken. Math and physics are like what's p-hacking.
- Kenji 9y agoThere are actually ways in which science can come up with the wrong answer - for example if we lived much later, the universe would be expanding so rapidly that we could not see the stars around us - the night sky would be dark. We would wrongly conclude that nothing is out there. Sadly, what people call science these days has nothing to do with the scientific method, it's just a bunch of idiots doing correlation and thinking it's causation.
- Retra 9y agoIf the sky is dark, it is because there is nothing out there. That's what "nothing" means: that which provides no evidence or experience from which to demonstrate its existence.
- pc2g4d 9y agoThis is a nice summary of fivethirtyeight's science crisis work, but (as with most treatments of the subject) it leaves me fundamentally unsatisfied. Apparently we've identified the problem enough to say "there's a problem". We can say "look at all the ways you can manipulate this analysis to achieve the desired outcome". We can say "gosh, science is harder than we thought". But it seems we're still far from a convincing solution. The fact that statistical analysis is so liable to manipulation seems to call the entire thing into question. In the article they take comfort from the fact that many of the labs analyzing the red card/race data arrived at similar conclusions. One would assume this is because they made similar choices in the analysis. But what says those were the right sorts of choices? Could it not simply be that the labs shared the same biases and errors, making that outcome more common? Is a proper analysis really determined by (essentially) democratic vote? If that's what we've arrived at, it gives me less rather than more confidence in the robustness of the scientific process. It feels like something fundamental has to be reimagined. It's difficult to prove things about the world---but maybe it's actually near-impossible? Or maybe we need to get real about the cost of actually demonstrating anything reliably. Instead of individual labs running one-off experiments it becomes researchers collaborating openly to build the perfect experiments, which are then run by many different labs, then analyzed collectively in the open for strengths and weaknesses, then reformulated, sent out again, and so on iteratively until at the end of years of research one little bit of probably-truth drips out the bottom of the system. But that bit would be something we could build on.
- tpetricek 9y agoMaybe the thing that needs to be reimagined is the naive image of science as an infallible way of always getting true answers. Science works, just not in as simple way as one might naively think. Feyerabend's "Against Method" is my favourite place to start :-).
- averagewall 9y agoI like your idea about collaborating on bigger experiments. One big experiment can be both more convincing and more accessible than 1000 little ones all measuring different incomparable things that take 1000s of man-hours just to identify if they're what you want or not. The trouble is everyone wants to be the special snowflake discovering the special effect in their own special experiment, so now we have too much messy unreliable and inaccessible data to be of much use in the real world.
- jostmey 9y agoScience isn't broken... the academic system is
- crawfordcomeaux 9y agoIf a person's mental state can impact their decisions and the quality of their work, why aren't we tracking the subjective states of those conducting research? And does http://eqradio.csail.mit.edu http://eqradio.csail.mit.edu provide a tool for doing so?
- devoply 9y agoThis sounds very scary and totalitarian. We have the law and the police that's the maximum level of intrusion I am willing to tolerate in terms of monitoring my personal state and behavior. Anything more than that and I am gone.
- crawfordcomeaux 9y agoI agree. Thankfully, as human beings, we're capable of coming up with systems using this technology to solve the subjectivity problem in a responsible, ethical manner. It doesn't have to be one involving the law.
- devoply 9y agoNot sure if you are being sarcastic or not. I hope you are being sarcastic because we know that more or less any such technology not only has the possibility of being abused but has been shown to be abused in practice over and over again.
- crawfordcomeaux 9y agoAnd yet the technology exists. Who would you rather use it: those who sell to develop a responsible framework for using it or those who seek to abuse it? This tech is only going to become more accurate and more widespread over time. Ignoring it isn't an option. We've got little to no idea how to responsibly use human emotion as an input and decades worth of collective experience on how to exploit it. The potential for abuse is high, which means extreme transparency is needed, at the very least. Operating at an emotional level requires a whole new set of metrics and a fundamental shift in how we do anything. Better to figure it out now than to wait until the tech becomes ubiquitous. Those looking to exploit the tech most definitely won't wait for that day. A few people I've spoken to about it were eager to explore the tech purely for the sake of improving sales of various things. I changed the subject with them after realizing they had little regard for human life in this context. People concerned about this need to band together to find ways to productively use it and defend against its misuse. I've been working on such a framework, if anyone's interested in exploring it with me.
- pottersbasilisk 9y agoScience a huge pr problem, one so bad you might as well say science is broken. The average person is losing faith in science because of high profile failures, and the distrust is only increasing. I fear Nasim Talib is right. https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577#.pbipdn1dg https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...
- michaelmrose 9y agoAuthor has some interesting things to say but appears to be an apologist for anti intellectual rednecks whom are somehow some unappreciated source of cultural wisdom. He believes trump supporters/and brexit fans are voting in their own interests as opposed to being duped to serve others, describs intellectual persuits as not proper jobs and further states "people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons."
- bsder 9y ago> Science a huge pr problem, one so bad you might as well say science is broken. Science has a huge PR problem in that it is FAR less funded than the people with money and power whom it sometimes comes into conflict with.
- averagewall 9y agoMy pet idea for making science less wrong is to maintain a citation graph of all papers. Then when a problem is found with any paper, every other one downstream from it is automatically flagged as at risk of being wrong. Now all those authors (or others) have to go back and re-evaluate how that citation was used and how it affects their result. Once they decide it's OK, they update their paper and remove the flag. If it's not OK then their paper is retracted or flagged as wrong or simply keeps its at-risk flag if it's not important enough for anybody to bother re-checking it. This way, people will be reluctant to cite too many useless papers for their friends, and will be reluctant to depend on unreliable ones. Work with good methodology would be more popular to cite or rely on. Maybe peer review could even become optional this way. If other researchers trust your work enough to risk their own papers by citing it, that would act as a peer approval in the long term. Actual peer review would only be needed to give an immediate indication of the quality. We would first need to solve the versioning problem where there's no way to update a paper when mistakes are discovered or simply to improve it.
- throwaway287391 9y ago> My pet idea for making science less wrong is to maintain a citation graph of all papers. Then when a problem is found with any paper, every other one downstream from it is automatically flagged as at risk of being wrong. Now all those authors (or others) have to go back and re-evaluate how that citation was used and how it affects their result. Once they decide it's OK, they update their paper and remove the flag. If it's not OK then their paper is retracted or flagged as wrong or simply keeps its at-risk flag if it's not important enough for anybody to bother re-checking it. This is an interesting idea, but I don't know what real-world problem it would actually solve. As someone who reads a lot of scientific papers, I can't think of a single one whose correctness is actually dependent on the correctness of the results of a paper it cites, as though the paper in question is "buggy" because it "calls another paper as a subroutine" and that subroutine is buggy. Could you give an example or two of this? I could see this making sense in mathematics since mathematical proofs really do "call other papers as subroutines" (theorems), but not so much in science.
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- mwnivek 9y agoThis article is from August 2015. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10085698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10085698
- bhk 9y ago> It’s no accident that every good paper includes the phrase “more study[1] is needed” ... [1] read: FUNDING Let's distinguish "science" -- the scientific method, the general advancement of human understanding over the centuries, etc. -- from "pork": institutionalized government funding, the establishment pursuing that, and all of the mundane, bureaucratic processes that ensue, and then the resulting hype, pettiness, recriminations, and sacrificing of ideals that it inculcates. There is nothing wrong with science, although it may be harder these days to recognize it. Pork, on the other hand, is approaching a singularity.
- theprop 9y agoI know tons of scientists, post-docs, lab heads. It's WAY too hard to be a scientist. The kind of salary and other sacrifices scientists are asked to make are unfair and surely deter many to leave science. Science is the only thing moving everything forward and if the funding strategy is look for irrational people who will work insanely hard for next-to-nothing salaries...it doesn't sound like a great strategy.
- paulsutter 9y ago> Scientists who fiddle around like this — just about all of them do, Simonsohn told me — aren’t usually committing fraud Yes they are
- ouid 9y agoThe answer is clear. Hypothesis driven experiment. Drive it into the brains of everyone who might enter the scientific profession, and then, when someone is caught with an experiment driven hypothesis, we don't have to speculate whether or not it was fraud, because they will have known better, by simple virtue of having their credentials, and we can then safely revoke those credentials.
- Pica_soO 9y agoNobody is claiming that the basic principle is not working. What is warped and bend is the pipeline, that would allow for science to proceed faster, for the results to be transferred to companies faster, for the companies to actually apply the results in buy-able products and for that revenue to feedback into science endeavors. That machine- is broken, leaking and actually in parts moving contrary to the scientific interests of humanity. The quality issue of science itself, could easily be remedied by replacing citations with partial repeatable experimental coverage in citations this way also ending inflation.