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Yeah, but to be fair, fMRI has been problematic for years and years. When I was doing my PhD (2008-11), I read a bunch of neuroimaging studies, and was very sce
by disgruntledphd2 6y ago
Yeah, but to be fair, fMRI has been problematic for years and years. When I was doing my PhD (2008-11), I read a bunch of neuroimaging studies, and was very sceptical about the results because of the small samples, and the undocumented pre-processing.
To be fair though, you shouldn't believe any science in most disciplines unless its been replicated by multiple labs/authors.
- pc86 6y agoInteresting, what is your PhD in?
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoPsychology (mostly psychometrics, social and health). I was studying the placebo effect, so read very very widely. I know very little about the brain, except what I did in my undergrad (which wasn't a lot), but all the statistics in papers looked really, really dodgy to me.
- aeternum 6y agoIs it common for labs to attempt replication? From my limited understanding, replication does not have much prestige and can be difficult to get published. Is this a problem, and have research universities found a solution?
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoYeah, this is a real problem. The incentive structure is such that people are encouraged to find "novel" things. This leads to lots of data-dredging for significant findings that are counter-intuitive. And because of the bias towards novelty, replications are not regarded as worth publishing and so these results remain unchallenged. It's a hard problem, and has been known to be a hard problem for at least the last forty years (within psychology, at least) and yet very little has been done. Brian Nosek and the OSF are doing good work here though.