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Re: "Science does not get worse when there are more bad papers"... I don't think that this is true at all. Weeding through bad papers is, at a minimum, an oppo

Re: "Science does not get worse when there are more bad papers"... I don't think that this is true at all. Weeding through bad papers is, at a minimum, an opportunity cost, as is a good paper built on top of a bad one. Also, there is a societal cost in that bad research can get picked up and believed by people, like the anti-vax crowd. Or, bad research can be used to push an agenda, like anti-climate change.

SantalBlush 3y ago
You are correct. Many people want research to work like a social media site where everyone can contribute, believing this is an egalitarian--and therefore better--solution. In reality, it would slow research to a crawl, as noise and conflicted interests dominate the conversation and drown out more rigorous or valuable information.
- huijzer 3y ago
  > noise and conflicted interests dominate the conversation and drown out more rigorous or valuable information. That's actually a great point. Who says this isn't already the case? There isn't much evidence to suggest that things have gotten better after the Why Most Published Research Findings Are False paper in 2005. I think people should be extremely skeptical of anything they read, irregardless of a peer review stamp.
  - SantalBlush 3y ago
    >I think people should be extremely skeptical of anything they read This is a mistake that many HN readers make; they think that if one is equipped with some above-average level of intelligence, one can discern the validity of new research. But this is wrong. It usually takes many years of study before one can begin to clearly understand what is even being said, let alone whether it has any veracity. People of above-average intelligence often resent this fact, because it suggests that their smart opinion isn't as valuable as the opinion of an expert, but that is simply a sad fact of life. If they haven't put in the work in that field, then they don't know what they're talking about in that field, and they are incapable of applying skepticism in that field correctly. This is precisely and unfortunately why we are forced to place our trust in experts.
    - mike_hearn 3y ago
      In practice that's not the case. Maybe for some fields it is, but there are definitely plenty of fields where minimal expertise is required to do basic sanity checks of a paper. And there are many generic 'tells' that are indicative of issues across a wide range of fields, e.g. if a paper is reporting mostly P = 0.049 results, well ... As an example of an issue that doesn't require much expertise to spot, I was reading a health paper a couple of days ago that reported on an intervention in a specific population. The paper said words to the effect of "[the intervention] was effective, especially for men". The associated chart not only had (somehow?!) got a legend that didn't match the actual chart lines, but whilst the line for men did indeed go down the line for women was very clearly flat! This should have been reported as "no effect in women but an effect in men" but wasn't. When the wording doesn't match the data being reported, that's a good sign in any field that the researchers know they're treading on thin ice. That particular claim was a correlation/causation fallacy anyway, which is very common in health. They didn't have any proof it was their intervention causing the reduction and there were a bunch of reasons to suspect it wasn't. But the intervention was long term and high effort so it's not a surprise they wanted to find something.
      - SantalBlush 3y ago
        This is a great example of what I'm talking about. P-values of 0.049 is not a "tell"; that is an HN meme. You can have p-values above 5 percent and the paper can still convey novel and valid research, depending on the nature of the study. The 5-percent value is a common cutoff, but it is a largely arbitrary one. Sometimes there is justification for a higher one, and sometimes it should be lower. To gauge what sort of p-value suggests a useful model requires familiarity with the area and the broader context of the research.
        mike_hearn 3y ago
        That's the point - it's an arbitrary cutoff, so the high frequency with which results cluster around that point is indicative of a problem. If a field accepts P=0.05 as significant it means 1 in 20 results can be false positives just by random chance. Now think about how many papers get published, and many of them report more than one thing. The right threshold should really be an order of magnitude lower. It's not OK for scientists to report FPs at that rate, and that's a big part of the reason for declining confidence in science.
  - venv 3y ago
    Maybe, but it would still be better if the situation didn't detoriate further.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  This depends heavily on the field. In many cases results can easily be independently verified. This is why it works for AI. If you publish a result, it should come with code anybody can run. If the code doesn't exist or doesn't do what you say it does, you're a fool and everyone can ignore you. If it does, you don't need anyone's stamp of approval to prove it. But that doesn't work with medical trials or things of that nature where independently verifying the claims is expensive.
mschuster91 3y ago
> Also, there is a societal cost in that bad research can get picked up and believed by people, like the anti-vax crowd. Or, bad research can be used to push an agenda, like anti-climate change. Responsible media would act as a gatekeeper. The problem is, most media utterly gutted scientific journalists for more profit, so they completely lack the basis to evaluate and supply context on research. Others, particularly boulevard media, willfully ignore any kind of ethics for clicks. On top of that comes a general media illiteracy and media distrust that makes it even harder to combat because there's an awful lot of media that thrives on intentionally pushing crap to people.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
  the gatekeeper job belongs to the publication, rather than people reporting on what the publication chose to publish, especially when the journalists reporting on it aren't experts in the field (which we obviously can't expect them to be for everything they report on)
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
The solution to this is reputation. The flaw is that we're using the reputation of for-profit journals rather than the research institutions. You shouldn't have confidence in a paper because it was published in Nature, you should have confidence in it because it was published by Harvard or the University of California or Google Research, who puts the name of their institution on it and thereby stakes their reputation. For the preeminent researchers in a field, their own names may be enough for people in that field to trust the result. You can still have a paper published by nobody, and if the results are interesting, researchers at known institutions can try to replicate it. Until then it's nothing. But if they do, the nobody gets cited and credited with being the first and takes a step to building their own reputation, and the known institution gets credited with knowing when to spend resources following up on something significant.
- notahacker 3y ago
  The research institutes are also for profit bodies, just much more of an closed shop because there's only so many people they can employ at any one time (and that's before we even get into tenure or the fact all you're really doing is shifting the peer review burden onto people that report into the person that wrote the paper). You can have papers published by Google Research or by nobody now: turns out academics like the journals' attempts to curate interesting stuff more than only ever reading stuff on their bookmark list or that's mailed to them in a desperate attempt to get some engagement. And for all that they might not like the long delays and low chance of success associated with submitting to Nature, they like the idea of trying to persuade an academic at an elite institution to go to the trouble of replicating their research as the only means to build their reputation even less...
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > The research institutes are also for profit bodies Their business model isn't to put the research behind a paywall, which is the relevant distinction. > turns out academics like the journals' attempts to curate interesting stuff more than only ever reading stuff on their bookmark list or that's mailed to them in a desperate attempt to get some engagement. This is what conferences are for, and then you have the conference organizers curating the talks but everyone gets the list of talks and links to all the freely available papers even if they can't afford to attend the conference.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
> Weeding through bad papers How does one come across these bad papers in the first place, such that they must be weeded through? Maybe we need a different method of curation such that they stay below the noise floor.

SantalBlush 3y ago

You are correct. Many people want research to work like a social media site where everyone can contribute, believing this is an egalitarian--and therefore better--solution. In reality, it would slow research to a crawl, as noise and conflicted interests dominate the conversation and drown out more rigorous or valuable information.

huijzer 3y ago
> noise and conflicted interests dominate the conversation and drown out more rigorous or valuable information. That's actually a great point. Who says this isn't already the case? There isn't much evidence to suggest that things have gotten better after the Why Most Published Research Findings Are False paper in 2005. I think people should be extremely skeptical of anything they read, irregardless of a peer review stamp.
- SantalBlush 3y ago
  >I think people should be extremely skeptical of anything they read This is a mistake that many HN readers make; they think that if one is equipped with some above-average level of intelligence, one can discern the validity of new research. But this is wrong. It usually takes many years of study before one can begin to clearly understand what is even being said, let alone whether it has any veracity. People of above-average intelligence often resent this fact, because it suggests that their smart opinion isn't as valuable as the opinion of an expert, but that is simply a sad fact of life. If they haven't put in the work in that field, then they don't know what they're talking about in that field, and they are incapable of applying skepticism in that field correctly. This is precisely and unfortunately why we are forced to place our trust in experts.
  - mike_hearn 3y ago
    In practice that's not the case. Maybe for some fields it is, but there are definitely plenty of fields where minimal expertise is required to do basic sanity checks of a paper. And there are many generic 'tells' that are indicative of issues across a wide range of fields, e.g. if a paper is reporting mostly P = 0.049 results, well ... As an example of an issue that doesn't require much expertise to spot, I was reading a health paper a couple of days ago that reported on an intervention in a specific population. The paper said words to the effect of "[the intervention] was effective, especially for men". The associated chart not only had (somehow?!) got a legend that didn't match the actual chart lines, but whilst the line for men did indeed go down the line for women was very clearly flat! This should have been reported as "no effect in women but an effect in men" but wasn't. When the wording doesn't match the data being reported, that's a good sign in any field that the researchers know they're treading on thin ice. That particular claim was a correlation/causation fallacy anyway, which is very common in health. They didn't have any proof it was their intervention causing the reduction and there were a bunch of reasons to suspect it wasn't. But the intervention was long term and high effort so it's not a surprise they wanted to find something.
    - SantalBlush 3y ago
      This is a great example of what I'm talking about. P-values of 0.049 is not a "tell"; that is an HN meme. You can have p-values above 5 percent and the paper can still convey novel and valid research, depending on the nature of the study. The 5-percent value is a common cutoff, but it is a largely arbitrary one. Sometimes there is justification for a higher one, and sometimes it should be lower. To gauge what sort of p-value suggests a useful model requires familiarity with the area and the broader context of the research.
      - mike_hearn 3y ago
        That's the point - it's an arbitrary cutoff, so the high frequency with which results cluster around that point is indicative of a problem. If a field accepts P=0.05 as significant it means 1 in 20 results can be false positives just by random chance. Now think about how many papers get published, and many of them report more than one thing. The right threshold should really be an order of magnitude lower. It's not OK for scientists to report FPs at that rate, and that's a big part of the reason for declining confidence in science.
- venv 3y ago
  Maybe, but it would still be better if the situation didn't detoriate further.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
This depends heavily on the field. In many cases results can easily be independently verified. This is why it works for AI. If you publish a result, it should come with code anybody can run. If the code doesn't exist or doesn't do what you say it does, you're a fool and everyone can ignore you. If it does, you don't need anyone's stamp of approval to prove it. But that doesn't work with medical trials or things of that nature where independently verifying the claims is expensive.

mschuster91 3y ago

> Also, there is a societal cost in that bad research can get picked up and believed by people, like the anti-vax crowd. Or, bad research can be used to push an agenda, like anti-climate change. Responsible media would act as a gatekeeper. The problem is, most media utterly gutted scientific journalists for more profit, so they completely lack the basis to evaluate and supply context on research. Others, particularly boulevard media, willfully ignore any kind of ethics for clicks. On top of that comes a general media illiteracy and media distrust that makes it even harder to combat because there's an awful lot of media that thrives on intentionally pushing crap to people.

ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
the gatekeeper job belongs to the publication, rather than people reporting on what the publication chose to publish, especially when the journalists reporting on it aren't experts in the field (which we obviously can't expect them to be for everything they report on)

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

The solution to this is reputation. The flaw is that we're using the reputation of for-profit journals rather than the research institutions. You shouldn't have confidence in a paper because it was published in Nature, you should have confidence in it because it was published by Harvard or the University of California or Google Research, who puts the name of their institution on it and thereby stakes their reputation. For the preeminent researchers in a field, their own names may be enough for people in that field to trust the result. You can still have a paper published by nobody, and if the results are interesting, researchers at known institutions can try to replicate it. Until then it's nothing. But if they do, the nobody gets cited and credited with being the first and takes a step to building their own reputation, and the known institution gets credited with knowing when to spend resources following up on something significant.

notahacker 3y ago
The research institutes are also for profit bodies, just much more of an closed shop because there's only so many people they can employ at any one time (and that's before we even get into tenure or the fact all you're really doing is shifting the peer review burden onto people that report into the person that wrote the paper). You can have papers published by Google Research or by nobody now: turns out academics like the journals' attempts to curate interesting stuff more than only ever reading stuff on their bookmark list or that's mailed to them in a desperate attempt to get some engagement. And for all that they might not like the long delays and low chance of success associated with submitting to Nature, they like the idea of trying to persuade an academic at an elite institution to go to the trouble of replicating their research as the only means to build their reputation even less...
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > The research institutes are also for profit bodies Their business model isn't to put the research behind a paywall, which is the relevant distinction. > turns out academics like the journals' attempts to curate interesting stuff more than only ever reading stuff on their bookmark list or that's mailed to them in a desperate attempt to get some engagement. This is what conferences are for, and then you have the conference organizers curating the talks but everyone gets the list of talks and links to all the freely available papers even if they can't afford to attend the conference.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

> Weeding through bad papers How does one come across these bad papers in the first place, such that they must be weeded through? Maybe we need a different method of curation such that they stay below the noise floor.