3 ms·

>What if after a year of posting, you find an error in your study? You have just misinformed everyone for a year. How do you backtrack on that? If a paper turn

>What if after a year of posting, you find an error in your study? You have just misinformed everyone for a year. How do you backtrack on that? If a paper turns out to be flawed, then you retract the paper. In order to retract it, someone needs to figure out that it was in fact flawed. Most scientists don't knowingly publish bad research, they just make mistakes that get missed in peer review. Keeping research hidden away in paywalled journals isn't going to improve the quality of science one iota. Expecting scientists to maintain radio silence is roughly analogous to security by obscurity, with the same obvious shortcomings. The literature is full of widely-cited studies with significant methodological flaws, because they're useful enough to cite but not important enough to warrant serious scrutiny. If we're serious about building a credible scientific literature, we need to subject papers to the disinfectant of sunlight. We need to leverage the power of social media to make connections between scientists, iterate faster, bring informed laypeople into the conversation and find those bad papers.

naasking 8y ago
> If a paper turns out to be flawed, then you retract the paper. In order to retract it, someone needs to figure out that it was in fact flawed. Most scientists don't knowingly publish bad research, they just make mistakes that get missed in peer review. Keeping research hidden away in paywalled journals isn't going to improve the quality of science one iota. Except OP wasn't suggesting keeping silent, he was suggesting not broadcasting it on social media. You can broadcast it through scientific channels of course, because scientists generally know to preserve some healthy skepticism until something is replicated. Some new result on social media could easily go viral so almost everyone hears about it, but do you think the retraction on social would get the same attention? Of course not, so it's about stopping the spread of misinformation, which I hope you agree is a problem these days.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  The public discourse around science is dominated by non-scientists, many of whom habitually make grievous and blatant errors. Telling scientists to "stay in their lane" and avoid talking about their research in public isn't going to improve the quality of that discourse.
  - naasking 8y ago
    > Telling scientists to "stay in their lane" and avoid talking about their research in public isn't going to improve the quality of that discourse. There's a difference between results that have been validated by multiple studies and replicated, and results that have only one or two studies backing them. I think the replication crisis clearly shows why. Furthermore, there's also a difference between scientists making positive claims and scientists correcting improper interpretations of existing results. I think my post was pretty clear about what scientists should not be writing about on social media. Writing about anything else is perfectly fine.

naasking 8y ago

> If a paper turns out to be flawed, then you retract the paper. In order to retract it, someone needs to figure out that it was in fact flawed. Most scientists don't knowingly publish bad research, they just make mistakes that get missed in peer review. Keeping research hidden away in paywalled journals isn't going to improve the quality of science one iota. Except OP wasn't suggesting keeping silent, he was suggesting not broadcasting it on social media. You can broadcast it through scientific channels of course, because scientists generally know to preserve some healthy skepticism until something is replicated. Some new result on social media could easily go viral so almost everyone hears about it, but do you think the retraction on social would get the same attention? Of course not, so it's about stopping the spread of misinformation, which I hope you agree is a problem these days.

jdietrich 8y ago
The public discourse around science is dominated by non-scientists, many of whom habitually make grievous and blatant errors. Telling scientists to "stay in their lane" and avoid talking about their research in public isn't going to improve the quality of that discourse.
- naasking 8y ago
  > Telling scientists to "stay in their lane" and avoid talking about their research in public isn't going to improve the quality of that discourse. There's a difference between results that have been validated by multiple studies and replicated, and results that have only one or two studies backing them. I think the replication crisis clearly shows why. Furthermore, there's also a difference between scientists making positive claims and scientists correcting improper interpretations of existing results. I think my post was pretty clear about what scientists should not be writing about on social media. Writing about anything else is perfectly fine.