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It regularly astonishes me how easily people are willing to accept scientific malpractice with such excuses. Likewise. The BBC reports that 2/3 of scientific r

by gaius 8y ago

It regularly astonishes me how easily people are willing to accept scientific malpractice with such excuses. Likewise. The BBC reports that 2/3 of scientific research cannot be reproduced. Let’s be honest about what that means: 2/3 of scientists are fraudulent or incompetent. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778

lancebeet 8y ago
If we want to give people the benefit of the doubt, it could also mean that scientific research is difficult and even competent individuals often make mistakes.
SubiculumCode 8y ago
This is incorrect and unhelpful. Science in fields with lots of complexity, such as neuroscience and psychology, suffer from hard problems such as unmeasured causal variables and divergent sample characteristics. You might chalk this up to incompetence, but there are are in fact real concerns of feasibility. You cannot hope to measure or control all relevant cognitive factors, you just try to balance your sample groups on the more obvious measures, increase your sample size, then hope that other differences average out with random assignment.
- lrem 8y ago
  To put it otherwise: for some problems, none of the 7 billions humans alive is competent enough right now. For some of them, we'll collectively eventually get there, if we don't stop trying.
AllegedAlec 8y ago
> Let’s be honest about what that means: 2/3 of scientists are fraudulent or incompetent. No, it means that 2/3rds of the attempts to reproduce research fails. When you work on the very edge of science, the lab you're working on it probably either the only one, of one of a very small number who are even able to perform the research that you're doing, due to a combination of highly specialised equipment, subject knowledge and just plain experience. Without that combination of factors, it's quite easy to mess up an experiment and therefore fail to reproduce the research.

by gaius 8y ago

lancebeet 8y ago

If we want to give people the benefit of the doubt, it could also mean that scientific research is difficult and even competent individuals often make mistakes.

SubiculumCode 8y ago

This is incorrect and unhelpful. Science in fields with lots of complexity, such as neuroscience and psychology, suffer from hard problems such as unmeasured causal variables and divergent sample characteristics. You might chalk this up to incompetence, but there are are in fact real concerns of feasibility. You cannot hope to measure or control all relevant cognitive factors, you just try to balance your sample groups on the more obvious measures, increase your sample size, then hope that other differences average out with random assignment.

lrem 8y ago
To put it otherwise: for some problems, none of the 7 billions humans alive is competent enough right now. For some of them, we'll collectively eventually get there, if we don't stop trying.

AllegedAlec 8y ago

> Let’s be honest about what that means: 2/3 of scientists are fraudulent or incompetent. No, it means that 2/3rds of the attempts to reproduce research fails. When you work on the very edge of science, the lab you're working on it probably either the only one, of one of a very small number who are even able to perform the research that you're doing, due to a combination of highly specialised equipment, subject knowledge and just plain experience. Without that combination of factors, it's quite easy to mess up an experiment and therefore fail to reproduce the research.