11 ms·

To an alarming degree, science is not self-correcting

257 points by martincmartin 13y ago

0xdeadbeefbabe 13y ago
The guy who wrote Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had a problem with the scientific method too: "Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones. The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thoughts and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself." I used to think (10 years ago) he was wrong or concerned about something that would happen far in the future beyond my lifespan.
- zafka 13y ago
  Thanks for mentioning this book. I think this book by Robert Pirsig should be on the short list of "Must Reads" of any true hacker
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Robert Pirsig. I'm re-reading ZatAoMM now, first time in about 20 years. I'm not entirely convinced that Phaedrus's dilemma poses a true conflict. Science is evolution toward a more complete truth, and it's expected that any given step will be incomplete. Of conflicting or alternate theories, often one will be simpler than the other (Occam's Razor). In other cases, there may be more than one correct answer (wave/particle duality). I don't see either circumstance toppling science.
cantankerous 13y ago
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn has some interesting commentary on how invalid scientific models of our world are eventually (and painfully) discharged. It's the book that coined the term "paradigm shift". This article tends to focus more on bad science, but I think the book is still at least partially relevant.
- ambler0 13y ago
  I agree with you that Kuhn is still worth reading, but perhaps a better intro to Philosophy of Science can be found in Laudan's "Science and Relativism". He is not dismissive of Kuhnian-style relativism, but he is critical of it and helps you see how it fits into the larger debate. At least that's what I remember. It's been a while since college :/ http://www.amazon.com/Science-Relativism-Controversies-Philosophy-Foundations/dp/0226469492 http://www.amazon.com/Science-Relativism-Controversies-Philo...
  - 001sky 13y ago
    As a side dish, also perhaps enlightening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untimely_Meditations#On_the_Use_and_Abuse_of_History_for_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untimely_Meditations#On_the_Us...
  - dnautics 13y ago
    I argue the best primer is Feynman's "The meaning of it all: Thoughts of a citizen-scientist" and "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". I'm not just linkbaiting HN's love for Feynman: Feynman was an active, practicing scientist and besides being introspective, he had a great knack for explaining things in a perspective accessible to non-scientists. Kuhn is worth reading, though if you are a scientist and want to get a more-in-depth analysis of philosophy of science that is laid out formally.
- alexqgb 13y ago
  The "painful" bit is key. There's a difference between constantly self-correcting and massively self-correcting, in a sudden, irregular way (known as "punctured equilibrium") only occasionally.
- pdonis 13y ago
  I'm not a fan of Kuhn, largely because he can be read as saying that, indeed, scientific models that get "overthrown" in a paradigm shift are therefore "invalid". (In the extreme, this leads to complete relativism, the idea that there is no such thing as a "valid" model at all. Kuhn himself has waffled on this point: sometimes he says he didn't really mean to take that extreme view, but other times he says things that are really hard to make sense of in any other way.) That leads people to believe that, for example, Newtonian physics must be "invalid" because it was "overthrown" by relativity. But it's really hard to square that claim with the fact that Newtonian physics (along with many other supposedly "invalid" models) gets used every day to make accurate predictions. I think the bad science described in the article is, at least in part, a reflection of our losing sight of that ultimate objective: we build scientific models of the world in order to make accurate predictions. It's not enough to say, well, I used all the right statistical techniques, I used all the right double-blind control procedures, my results have been replicated. Those things are all necessary, but they're not sufficient; they're not the goal, they're only the starting point. The goal is to make accurate predictions. I think we get a lot of bad science because we don't enforce that requirement enough.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
Technology development is going through a revolution over the last decade or two. The process of teams creating things that have a high degree of precision and detail has been found to overwhelmingly social in nature. That is, while technical skills are irreplaceable, it's the social aspects of developing new things that are much more critical to success than the technical aspects. Many technologists do not get this. To them, anything important must by definition involve some kind of new tech. They fail to see that even in breakout technology development, the social way we construct teams and interact with each other (and our market) is critical. Turns out humans are social animals. And this nature has impacts on all kinds of things, even things that are completely analytic. Science has yet to make this leap. We're still at the stage where the details of the science are published and gushed over. We focus on the science itself instead of the much more interesting and powerful thing: the social structure of how we are conducting our scientific research. There is a slight bit of light on the horizon. People from technical backgrounds are taking a hard look at how we organize our information and work. There are calls for more open science, there are calls to rethink our how we make funding decisions. There are calls for scientists to stop trying to be priests of knowledge -- arbiters of all that is true -- and work more as servants. These are all taken from mistakes the tech community has made and suffered from (and still suffers, in many cases). Let's hope this trend continues.
- tensor 13y ago
  Given the tech community's tendency towards populism over genuine technical merit, I don't think it is a good model for discovering truth about the world. The tech community is still busy reinventing the 70's poorly, let alone making any real progress. Social is only important in so far is it facilitates communication and progress towards technical understanding.
sambeau 13y ago
Like democracy, science is the worst way to discover truth… apart from all the others.
- jacoblyles 13y ago
  Status quo apologetics. Ewww.
- 001sky 13y ago
  This would only be interesting if it were (true) that all truths are scientific ones. Of course, this is an absurd proposition. Logical abstraction is not per-se science, but rather art itself. Cue Irony...another counter-example. &tc.
jacoblyles 13y ago
The truth machine is broken. How do we fix it? And why is it that whenever I see a list of the "top 10 most important problems" to solve, this isn't on it? Most educated people take the veracity of published science as given, and we clearly know that's a false assumption. I know we need more transparency in science - sharing of data and code, and negative results. But institutionally, I don't know how we get there with the tools we have. Part of the reason the current system stays in place, despite failing at its charter mission, is billions of dollars of annual subsidies. Changing the way research dollars are allocated would change the structure of the academic enterprise, but that is incredibly hard to do. Few systems have as much momentum.
- pdonis 13y ago
  Most educated people take the veracity of published science as given That's the root problem right there.
- dnautics 13y ago
  It's not just the subsidies, but how they are awarded - right on with the "structure of the academic enterprise". Consider: To get promoted to professorship, you have to selected by slighly hoarier professors; to be selected, you have to have published works, which are (anonymously) reviewed by other professors, and be awarded grants with (anonymous) review committees of other professors. You probably went to grad school under the tutelage of professors in the same circle... And at least in the past scientists were sufficiently generalist that you had a wide pool of fellows who were reviewing your work at all stages; now we have siloed subdisciplines (like "chemical biology" - which, mind you is not the same as "biological chemistry" or "biochemistry"), and the emergence of "interdisciplinary research" which somehow instead of encouraging generalism, instead promoted dilettantes who couldn't hack it in either of their parent fields... Is there any wonder why research is increasingly unreliable?
- pnathan 13y ago
  So there's an interesting topic hidden in your comment. What is truth? I don't mean to ask that in a flippant way. I mean to ask it in a way that has an answer - or at least a reliable set of answers. Of course this is a philosophical debate of long standing, but it has a lot of relevance for today. What do you mean by truth? How do you attain to truth? Is truth what is objectively perceived? If so, how do you determine what is the shared subjective perception of the exterior world? Is truth possible to attain to? Should we instead focus on finding and sharing working(up to tolerance) models of the reality we encounter? This is sort of a big debate in philosophy of science circles. You can see traces of it in Popper, Feyerabend, and a few others you can rummage up on Wikipedia. These are the questions that frame how you do research, how you present research, and the expectations of reliability of research.
pnathan 13y ago
In my experience at the university performing graduate research - * Newness is prized * Replicating old science is not prized * Funding and papers happens for breakthroughs In software engineering - * many bugs in code creep through exacting peer reviews. Recapping the short list: new things make you money, reviewing things is error prone, replicating old things doesn't make you money until someone wants to rely on them. Hmmmm. The disincentives to replicate unapplied research speak for themselves. What then is to be done beyond hand-wringing and moaning? Several things have to happen: First, grants need to be given for replication of research- replication needs to be an thing that is frequently done. Second, papers (dis)proving prior results (or disproving, period) need to be a recognized category in journals. I do not mean that disproving someone else's pet theory in favor of yours; I mean disproving the result, period; regardless of whether it helps advance your particular line of work. From someone who's currently in industry (and is looking towards going back for the PhD), I encourage the academics to open up and/or push the area of "negative results" as a recognized category of paper. If you have graduate students that can't reproduce prior work - please have them publish that! There have been occasional comments about Journals of Negative Results; maybe those could come to fruition sometime. :-)
- vortmeester 13y ago
  As an experimental physicist, I want to point out that negative results do get published -- for example, much of the experimental work on gravity amounts to the showing of no measurable difference from theoretical expectation, to a high degree of accuracy [1] -- but writing the papers for them is much harder than writing up positive results. The reason is simple: you have to convincingly show that your failure to show a result is not just due to your mistakes. Here is an analogy to a trivial situation. Which is more convincing? Positive result: By following the steps in the documentation, I installed MS Word on my computer. Therefore, MS Word can be installed on my computer. Negative result: I followed the steps in the documentation, but MS Word still doesn't work on my computer. Therefore, MS Word cannot be installed on my computer. If you're like me, you barely pause after reading the positive result, but the negative one brings to mind piles of questions: did you have the right version for your OS? Do you have enough disk space? Does your computer work properly in other respects? A really tricky problem could take ages to figure out. At some point it's probably going to seem wiser just to abandon the problem, and get a different computer or a different program. So, as a scientist, when you're faced with a negative result, you know you have a battle ahead of you. If you don't think anyone will care very much about your result, moving on to the next project may seem to be the right choice. It's a tough situation, and I sympathize with anyone facing it. And is it the right choice for science as a whole? Sometimes it isn't, but sometimes it is. [1] For one such example, check out the Eotvos experiment and its many descendants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eötvös_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eötvös_experiment
tokenadult 13y ago
This is an excellent overview article on an important topic. It mentions many of the most influential authors on the topic of accuracy of scientific publications. Hacker News readers may enjoy "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"[1] by Peter Norvig, a LISP hacker who is now director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research. Norvig's essay is my all-time favorite link to share in a Hacker News comment. That's because we see submissions here every day of preliminary studies that can be analyzed by Norvig's checklist on research issues to look for when reading about a scientific finding. I discuss psychology research weekly with a group of psychologists who study human behavior genetics in a "journal club" (graduate seminar course). Those researchers have told me about other researchers who are trying to clean up the published literature in psychology, for example Jelte Wicherts, whose article "Letting the daylight in: reviewing the reviewers and other ways to maximize transparency in science"[2] in an open-access journal suggests general procedures to improve scientific publishing, for example by changing the incentive structure around reviewing papers submitted for publication. Another helpful researcher on statistical tests to verify results is Uri Simonsohn. The papers he and his colleagues produce[3] are thought-provoking, pointed, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. [1] http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html [2] Jelte M. Wicherts, Rogier A. Kievit, Marjan Bakker and Denny Borsboom. Letting the daylight in: reviewing the reviewers and other ways to maximize transparency in science. Front. Comput. Neurosci., 03 April 2012 doi: 10.3389/fncom.2012.00020 http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2012.00020/full http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.338... [3] http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/ http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  Norvig's essay is an absolute must-read. You may learn more counter-intuitive facts in the next hour than in the last week. For convenience to mobile users, here's the link again: http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
- foxlisk 13y ago
  Norving missed an excellent chance to title this paper "The structure and interpretation of science experiments"
Theodores 13y ago
This article re-hashes much of the content of Ben Goldacre's book 'Bad Pharma', however it does not propose any solutions (Ben Goldacre does). There is plenty that can be done with legislation, as a customer of healthcare and in clinical trials. If all trials - good results or bad - were published then we would be half way there. http://www.badscience.net/2013/10/why-and-how-i-wrote-bad-pharma/ http://www.badscience.net/2013/10/why-and-how-i-wrote-bad-ph... The article mentions the company 'Amgen' and how they were not able to reproduce some earlier trial results. Alarm bells went off for me right there at the word 'Amgen'. They were the company that had the wonder drug EPO, as in of Lance Armstrong fame. That story is truly fascinating and best pieced together from the book 'Blood Medicine': http://www.bloodmedicine.info/ http://www.bloodmedicine.info/ ...and from the cycling scandal books that have came out recently, e.g. Tyler Hamilton's.
Tichy 13y ago
I wonder if much of it is not being corrected because it simply isn't important enough? Like the example of "think about a professor before an exam to get higher scores". I suspect that if for example some medication against HIV is found to not work, it will be thrown out again quickly.
pasbesoin 13y ago
I haven't read the article, yet (in a bit of a hurry ATM...), but a crucial part of science is (independent) reproduction and verification. Any number of things stand in the way of this: Funding and funding restrictions, counter-productive IP laws, "cult of celebrity" (to the detriment of those quiet souls who "quiety grind away"), etc. I've been screwed over more than once by "medical science" and medical "best practices", so I have been somewhat sensitized to incongruities in this area. A recent, emerging big one: Statins, and more so the premise upon which they became ubiquitous, stand upon increasingly shaky ground -- at least with regard to their current, widespread prescription and use. E.g. http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2013/03/09/895-the-great-cholesterol-myth/ http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2013/03/09/895-the-great-chol...
timr 13y ago
What a weird article. I agree with nearly every individual fact within it, but after reading it, I still don't know the point of the piece. I don't want to jump to conclusions, but given that this piece is mostly criticism of science the part of me that associates "conservatives" with "anti-intellectual reactionaries" suspects a hidden agenda to undermine science or give climate change "skeptics" something to point at and yell about [1]. Do scientists get funding to replicate research? No, not usually. Does replication still happen? Yes replication of a previous work is often step 0 of new research. It happens all the time. Do replication results get published? No, not usually. Unless it's a clear rebuttal of a famous paper. Does this matter? Debatable. Science proceeds slowly, and bad papers tend to be forgotten unless they're easily replicable. It just takes time. Does this mean that we can't trust science? Absolutely not. You just can't trust individual papers, prima facie. This is something that scientists are supposed to learn as undergrads. Just because it's in a journal (even a "good" journal, like Science or Nature -- some would say especially if it's in one of those journals) doesn't mean it's right. What does this tell us about armchair science? It's utterly useless. The reason that you have to be a professional scientist is not because professional scientists are smarter, but because they have a huge depth of knowledge about a particular field. Any working scientist can point out published, cited papers in their field that are total crap. But you can't tell that a paper might be crap unless you've spent years reading all of the literature in the field. Yet people on the internet persist in thinking that they can cherry-pick a single paper from arXiv or PubMed, and make sweeping conclusions about a field. [1] indeed, the usual HN climate-change critics are in this thread, pointing at and yelling about how science is "broken".
- frogpelt 13y ago
  Where did this article mention climate change? If you agree with every fact in the article, why would you look for a hidden agenda? Your comment makes you seem a bit paranoid.
  - timr 13y ago
    It didn't mention climate change. I know from past experience that this line of argument -- indeed, any that casts doubt on scientific research -- is a favorite of the "climate skeptic" world. Moreover, I know that the Economist has a center-right political bias. Maybe they're advocating for something specific here (it's honestly unclear), but given that the Economist almost never writes anything of substance about science, and given their political bias, it isn't at all paranoid to wonder if this article has a subtext. It's called "being an intelligent consumer of media".
0xdeadbeefbabe 13y ago
And this is why http://xkcd.com/836/ http://xkcd.com/836/ could have a fourth scene at the graveyard. Top hat man and his girlfriend stand by his tombstone. Girlfriend says to top hat man something like, "that study turned out to be bogus" or "he was in the control group"
- StavrosK 13y ago
  Science isn't a study, it's the way to make a study. That's like saying the coin toss is bullshit because you didn't win it.
capnrefsmmat 13y ago
I am sometimes amused to read failed replication studies which do not calculate their own statistical power -- so they do not know whether, assuming the original study was correct, they will have the sample size to reliably detect an effect. A failed replication then says nothing about the original conclusions. Statistical error is a hobby of mine. The Economist mentions a few pervasive errors, but there are many more. I've been writing a guide: http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/ http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/ One amusing example is the oft-quoted statistic that 3 million Americans use a gun in self-defense each year. The true figure is several orders of magnitude smaller. Follow the link for more details: http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/p-value.html#taking-up-arms-against-the-base-rate-fallacy http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/p-value.html#taking-up-ar...
- guelo 13y ago
  Nice article, but copying an xkcd image without copying the image's tooltip text is criminal.
  - andrewflnr 13y ago
    Um, you mean in the sarcastic sense?
    - PakG1 13y ago
      The tooltip text is half the joke a lot of the time.
  - olalonde 13y ago
    Which is: "'So, uh, we did the green study again and got no link. It was probably a--' 'RESEARCH CONFLICTED ON GREEN JELLY BEAN/ACNE LINK; MORE STUDY RECOMMENDED!'"
- cousin_it 13y ago
  That's great work and I want more of it!
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
shawndumas 13y ago
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble/print http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-t...
danielharan 13y ago
Given all the talk about "Open access" and reforming peer review, one of the most important things to fix should be publication bias. Positive and negative results both need to be published, along with all the tools and data. Does anyone know if there are groups aiming for that standard?
haberman 13y ago
The fundamental problem as I see it: science can either produce a high rate of unreliable results or a low rate of reliable results, but the market demands a high rate of reliable results. The market produces the current situation because the rate of results is much easier to observe than their reliability. No one wants to fund a study only to get no result out of it. So they end up getting an unreliable result instead.
- icelancer 13y ago
  >The fundamental problem as I see it: science can either produce a high rate of unreliable results or a low rate of reliable results, but the market demands a high rate of reliable results. Well said, but the market will accept a high rate of unreliable results because no one knows better.
- ballard 13y ago
  Interesting. Does this seem like an opportunity to measure reputation from influence, results and funding utilization? Is any site (lexis, etc) already trying this?
Strilanc 13y ago
Their starting example of priming reminds me of the post/video "Fixing Toxic Online Behavior in League of Legends" [1], where the makers of LoL discuss (among other things) testing how well priming was reducing toxic behavior. They had absurd results like changing the color of intro text giving (IIRC) ~30% reductions, and were (IMO) obviously accidentally cherry picking. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5616541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5616541
snowwrestler 13y ago
Probably not a great idea to learn about science in a magazine called The Economist. (Yes, I am familiar with this famous and well-liked magazine. Its reputation does not rest on its science reporting.)
tensor 13y ago
The only important discussion to have is "how can we improve our scientific method." Complaining about deficiencies without offering improvements is not particularly useful. There is no alternative to science. The posters here that are suggesting that people should not trust science ought to be shunned. It is good to be skeptical of particular studies, but if you discard "science" you are reverting to a position of complete ignorance. Always remember that without an alternative model, if you discard a body of research the only valid fallback is that you don't know anything.
- icelancer 13y ago
  >Always remember that without an alternative model, if you discard a body of research the only valid fallback is that you don't know anything. In the field I am in (sports biomechanics), this would be a vast improvement on things.
ballard 13y ago
20 m€ on rigor: Institute the "ten {wo,}man rule" http://impruvism.com/world-war-z/ http://impruvism.com/world-war-z/ And more readily, easily reproducible experiments. And regular joke / high-quality fake papers.
thisisnotatest 13y ago
How about a karma/bittorrent system for researchers to encourage replication? In such a system, the "application fee" for submitting your experiment to a journal would be that you must also replicate someone else's experiment that was also submitted to the journal. This system could scale arbitrarily.
- sungx105 13y ago
  This would not be a realistic solution, because the time it can take to do experiments might be an extremely long time. This would make it so that everyone would be (at best) half as productive as before, since they would have to spend the time necessary to carry out the replication. This would only be worsened if what you were required to replicate was not in a similar area to the researcher's area of expertise.
SeanDav 13y ago
I suppose it is naive to believe that scientific papers should not be published until they are peer reviewed and more importantly, their results duplicated. If this is impractical there should be separate sections in journals for non-replicated and replicated results or perhaps there needs to be separate tiers, with something like the "Gold Tier" only containing papers that have had their results replicated multiple times in multiple countries. Probably wishful thinking, but it seems clear, something needs to change.

257 points by martincmartin 13y ago

The guy who wrote Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had a problem with the scientific method too: "Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones. The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thoughts and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself." I used to think (10 years ago) he was wrong or concerned about something that would happen far in the future beyond my lifespan.

zafka 13y ago
Thanks for mentioning this book. I think this book by Robert Pirsig should be on the short list of "Must Reads" of any true hacker
dredmorbius 13y ago
Robert Pirsig. I'm re-reading ZatAoMM now, first time in about 20 years. I'm not entirely convinced that Phaedrus's dilemma poses a true conflict. Science is evolution toward a more complete truth, and it's expected that any given step will be incomplete. Of conflicting or alternate theories, often one will be simpler than the other (Occam's Razor). In other cases, there may be more than one correct answer (wave/particle duality). I don't see either circumstance toppling science.

cantankerous 13y ago

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn has some interesting commentary on how invalid scientific models of our world are eventually (and painfully) discharged. It's the book that coined the term "paradigm shift". This article tends to focus more on bad science, but I think the book is still at least partially relevant.

ambler0 13y ago
I agree with you that Kuhn is still worth reading, but perhaps a better intro to Philosophy of Science can be found in Laudan's "Science and Relativism". He is not dismissive of Kuhnian-style relativism, but he is critical of it and helps you see how it fits into the larger debate. At least that's what I remember. It's been a while since college :/ http://www.amazon.com/Science-Relativism-Controversies-Philosophy-Foundations/dp/0226469492 http://www.amazon.com/Science-Relativism-Controversies-Philo...
- 001sky 13y ago
  As a side dish, also perhaps enlightening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untimely_Meditations#On_the_Use_and_Abuse_of_History_for_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untimely_Meditations#On_the_Us...
- dnautics 13y ago
  I argue the best primer is Feynman's "The meaning of it all: Thoughts of a citizen-scientist" and "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". I'm not just linkbaiting HN's love for Feynman: Feynman was an active, practicing scientist and besides being introspective, he had a great knack for explaining things in a perspective accessible to non-scientists. Kuhn is worth reading, though if you are a scientist and want to get a more-in-depth analysis of philosophy of science that is laid out formally.
alexqgb 13y ago
The "painful" bit is key. There's a difference between constantly self-correcting and massively self-correcting, in a sudden, irregular way (known as "punctured equilibrium") only occasionally.
pdonis 13y ago
I'm not a fan of Kuhn, largely because he can be read as saying that, indeed, scientific models that get "overthrown" in a paradigm shift are therefore "invalid". (In the extreme, this leads to complete relativism, the idea that there is no such thing as a "valid" model at all. Kuhn himself has waffled on this point: sometimes he says he didn't really mean to take that extreme view, but other times he says things that are really hard to make sense of in any other way.) That leads people to believe that, for example, Newtonian physics must be "invalid" because it was "overthrown" by relativity. But it's really hard to square that claim with the fact that Newtonian physics (along with many other supposedly "invalid" models) gets used every day to make accurate predictions. I think the bad science described in the article is, at least in part, a reflection of our losing sight of that ultimate objective: we build scientific models of the world in order to make accurate predictions. It's not enough to say, well, I used all the right statistical techniques, I used all the right double-blind control procedures, my results have been replicated. Those things are all necessary, but they're not sufficient; they're not the goal, they're only the starting point. The goal is to make accurate predictions. I think we get a lot of bad science because we don't enforce that requirement enough.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

Technology development is going through a revolution over the last decade or two. The process of teams creating things that have a high degree of precision and detail has been found to overwhelmingly social in nature. That is, while technical skills are irreplaceable, it's the social aspects of developing new things that are much more critical to success than the technical aspects. Many technologists do not get this. To them, anything important must by definition involve some kind of new tech. They fail to see that even in breakout technology development, the social way we construct teams and interact with each other (and our market) is critical. Turns out humans are social animals. And this nature has impacts on all kinds of things, even things that are completely analytic. Science has yet to make this leap. We're still at the stage where the details of the science are published and gushed over. We focus on the science itself instead of the much more interesting and powerful thing: the social structure of how we are conducting our scientific research. There is a slight bit of light on the horizon. People from technical backgrounds are taking a hard look at how we organize our information and work. There are calls for more open science, there are calls to rethink our how we make funding decisions. There are calls for scientists to stop trying to be priests of knowledge -- arbiters of all that is true -- and work more as servants. These are all taken from mistakes the tech community has made and suffered from (and still suffers, in many cases). Let's hope this trend continues.

tensor 13y ago
Given the tech community's tendency towards populism over genuine technical merit, I don't think it is a good model for discovering truth about the world. The tech community is still busy reinventing the 70's poorly, let alone making any real progress. Social is only important in so far is it facilitates communication and progress towards technical understanding.

sambeau 13y ago

Like democracy, science is the worst way to discover truth… apart from all the others.

jacoblyles 13y ago
Status quo apologetics. Ewww.
001sky 13y ago
This would only be interesting if it were (true) that all truths are scientific ones. Of course, this is an absurd proposition. Logical abstraction is not per-se science, but rather art itself. Cue Irony...another counter-example. &tc.

jacoblyles 13y ago

The truth machine is broken. How do we fix it? And why is it that whenever I see a list of the "top 10 most important problems" to solve, this isn't on it? Most educated people take the veracity of published science as given, and we clearly know that's a false assumption. I know we need more transparency in science - sharing of data and code, and negative results. But institutionally, I don't know how we get there with the tools we have. Part of the reason the current system stays in place, despite failing at its charter mission, is billions of dollars of annual subsidies. Changing the way research dollars are allocated would change the structure of the academic enterprise, but that is incredibly hard to do. Few systems have as much momentum.

pdonis 13y ago
Most educated people take the veracity of published science as given That's the root problem right there.
dnautics 13y ago
It's not just the subsidies, but how they are awarded - right on with the "structure of the academic enterprise". Consider: To get promoted to professorship, you have to selected by slighly hoarier professors; to be selected, you have to have published works, which are (anonymously) reviewed by other professors, and be awarded grants with (anonymous) review committees of other professors. You probably went to grad school under the tutelage of professors in the same circle... And at least in the past scientists were sufficiently generalist that you had a wide pool of fellows who were reviewing your work at all stages; now we have siloed subdisciplines (like "chemical biology" - which, mind you is not the same as "biological chemistry" or "biochemistry"), and the emergence of "interdisciplinary research" which somehow instead of encouraging generalism, instead promoted dilettantes who couldn't hack it in either of their parent fields... Is there any wonder why research is increasingly unreliable?
pnathan 13y ago
So there's an interesting topic hidden in your comment. What is truth? I don't mean to ask that in a flippant way. I mean to ask it in a way that has an answer - or at least a reliable set of answers. Of course this is a philosophical debate of long standing, but it has a lot of relevance for today. What do you mean by truth? How do you attain to truth? Is truth what is objectively perceived? If so, how do you determine what is the shared subjective perception of the exterior world? Is truth possible to attain to? Should we instead focus on finding and sharing working(up to tolerance) models of the reality we encounter? This is sort of a big debate in philosophy of science circles. You can see traces of it in Popper, Feyerabend, and a few others you can rummage up on Wikipedia. These are the questions that frame how you do research, how you present research, and the expectations of reliability of research.

pnathan 13y ago

In my experience at the university performing graduate research - * Newness is prized * Replicating old science is not prized * Funding and papers happens for breakthroughs In software engineering - * many bugs in code creep through exacting peer reviews. Recapping the short list: new things make you money, reviewing things is error prone, replicating old things doesn't make you money until someone wants to rely on them. Hmmmm. The disincentives to replicate unapplied research speak for themselves. What then is to be done beyond hand-wringing and moaning? Several things have to happen: First, grants need to be given for replication of research- replication needs to be an thing that is frequently done. Second, papers (dis)proving prior results (or disproving, period) need to be a recognized category in journals. I do not mean that disproving someone else's pet theory in favor of yours; I mean disproving the result, period; regardless of whether it helps advance your particular line of work. From someone who's currently in industry (and is looking towards going back for the PhD), I encourage the academics to open up and/or push the area of "negative results" as a recognized category of paper. If you have graduate students that can't reproduce prior work - please have them publish that! There have been occasional comments about Journals of Negative Results; maybe those could come to fruition sometime. :-)

vortmeester 13y ago
As an experimental physicist, I want to point out that negative results do get published -- for example, much of the experimental work on gravity amounts to the showing of no measurable difference from theoretical expectation, to a high degree of accuracy [1] -- but writing the papers for them is much harder than writing up positive results. The reason is simple: you have to convincingly show that your failure to show a result is not just due to your mistakes. Here is an analogy to a trivial situation. Which is more convincing? Positive result: By following the steps in the documentation, I installed MS Word on my computer. Therefore, MS Word can be installed on my computer. Negative result: I followed the steps in the documentation, but MS Word still doesn't work on my computer. Therefore, MS Word cannot be installed on my computer. If you're like me, you barely pause after reading the positive result, but the negative one brings to mind piles of questions: did you have the right version for your OS? Do you have enough disk space? Does your computer work properly in other respects? A really tricky problem could take ages to figure out. At some point it's probably going to seem wiser just to abandon the problem, and get a different computer or a different program. So, as a scientist, when you're faced with a negative result, you know you have a battle ahead of you. If you don't think anyone will care very much about your result, moving on to the next project may seem to be the right choice. It's a tough situation, and I sympathize with anyone facing it. And is it the right choice for science as a whole? Sometimes it isn't, but sometimes it is. [1] For one such example, check out the Eotvos experiment and its many descendants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eötvös_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eötvös_experiment

tokenadult 13y ago

This is an excellent overview article on an important topic. It mentions many of the most influential authors on the topic of accuracy of scientific publications. Hacker News readers may enjoy "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"[1] by Peter Norvig, a LISP hacker who is now director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research. Norvig's essay is my all-time favorite link to share in a Hacker News comment. That's because we see submissions here every day of preliminary studies that can be analyzed by Norvig's checklist on research issues to look for when reading about a scientific finding. I discuss psychology research weekly with a group of psychologists who study human behavior genetics in a "journal club" (graduate seminar course). Those researchers have told me about other researchers who are trying to clean up the published literature in psychology, for example Jelte Wicherts, whose article "Letting the daylight in: reviewing the reviewers and other ways to maximize transparency in science"[2] in an open-access journal suggests general procedures to improve scientific publishing, for example by changing the incentive structure around reviewing papers submitted for publication. Another helpful researcher on statistical tests to verify results is Uri Simonsohn. The papers he and his colleagues produce[3] are thought-provoking, pointed, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. [1] http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html [2] Jelte M. Wicherts, Rogier A. Kievit, Marjan Bakker and Denny Borsboom. Letting the daylight in: reviewing the reviewers and other ways to maximize transparency in science. Front. Comput. Neurosci., 03 April 2012 doi: 10.3389/fncom.2012.00020 http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2012.00020/full http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.338... [3] http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/ http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/

sillysaurus2 13y ago
Norvig's essay is an absolute must-read. You may learn more counter-intuitive facts in the next hour than in the last week. For convenience to mobile users, here's the link again: http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
foxlisk 13y ago
Norving missed an excellent chance to title this paper "The structure and interpretation of science experiments"

Theodores 13y ago

This article re-hashes much of the content of Ben Goldacre's book 'Bad Pharma', however it does not propose any solutions (Ben Goldacre does). There is plenty that can be done with legislation, as a customer of healthcare and in clinical trials. If all trials - good results or bad - were published then we would be half way there. http://www.badscience.net/2013/10/why-and-how-i-wrote-bad-pharma/ http://www.badscience.net/2013/10/why-and-how-i-wrote-bad-ph... The article mentions the company 'Amgen' and how they were not able to reproduce some earlier trial results. Alarm bells went off for me right there at the word 'Amgen'. They were the company that had the wonder drug EPO, as in of Lance Armstrong fame. That story is truly fascinating and best pieced together from the book 'Blood Medicine': http://www.bloodmedicine.info/ http://www.bloodmedicine.info/ ...and from the cycling scandal books that have came out recently, e.g. Tyler Hamilton's.

Tichy 13y ago

I wonder if much of it is not being corrected because it simply isn't important enough? Like the example of "think about a professor before an exam to get higher scores". I suspect that if for example some medication against HIV is found to not work, it will be thrown out again quickly.

pasbesoin 13y ago

I haven't read the article, yet (in a bit of a hurry ATM...), but a crucial part of science is (independent) reproduction and verification. Any number of things stand in the way of this: Funding and funding restrictions, counter-productive IP laws, "cult of celebrity" (to the detriment of those quiet souls who "quiety grind away"), etc. I've been screwed over more than once by "medical science" and medical "best practices", so I have been somewhat sensitized to incongruities in this area. A recent, emerging big one: Statins, and more so the premise upon which they became ubiquitous, stand upon increasingly shaky ground -- at least with regard to their current, widespread prescription and use. E.g. http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2013/03/09/895-the-great-cholesterol-myth/ http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2013/03/09/895-the-great-chol...

timr 13y ago

What a weird article. I agree with nearly every individual fact within it, but after reading it, I still don't know the point of the piece. I don't want to jump to conclusions, but given that this piece is mostly criticism of science the part of me that associates "conservatives" with "anti-intellectual reactionaries" suspects a hidden agenda to undermine science or give climate change "skeptics" something to point at and yell about [1]. Do scientists get funding to replicate research? No, not usually. Does replication still happen? Yes replication of a previous work is often step 0 of new research. It happens all the time. Do replication results get published? No, not usually. Unless it's a clear rebuttal of a famous paper. Does this matter? Debatable. Science proceeds slowly, and bad papers tend to be forgotten unless they're easily replicable. It just takes time. Does this mean that we can't trust science? Absolutely not. You just can't trust individual papers, prima facie. This is something that scientists are supposed to learn as undergrads. Just because it's in a journal (even a "good" journal, like Science or Nature -- some would say especially if it's in one of those journals) doesn't mean it's right. What does this tell us about armchair science? It's utterly useless. The reason that you have to be a professional scientist is not because professional scientists are smarter, but because they have a huge depth of knowledge about a particular field. Any working scientist can point out published, cited papers in their field that are total crap. But you can't tell that a paper might be crap unless you've spent years reading all of the literature in the field. Yet people on the internet persist in thinking that they can cherry-pick a single paper from arXiv or PubMed, and make sweeping conclusions about a field. [1] indeed, the usual HN climate-change critics are in this thread, pointing at and yelling about how science is "broken".

frogpelt 13y ago
Where did this article mention climate change? If you agree with every fact in the article, why would you look for a hidden agenda? Your comment makes you seem a bit paranoid.
- timr 13y ago
  It didn't mention climate change. I know from past experience that this line of argument -- indeed, any that casts doubt on scientific research -- is a favorite of the "climate skeptic" world. Moreover, I know that the Economist has a center-right political bias. Maybe they're advocating for something specific here (it's honestly unclear), but given that the Economist almost never writes anything of substance about science, and given their political bias, it isn't at all paranoid to wonder if this article has a subtext. It's called "being an intelligent consumer of media".

0xdeadbeefbabe 13y ago

And this is why http://xkcd.com/836/ http://xkcd.com/836/ could have a fourth scene at the graveyard. Top hat man and his girlfriend stand by his tombstone. Girlfriend says to top hat man something like, "that study turned out to be bogus" or "he was in the control group"

StavrosK 13y ago
Science isn't a study, it's the way to make a study. That's like saying the coin toss is bullshit because you didn't win it.

capnrefsmmat 13y ago

I am sometimes amused to read failed replication studies which do not calculate their own statistical power -- so they do not know whether, assuming the original study was correct, they will have the sample size to reliably detect an effect. A failed replication then says nothing about the original conclusions. Statistical error is a hobby of mine. The Economist mentions a few pervasive errors, but there are many more. I've been writing a guide: http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/ http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/ One amusing example is the oft-quoted statistic that 3 million Americans use a gun in self-defense each year. The true figure is several orders of magnitude smaller. Follow the link for more details: http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/p-value.html#taking-up-arms-against-the-base-rate-fallacy http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/p-value.html#taking-up-ar...

guelo 13y ago
Nice article, but copying an xkcd image without copying the image's tooltip text is criminal.
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  Um, you mean in the sarcastic sense?
  - PakG1 13y ago
    The tooltip text is half the joke a lot of the time.
- olalonde 13y ago
  Which is: "'So, uh, we did the green study again and got no link. It was probably a--' 'RESEARCH CONFLICTED ON GREEN JELLY BEAN/ACNE LINK; MORE STUDY RECOMMENDED!'"
cousin_it 13y ago
That's great work and I want more of it!

deleted 13y ago

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shawndumas 13y ago

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble/print http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-t...

danielharan 13y ago

Given all the talk about "Open access" and reforming peer review, one of the most important things to fix should be publication bias. Positive and negative results both need to be published, along with all the tools and data. Does anyone know if there are groups aiming for that standard?

haberman 13y ago

The fundamental problem as I see it: science can either produce a high rate of unreliable results or a low rate of reliable results, but the market demands a high rate of reliable results. The market produces the current situation because the rate of results is much easier to observe than their reliability. No one wants to fund a study only to get no result out of it. So they end up getting an unreliable result instead.

icelancer 13y ago
>The fundamental problem as I see it: science can either produce a high rate of unreliable results or a low rate of reliable results, but the market demands a high rate of reliable results. Well said, but the market will accept a high rate of unreliable results because no one knows better.
ballard 13y ago
Interesting. Does this seem like an opportunity to measure reputation from influence, results and funding utilization? Is any site (lexis, etc) already trying this?

Strilanc 13y ago

Their starting example of priming reminds me of the post/video "Fixing Toxic Online Behavior in League of Legends" [1], where the makers of LoL discuss (among other things) testing how well priming was reducing toxic behavior. They had absurd results like changing the color of intro text giving (IIRC) ~30% reductions, and were (IMO) obviously accidentally cherry picking. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5616541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5616541

snowwrestler 13y ago

Probably not a great idea to learn about science in a magazine called The Economist. (Yes, I am familiar with this famous and well-liked magazine. Its reputation does not rest on its science reporting.)

tensor 13y ago

The only important discussion to have is "how can we improve our scientific method." Complaining about deficiencies without offering improvements is not particularly useful. There is no alternative to science. The posters here that are suggesting that people should not trust science ought to be shunned. It is good to be skeptical of particular studies, but if you discard "science" you are reverting to a position of complete ignorance. Always remember that without an alternative model, if you discard a body of research the only valid fallback is that you don't know anything.

icelancer 13y ago
>Always remember that without an alternative model, if you discard a body of research the only valid fallback is that you don't know anything. In the field I am in (sports biomechanics), this would be a vast improvement on things.

ballard 13y ago

20 m€ on rigor: Institute the "ten {wo,}man rule" http://impruvism.com/world-war-z/ http://impruvism.com/world-war-z/ And more readily, easily reproducible experiments. And regular joke / high-quality fake papers.

thisisnotatest 13y ago

How about a karma/bittorrent system for researchers to encourage replication? In such a system, the "application fee" for submitting your experiment to a journal would be that you must also replicate someone else's experiment that was also submitted to the journal. This system could scale arbitrarily.

sungx105 13y ago
This would not be a realistic solution, because the time it can take to do experiments might be an extremely long time. This would make it so that everyone would be (at best) half as productive as before, since they would have to spend the time necessary to carry out the replication. This would only be worsened if what you were required to replicate was not in a similar area to the researcher's area of expertise.

SeanDav 13y ago

I suppose it is naive to believe that scientific papers should not be published until they are peer reviewed and more importantly, their results duplicated. If this is impractical there should be separate sections in journals for non-replicated and replicated results or perhaps there needs to be separate tiers, with something like the "Gold Tier" only containing papers that have had their results replicated multiple times in multiple countries. Probably wishful thinking, but it seems clear, something needs to change.