8 ms·

Scientific progress despite irreproducibility: A seeming paradox

59 points by nabla9 5y ago

mensetmanusman 5y ago
One example: What would progress in psychology even look like? More people than ever are medicated for mental illness, seems like the opposite of progress.
- 542458 5y ago
  I don’t think number of diagnoses is a great metric for or against the progress of psychology. We could outlaw psychology and have zero diagnoses, but that wouldn’t be progress. If we’re criticizing psychology for not “curing” people I think that’s a bit unfair - people may not be cured, but their conditions can be managed. I personally would love to be cured of what ails me, but that doesn’t mean I’m not grateful for the medications and therapy that help me live a more “normal” life than would otherwise be possible.
- nomel 5y ago
  With the assumption that their problems are real, what's the alternative? Surgery?
  - amrcnimgrnt 5y ago
    Finding the root causes of mental illness. it's like protesting overmedication of type two diabetes patients by pointing out that surgery isn't very effective. I agree, it isn't, but we know why the patient has type 2 and how he could cure himself!
- Tenoke 5y ago
  Clinical Psychology is just one part of the field of Psychology but even there can be progress in many directions - better diagnosis, less reported issues due to better prevention, less side-effects from treatments, or just pure metrics like higher life satisfaction, less suicides etc.
- _Microft 5y ago
  The field of psychology is far larger than just clinical psychology. So much larger that I would recommend looking it up on Wikipedia instead of listing things here.
- bsder 5y ago
  > More people than ever are medicated for mental illness, seems like the opposite of progress. Maybe. And maybe a bunch of those people were self-medicating with alcohol, nicotine, etc. and now are actually getting real treatment. Don't get me wrong. I think we overly medicate people--especially school children. I think ADHD is hideously overdiagnosed. However, I've also seen the flip side. People who were completely disconnected from reality who suddenly are back to their "normal" selves with just a small amount of medication.
api 5y ago
If you are descending a learning gradient you don't need every step to be perfect. You just need the general progress to be along the gradient. If science is even a little bit more right than wrong, theoretically it will follow the gradient over time (with some wiggles). I don't think anyone would argue that more than 50% of scientific publications or findings are flawed.
- oerpli 5y ago
  Some (e.g. Marc Andreessen: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/flying-x-wings-into-the-death-star https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/flying-x-wings-into-th... ) say, 90% are either wrong or useless. It's roughly what I would guess as well.
  - mirker 5y ago
    Citations follow some power-law type of distribution, so the 10% (or whatever) of useful ones are basically the high impact papers, anyway. It would be more surprising if citations and usefulness were anti-correlated in some way. Back to the “gradient” analogy, in this case, papers have a feedback mechanism to suppress less useful papers. Science is not a random flurry of results mashed together.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      >It would be more surprising if citations and usefulness were anti-correlated in some way. I have definitely seen some highly cited and influential papers overstay their welcome and hold the field back. That's not to say they didn't propel the field forward when they were initially published, just that their overbearing influence causes us to stick to a paradigm that is no longer producing results. "Science progresses one funeral at a time" and all that.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    Based on my experience as a PhD student (Machine Learning Algorithms for Brain-Computer Interfaces), I would say that useless papers are far more of a problem than wrong ones. I didn't see a lot of evidence of outright fraud, but a lot of mundane and irrelevant research ("This algorithm happens to work well on this one particular test dataset well") presented as if it were a breakthrough that was important to the field. "Publish or perish" is a helluva drug.
wolverine876 5y ago
Every human institution is flawed, which imposes costs, but costs needn't bankrupt the enterprise. Every business is flawed, but some succeed (YC could tell you something about that). All software is flawed. The only solution - the only means to success - is to minimize the flaws and to find solutions that deliver positive returns on the investments. Democracy itself is very flawed, but works; so does science. (That's not an excuse for the flaws or a reason to accept them.)
inter_netuser 5y ago
Everyone who reads scientific papers as a part of their job know a good chunk, if not the majority, of papers are fluff, and not only in social sciences. I’ve been a reviewer for a journal and we’d always recieve a good chunk of marketing whitepapers dressed up in just enough jargon to be published.
EverywhereTrip 5y ago
The problem isn't irreproducibility in "science". It is irreproducibility in a few fields. Most notably, nutrition, psychology, and economics. These are all fields which study humans. The study of humans is far more fraught with bias and ideology. Humans are also independent decision making agents and behave in a way that atoms do not.
- elisharobinson 5y ago
  why stop there modern medicine is also full to the brim with non tested hypothesis. i,e only recently have we seriously looked at the effects of saline and the placebo effect is well documented phenomenon.
  - adamisom 5y ago
    Funny you mention placebo effect. It actually is probably far less of a thing than popularly believed see https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/31/powerless-placebos/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/31/powerless-placebos/ From one point of view that just proves your point more, from another, less. If placebo effect is tenuous then all else equal that’s a good sign for the rest of medicine… but in fact lots of medicine is tenuous. The landmark “Most Published Research Findings Are False” was looking at medical findings iirc.
- derbOac 5y ago
  Surveys suggest it's not limited to a few fields. You might be right about fields studying humans though.
  - cbozeman 5y ago
    I'm going to take the opposite position and posit that the "problem" with studying humans is that we just don't know enough yet. We can't predict human behavior because our science is simply not advanced enough. I think once we have as strong an understanding of biology as we do something like say, physics or mathematics, we'll find it significantly easier to predict human behavior. Or put another way, I don't think we can't predict human behavior because humans are "special", but because we're actually kind dumb on a cosmic scale.
tomp 5y ago
Is this even true? Most of the progress is in "hard sciences" - physics, cellular biology, computational biology, genetics ... where experiments (and presumably reproducibility) is just fine.
- epistasis 5y ago
  As somebody in computational biology, I think it's important to note that a ton of cellular biology and even computational biology is "not reproducible." This could be anything from bad documentation of how something was run (computational scientists are often terrible at lab notebook culture), to having a model system that lived for a while and no longer exists in the form that initial discoveries were made with. Or it could be that there was just that one batch of reagents that reliably reproduced a phenomenon, and all future orders of the reagents no longer get the same phenomenon, and whatever the difference was is lost to time. But I would claim that especially in biology, though this is less than ideal for writing up near little explanations of reality, it is still extremely useful for understanding what's going on. Scientific papers aren't meant to be ever-lasting truth, like a textbook. They are communications amongst specialists about "look here something cool happened that may be useful to you too." It is only through lots of work that a phenomenon can be established as widespread in biology, and sharing information before doing 10 years of work helps accelerate everything. This is why I roll my eyes at complaints like that one about "foundational cancer research papers not being reproducible." It was written by scientists in industry who wanted to take a new paper and develop an entire drug program around something particularly novel and surprising. Sure, that would be ideal if it worked, but the scientific literature is a lot more than a catalog of ideas ready for commercialization. Scientists in practice understand the limitations of taking a journal paper as gospel. They always try to get something working in their own hands before basing a lot of research off another paper.
  - SubiculumCode 5y ago
    As a fellow scientist, thank you for your dissemination of how science is actually conducted, and what any single paper or series of papers mean. Progress almost always occurs due to the assessment of converging methods and analytic approaches, almost like individual papers are weak classifiers in a big beautiful bag.
miga 5y ago
It has been conjectured before, that probably "most published research findings are false" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Findings_Are_False https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Fi.... But science is a body of the findings that are confirmed many times, harder and harder to falsify.
- amrcnimgrnt 5y ago
  You inspired me to come up with this conjecture: The number of correct papers grows logarithmically with the number of papers published.
analog31 5y ago
In my view, reproducibility is neither strictly necessary nor sufficient for scientific progress. I'm sure if you went back through the literature on something like electromagnetism, you would find results that fail to replicate, yet the theory of electromagnetism if applied properly is remarkably robust. Scientific results can be strengthened by replication, but that's just one thing, and if that's all you do, then you end up with a science that does nothing but generate independent factoids. On the other hand, robust science tends to look at a particular phenomenon from many different angles, and manages to connect multiple results together into a framework that can survive retracting individual studies without collapsing. This is how electromagnetism developed. Sciences that are in the factoid phase are not necessarily junk. Discovery of a psychological "effect" is perfectly scientific and interesting. But some sciences have barely progressed beyond the factoid phase. And if those sciences are also plagued by irreproducibility, then they may embrace scientific methodology without producing a useful scientific knowledge base.
- atty 5y ago
  As a physicist, I think how we normally describe what you’re talking about is that there must be a robust and explanatory theory that goes along with experimental measurements. The most fruitful areas of research are the ones where theory and experiment exist on approximately the same level of what they can predict or measure. These strong explanatory theories are the things that generate truly robust, reproducible experiments. In cases where there is significant differences in the maturity between theory and experiment, you either end up with theorists playing games with math, making up tons of unconstrained theories (string theory, for instance), or in the other direction you end up with experimentalists measuring anything and everything they can imagine, half of which is probably not theoretically enlightening, waiting for theorists to constrain their space of possible experiments to potentially fruitful paths. Obviously this is harder for fields that don’t have models as robust as we do in physics, but I’d guess the same phenomenon happens everywhere.
  - analog31 5y ago
    I'm a physicist too. A bad analogy is that theory and experiment are like plywood. The individual layers are weak, but criss crossing them against one another and gluing them together makes something that's quite strong.
baron_harkonnen 5y ago
> Proving the claims of rapid progress would be inordinately difficult and beyond the scope of this contribution. That seems like it's an important part of this issue. If we know that there are massive problems with irreproducibility and we just have to go on an assumption that there has been "rapid progress" then it seems like the most obvious solution to the "paradox" is to question that progress as well. This is similar to how in the 90s everything was labeled "healthy and fat free!" which we know resulted in food filled with sugar, then making the claim "the paradox of healthy food despite high sugar". It might be worth calling into question the claims of healthiness given the fundamental conditions that produce health aren't present. Certainly there are places that everyone will agree we've seen progress, but all of these places seem to be where scientific progress is closely tied to commercial application. One of the best examples that I think everyone will agree has been remarkable has been the storage capacity of batteries. While much of this progress surely starts in the labs, the true measure of progress isn't in papers it's commercial applications. It frankly doesn't matter at all if the academic research behind battery technology was good or not, because we know these batteries work and are in fact smaller. If you cellphone weighed 10 lbs and ran out of energy in 45 minutes you wouldn't care either way what the research said. However the answer to this "paradox" isn't just that the market is some force for testing what is real. Anyone who has worked long enough in machine learning knows a fair amount of bullshit not only exists in papers but in products as well. A better explanation for me is that we live in an age of unprecedented economic and high energy intensity activity. You generate 160,000 TWh of power you're going to see a lot of wonderful things that look like progress. Some real, some illusions, but assuming that science is really the basis for all of this is a fairly large, and unchecked in this article, assumption. Lots of the scientific progress we've made in the last few decades has happened outside of an academic research lab, and assuming "science" is the cause might be a bit naive.
- enkid 5y ago
  I agree with almost all that you say, bit I disagree with the implication that progress in commercial enterprises isn't also a form of scientific progress. I totally agree that the ultimate measure of scientific progress is how much of that is accessible to wider society. That doesn't have to be in a published journal, it's anything that allows us to know about the world and leverage that knowledge for the better.
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59 points by nabla9 5y ago

One example: What would progress in psychology even look like? More people than ever are medicated for mental illness, seems like the opposite of progress.

542458 5y ago
I don’t think number of diagnoses is a great metric for or against the progress of psychology. We could outlaw psychology and have zero diagnoses, but that wouldn’t be progress. If we’re criticizing psychology for not “curing” people I think that’s a bit unfair - people may not be cured, but their conditions can be managed. I personally would love to be cured of what ails me, but that doesn’t mean I’m not grateful for the medications and therapy that help me live a more “normal” life than would otherwise be possible.
nomel 5y ago
With the assumption that their problems are real, what's the alternative? Surgery?
- amrcnimgrnt 5y ago
  Finding the root causes of mental illness. it's like protesting overmedication of type two diabetes patients by pointing out that surgery isn't very effective. I agree, it isn't, but we know why the patient has type 2 and how he could cure himself!
Tenoke 5y ago
Clinical Psychology is just one part of the field of Psychology but even there can be progress in many directions - better diagnosis, less reported issues due to better prevention, less side-effects from treatments, or just pure metrics like higher life satisfaction, less suicides etc.
_Microft 5y ago
The field of psychology is far larger than just clinical psychology. So much larger that I would recommend looking it up on Wikipedia instead of listing things here.
bsder 5y ago
> More people than ever are medicated for mental illness, seems like the opposite of progress. Maybe. And maybe a bunch of those people were self-medicating with alcohol, nicotine, etc. and now are actually getting real treatment. Don't get me wrong. I think we overly medicate people--especially school children. I think ADHD is hideously overdiagnosed. However, I've also seen the flip side. People who were completely disconnected from reality who suddenly are back to their "normal" selves with just a small amount of medication.

api 5y ago

If you are descending a learning gradient you don't need every step to be perfect. You just need the general progress to be along the gradient. If science is even a little bit more right than wrong, theoretically it will follow the gradient over time (with some wiggles). I don't think anyone would argue that more than 50% of scientific publications or findings are flawed.

oerpli 5y ago
Some (e.g. Marc Andreessen: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/flying-x-wings-into-the-death-star https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/flying-x-wings-into-th... ) say, 90% are either wrong or useless. It's roughly what I would guess as well.
- mirker 5y ago
  Citations follow some power-law type of distribution, so the 10% (or whatever) of useful ones are basically the high impact papers, anyway. It would be more surprising if citations and usefulness were anti-correlated in some way. Back to the “gradient” analogy, in this case, papers have a feedback mechanism to suppress less useful papers. Science is not a random flurry of results mashed together.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    >It would be more surprising if citations and usefulness were anti-correlated in some way. I have definitely seen some highly cited and influential papers overstay their welcome and hold the field back. That's not to say they didn't propel the field forward when they were initially published, just that their overbearing influence causes us to stick to a paradigm that is no longer producing results. "Science progresses one funeral at a time" and all that.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  Based on my experience as a PhD student (Machine Learning Algorithms for Brain-Computer Interfaces), I would say that useless papers are far more of a problem than wrong ones. I didn't see a lot of evidence of outright fraud, but a lot of mundane and irrelevant research ("This algorithm happens to work well on this one particular test dataset well") presented as if it were a breakthrough that was important to the field. "Publish or perish" is a helluva drug.

wolverine876 5y ago

Every human institution is flawed, which imposes costs, but costs needn't bankrupt the enterprise. Every business is flawed, but some succeed (YC could tell you something about that). All software is flawed. The only solution - the only means to success - is to minimize the flaws and to find solutions that deliver positive returns on the investments. Democracy itself is very flawed, but works; so does science. (That's not an excuse for the flaws or a reason to accept them.)

inter_netuser 5y ago

Everyone who reads scientific papers as a part of their job know a good chunk, if not the majority, of papers are fluff, and not only in social sciences. I’ve been a reviewer for a journal and we’d always recieve a good chunk of marketing whitepapers dressed up in just enough jargon to be published.

EverywhereTrip 5y ago

The problem isn't irreproducibility in "science". It is irreproducibility in a few fields. Most notably, nutrition, psychology, and economics. These are all fields which study humans. The study of humans is far more fraught with bias and ideology. Humans are also independent decision making agents and behave in a way that atoms do not.

elisharobinson 5y ago
why stop there modern medicine is also full to the brim with non tested hypothesis. i,e only recently have we seriously looked at the effects of saline and the placebo effect is well documented phenomenon.
- adamisom 5y ago
  Funny you mention placebo effect. It actually is probably far less of a thing than popularly believed see https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/31/powerless-placebos/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/31/powerless-placebos/ From one point of view that just proves your point more, from another, less. If placebo effect is tenuous then all else equal that’s a good sign for the rest of medicine… but in fact lots of medicine is tenuous. The landmark “Most Published Research Findings Are False” was looking at medical findings iirc.
derbOac 5y ago
Surveys suggest it's not limited to a few fields. You might be right about fields studying humans though.
- cbozeman 5y ago
  I'm going to take the opposite position and posit that the "problem" with studying humans is that we just don't know enough yet. We can't predict human behavior because our science is simply not advanced enough. I think once we have as strong an understanding of biology as we do something like say, physics or mathematics, we'll find it significantly easier to predict human behavior. Or put another way, I don't think we can't predict human behavior because humans are "special", but because we're actually kind dumb on a cosmic scale.

tomp 5y ago

Is this even true? Most of the progress is in "hard sciences" - physics, cellular biology, computational biology, genetics ... where experiments (and presumably reproducibility) is just fine.

epistasis 5y ago
As somebody in computational biology, I think it's important to note that a ton of cellular biology and even computational biology is "not reproducible." This could be anything from bad documentation of how something was run (computational scientists are often terrible at lab notebook culture), to having a model system that lived for a while and no longer exists in the form that initial discoveries were made with. Or it could be that there was just that one batch of reagents that reliably reproduced a phenomenon, and all future orders of the reagents no longer get the same phenomenon, and whatever the difference was is lost to time. But I would claim that especially in biology, though this is less than ideal for writing up near little explanations of reality, it is still extremely useful for understanding what's going on. Scientific papers aren't meant to be ever-lasting truth, like a textbook. They are communications amongst specialists about "look here something cool happened that may be useful to you too." It is only through lots of work that a phenomenon can be established as widespread in biology, and sharing information before doing 10 years of work helps accelerate everything. This is why I roll my eyes at complaints like that one about "foundational cancer research papers not being reproducible." It was written by scientists in industry who wanted to take a new paper and develop an entire drug program around something particularly novel and surprising. Sure, that would be ideal if it worked, but the scientific literature is a lot more than a catalog of ideas ready for commercialization. Scientists in practice understand the limitations of taking a journal paper as gospel. They always try to get something working in their own hands before basing a lot of research off another paper.
- SubiculumCode 5y ago
  As a fellow scientist, thank you for your dissemination of how science is actually conducted, and what any single paper or series of papers mean. Progress almost always occurs due to the assessment of converging methods and analytic approaches, almost like individual papers are weak classifiers in a big beautiful bag.

miga 5y ago

It has been conjectured before, that probably "most published research findings are false" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Findings_Are_False https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Fi.... But science is a body of the findings that are confirmed many times, harder and harder to falsify.

amrcnimgrnt 5y ago
You inspired me to come up with this conjecture: The number of correct papers grows logarithmically with the number of papers published.

analog31 5y ago

In my view, reproducibility is neither strictly necessary nor sufficient for scientific progress. I'm sure if you went back through the literature on something like electromagnetism, you would find results that fail to replicate, yet the theory of electromagnetism if applied properly is remarkably robust. Scientific results can be strengthened by replication, but that's just one thing, and if that's all you do, then you end up with a science that does nothing but generate independent factoids. On the other hand, robust science tends to look at a particular phenomenon from many different angles, and manages to connect multiple results together into a framework that can survive retracting individual studies without collapsing. This is how electromagnetism developed. Sciences that are in the factoid phase are not necessarily junk. Discovery of a psychological "effect" is perfectly scientific and interesting. But some sciences have barely progressed beyond the factoid phase. And if those sciences are also plagued by irreproducibility, then they may embrace scientific methodology without producing a useful scientific knowledge base.

atty 5y ago
As a physicist, I think how we normally describe what you’re talking about is that there must be a robust and explanatory theory that goes along with experimental measurements. The most fruitful areas of research are the ones where theory and experiment exist on approximately the same level of what they can predict or measure. These strong explanatory theories are the things that generate truly robust, reproducible experiments. In cases where there is significant differences in the maturity between theory and experiment, you either end up with theorists playing games with math, making up tons of unconstrained theories (string theory, for instance), or in the other direction you end up with experimentalists measuring anything and everything they can imagine, half of which is probably not theoretically enlightening, waiting for theorists to constrain their space of possible experiments to potentially fruitful paths. Obviously this is harder for fields that don’t have models as robust as we do in physics, but I’d guess the same phenomenon happens everywhere.
- analog31 5y ago
  I'm a physicist too. A bad analogy is that theory and experiment are like plywood. The individual layers are weak, but criss crossing them against one another and gluing them together makes something that's quite strong.

baron_harkonnen 5y ago

> Proving the claims of rapid progress would be inordinately difficult and beyond the scope of this contribution. That seems like it's an important part of this issue. If we know that there are massive problems with irreproducibility and we just have to go on an assumption that there has been "rapid progress" then it seems like the most obvious solution to the "paradox" is to question that progress as well. This is similar to how in the 90s everything was labeled "healthy and fat free!" which we know resulted in food filled with sugar, then making the claim "the paradox of healthy food despite high sugar". It might be worth calling into question the claims of healthiness given the fundamental conditions that produce health aren't present. Certainly there are places that everyone will agree we've seen progress, but all of these places seem to be where scientific progress is closely tied to commercial application. One of the best examples that I think everyone will agree has been remarkable has been the storage capacity of batteries. While much of this progress surely starts in the labs, the true measure of progress isn't in papers it's commercial applications. It frankly doesn't matter at all if the academic research behind battery technology was good or not, because we know these batteries work and are in fact smaller. If you cellphone weighed 10 lbs and ran out of energy in 45 minutes you wouldn't care either way what the research said. However the answer to this "paradox" isn't just that the market is some force for testing what is real. Anyone who has worked long enough in machine learning knows a fair amount of bullshit not only exists in papers but in products as well. A better explanation for me is that we live in an age of unprecedented economic and high energy intensity activity. You generate 160,000 TWh of power you're going to see a lot of wonderful things that look like progress. Some real, some illusions, but assuming that science is really the basis for all of this is a fairly large, and unchecked in this article, assumption. Lots of the scientific progress we've made in the last few decades has happened outside of an academic research lab, and assuming "science" is the cause might be a bit naive.

enkid 5y ago
I agree with almost all that you say, bit I disagree with the implication that progress in commercial enterprises isn't also a form of scientific progress. I totally agree that the ultimate measure of scientific progress is how much of that is accessible to wider society. That doesn't have to be in a published journal, it's anything that allows us to know about the world and leverage that knowledge for the better.

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