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The author should have state from the start that the article he bases this upon is about social science and not the whole academic and science world, it's kind

The author should have state from the start that the article he bases this upon is about social science and not the whole academic and science world, it's kind of misleading Social science has always been full of incertainty and biased results, it seems rather normal the public don't trust it blindfully.

derbOac 5y ago
There's a sort of sentiment that shows up here on HN -- it's not everyone but it's consistent -- that the problems with replicability are limited to the social sciences, and don't apply elsewhere, which is not true. It's not everyone of course, there's pushback, but I'm surprised and concerned that it persists. Just last week or so there was a paper in Nature about how fMRI studies -- a modern backbone of neuroscience work -- have also been mostly unreplicable. This follows a litany of other papers showing the same thing. That Nature paper made transparent allusions to genetics which invested tons of money in studies which were also largely unreplicable, with fairly obvious power issues that were ignored. When the replicability crisis started getting attention, there were interviews with pharmacology corporation scientists saying that the pharm industry tends to internally assume that 2/3 of published pharmacology studies will not replicate when applied to the real world. There were studies showing that oncology had similar rates of problems, and so forth and so on. The social sciences is fuzzy as you say but they also tend to turn the microscope on science itself first. Meta-analysis in its modern form (as opposed to early statistical methodology papers) comes from psychology; this is just more of the same. There probably are differences across fields but I think few fields are immune. Also, I would push back on the idea that the general public's mistrust is limited to the social sciences. I would argue that issues with climate change skepticism are driven in part by a general distrust of academic findings and scientists, and many of the problems during the pandemic with skepticism about vaccination, masking policies, and so forth were driven by skepticism about biomedical research. Possner said "such challenges do not affect academic confidence in the reality of (say) climate change and Coronavirus"; I was puzzled by this precisely because I couldn't tell if he was being ironic, or pointing these out as areas where there is a contrast between academic confidence and public confidence in those findings, as if to say "well look at how much the public distrusts that; now imagine when academic confidence is eroded further?" My biggest problem with the linked piece, in fact, is that it is framed around the question "what happens when the public loses confidence in academic findings" when that problem is already here to a big extent. We saw what happened during the pandemic. That's what happens. Academics to some extent is falling apart, and it's not limited to the social sciences. The problems with misttrust are running deep and I think academic and political communities have their head in the sand, rather than taking their structural problems seriously. It's always the messenger: the irrational public, the muddle-headed social scientists who are exposing the problems, it's never the corruption in academics itself.

derbOac 5y ago

There's a sort of sentiment that shows up here on HN -- it's not everyone but it's consistent -- that the problems with replicability are limited to the social sciences, and don't apply elsewhere, which is not true. It's not everyone of course, there's pushback, but I'm surprised and concerned that it persists. Just last week or so there was a paper in Nature about how fMRI studies -- a modern backbone of neuroscience work -- have also been mostly unreplicable. This follows a litany of other papers showing the same thing. That Nature paper made transparent allusions to genetics which invested tons of money in studies which were also largely unreplicable, with fairly obvious power issues that were ignored. When the replicability crisis started getting attention, there were interviews with pharmacology corporation scientists saying that the pharm industry tends to internally assume that 2/3 of published pharmacology studies will not replicate when applied to the real world. There were studies showing that oncology had similar rates of problems, and so forth and so on. The social sciences is fuzzy as you say but they also tend to turn the microscope on science itself first. Meta-analysis in its modern form (as opposed to early statistical methodology papers) comes from psychology; this is just more of the same. There probably are differences across fields but I think few fields are immune. Also, I would push back on the idea that the general public's mistrust is limited to the social sciences. I would argue that issues with climate change skepticism are driven in part by a general distrust of academic findings and scientists, and many of the problems during the pandemic with skepticism about vaccination, masking policies, and so forth were driven by skepticism about biomedical research. Possner said "such challenges do not affect academic confidence in the reality of (say) climate change and Coronavirus"; I was puzzled by this precisely because I couldn't tell if he was being ironic, or pointing these out as areas where there is a contrast between academic confidence and public confidence in those findings, as if to say "well look at how much the public distrusts that; now imagine when academic confidence is eroded further?" My biggest problem with the linked piece, in fact, is that it is framed around the question "what happens when the public loses confidence in academic findings" when that problem is already here to a big extent. We saw what happened during the pandemic. That's what happens. Academics to some extent is falling apart, and it's not limited to the social sciences. The problems with misttrust are running deep and I think academic and political communities have their head in the sand, rather than taking their structural problems seriously. It's always the messenger: the irrational public, the muddle-headed social scientists who are exposing the problems, it's never the corruption in academics itself.