3 ms·
I am not to worried about Stapel. He is an outlier, and just as all outliers he is getting his share of attention in the media. I am in general much more worri
by maurits 13y ago
I am not to worried about Stapel. He is an outlier, and just as all outliers he is getting his share of attention in the media.
I am in general much more worried about the dubious statistics and protocols that are deployed on real data. The torturing of the data, shoddy experiment design, the unpublished negative results, and the somewhat sobering realization that research is actually hard. Ioannidis formulates this quite elegantly in "why most research findings are false" [1]
One thing that is painstakingly obvious, is that this whole affair was only possible because people do not, and are not obliged to, share their data and code.
[1]: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...
- plg 13y agoThis is a very important idea that is fortunately gaining some traction in academic science at the moment ... that is, the need to share data and code. Some journals even require it (sharing data that is, I'm thinking of brain imaging journals). My own opinion is that every academic scientist ought to, as a matter of course, make their data and code publicly available.
- andreasvc 13y agoI'm all for sharing data and code but don't you think that someone as determined to cheat as Stapel would have simply been a bit more careful in preparing his spreadsheet? Publishing carefully crafted fake data does not help, only replicating the experiment would but you can't do that for every publication. You can also demand that some kind of notary is present while performing the actual experiment, but ultimately you need a large amount of trust in science.