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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 ju
by 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 agoWhere 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 agoIt 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".
- mnemonicsloth 13y agoEvidently you don't consume the Economist very often. http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/09/ipcc-climate-change-report http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/09/ipcc-climate-... To put it in the language you seem to prefer, Bill O'Reilly thinks the Economist leans left. I disagree with Mr. O'Reilly's employers and will not send them traffic, but support for this claim is easily googled. ETA: The link above is more flip than I'd like. Try this: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21587224-all-means-question-climate-policies-facts-are-facts-stubborn-things http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21587224-all-means-que...
- timr 13y agoI don't think that the Economist is a reactionary right-wing publication (at least, not the editorial board), but I do think there are people on its staff who are sympathetic to the climate change denialists. That said, I think the piece is puzzling, not that I'm sure it's a right-wing hatchet job on science.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoEconomist is conservative (erm, right) by European standards. It just happens that it comes out as fairly left by American standards, given that we are so right of the continent.
- ceras 13y agoI am a "liberal" and a huge fan of The Economist. I don't find this to be an accurate assessment. Someone else already linked to their climate change stance, and in my experience their economic stances are generally supported in the academic community.
- cracell 13y agoHe's saying that he wonders if the point of the article is to give those that deny scientific studies in a non-scientific manner ammo. Something they can point to to rebuke scientific studies because they don't believe the scientific study is valid. I too didn't understand the point of this article. Nor how it showed that science is not self-correcting. To me it just talked about some issues with scientific research but didn't support it's headline at all. I've never heard anyone claim that science was self-correcting in the short term, these things take decades and sometimes even centuries to self-correct. And honestly that's ok. Science is all about having the best answer we can have, not the right answer. It's impossible to know we are right beyond the shadow of a doubt. We need to scrutinize how we research and improve our methods as we figure out how to but that doesn't mean science has some major issue. That's jut how it works and how it has historically worked as far as I know.
- hsitz 13y agoI also think the linked article was somewhat strange. Or maybe just linkbaity. The title can be paraphrased as "To an alarming degree, science is not self-correcting." However, the article actually describes the way science is supposed to work, which is self-correcting. The main criticism in the article seems to be that, in much of current scientific practice, the self-correction doesn't happen immediately. Well, it would be helpful to know: (1) how does current state of self-correction compare to different times in the past, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 200 years ago?, (2) what happens over the long term to papers that aren't refuted immediately but which later turn out to be obviously wrong? do they hang around and have a negative impact on progress of science? I'm sure there are more questions. Another strangeness in the article: The article begins by touting a concern over a 1998 "priming" study. In the third paragraph, the article states that there have been nine (9!) subsequent studies that have failed to replicate the 1998 study's result. Is that not an example of the scientific self-correction working quite well? The article complains, "Either the original research is flawed (as the replicators claim) or the replications are (as many of the original researchers on priming contend). Either way, something is awry." Yes, something is awry. But it's hard to see how it's the scientific method/process itself, which seems to be doing exactly what it's supposed to: calling the 1998 paper into question. (Is the main concern here just that more bad or questionable science is being published than in the past? I'm sure that's true, but there are also many more studies being published in this era and it seems not surprising that overall quality would decline.) Like some others at HN, I get concerned when I see pieces like this that the science-haters will latch on to and use to discredit the scientific method itself. The article itself _should not_ be taken that way, by anyone who understands science. But there are many who don't understand science, who are anti-science, etc.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago> The article begins by touting a concern over a 1998 "priming" study. In the third paragraph, the article states that there have been nine (9!) subsequent studies that have failed to replicate the 1998 study's result. Is that not an example of the scientific self-correction working quite well? Ideally, you'd like to see the original study being discredited before the point where 9 separate studies have exposed serious problems with it (and it's not clear that it's been discredited yet). Papers continue to pick up citations even after they've been formally retracted; that's also not a good example of self-correction working well even though the retraction process is supposed to be self-correction. Correction hasn't happened until people stop believing in problematic papers.
- mrab 13y agoWith a title "To an alarming degree..." it immediately feels like a persuasive paper. Who thinks it's alarming? From the sound of it, everyone should (or does) think this is alarming. But it may be a stretch to say this is someone trying to discredit global warming. Science isn't broken. People claim what they see, sometimes they are wrong, sometimes they are right. But eventually we find out the truth.
- saraid216 13y agoIt sort of amuses me that there are HN climate change denialists, but there aren't really any HN creationists.
- crassus 13y agoHacker News has climate change "denialists" because climate models are terrible at predicting global temperature[1][2]. Once scientists gain the ability to make accurate predictions, more logic-minded hackers will go along. Hackers like predictive models with a good track record, a la Nate Silver. They dislike emotional bullying. [1] http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/14/90-climate-model-projectons-versus-reality/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/14/90-climate-model-proje... [2] http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2157446...
- timr 13y agoIt's quite clear that "hackers" don't understand enough about the research to make informed criticisms. Cherry picking two measurements of temperature data does not make for a convincing rebuttal against the overwhelming independent lines of evidence summarized in (among other places), the IPCC reports.
- crassus 13y agoAh yes. I need to listen to authority and ignore the fact that observed data are falling out the bottom side of their models' 95% confidence intervals. This is how science is done in the modern age.
- pdonis 13y agothe usual HN climate-change critics are in this thread, pointing at and yelling about how science is "broken". I don't think the current situation in climate science shows that "science is broken". I think it shows that climate scientists have been too quick to claim the credibility of Science when their work does not measure up to that standard. (Climate science is certainly not the only field that does this: much of what passes for "scientific research" in the social sciences doesn't meet the standard either.) That's not to say we shouldn't be trying to figure out how the climate works; it's saying that you don't claim the mantle of Science until you can back it up.
- gilgoomesh 13y ago> climate scientists have been too quick to claim the credibility of Science when their work does not measure up to that standard What the fuck are you talking about? Observations and models are repeated and challenged far more in climate science than most other fields. It is a good example of science working exactly as it should. I'm not sure where you think climate science has gone astray but considering how expensive and difficult controlled experiments in climate science are, I think climate science does an amazingly good job. To clarify: yes, there are lots of bad papers in climate science (see Sturgeon's Law) but science does not require every paper to be accurate (in fact, you need a few extremist ideas to try to shake things up). Science requires rigorous retesting of theories to narrow the target and climate science is one field where that's happening all the time. Climate science's continuous observations does a pretty good job at sidelining inaccurate papers within a couple years (a quick turnaround all things considered). Climate science's problem is non scientists misrepresenting, misinterpreting and misunderstanding. The science itself is exactly what you'd want for every scientific field.
- ISL 13y ago> Observations and models are repeated and challenged far more in climate science than any other field. That may be an overstatement; see the Standard Model of physics.
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- guscost 13y agoThanks for avoiding the strawman "denier" nonsense, but I think you're looking for the phrase "CAGW-informed-legislation critics." Why would a rational person criticize the assumption that climate changes?
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago"Climate change" in this context is short-hand for "human modified climate change" and generally refers to climate change accelerated by human production of CO2. That said, criticising assumptions is perfectly rational.
- guscost 13y agoPerhaps I meant to say "practical person" instead.
- dnautics 13y ago>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. No. I promise you, there are scientists who literally cannot bring themselves to believe that any of the papers are crap, who buy into the Science as authority dogma. There are also scientists who do not have a depth of knowledge in any field, much less their own.
- icelancer 13y ago>Science proceeds slowly, and bad papers tend to be forgotten unless they're easily replicable. It just takes time. Tell that to the large group of anti-vaccine zealots.
- smsm42 13y agoWhen you're trying to protect science by finding nefarious motives among those who criticize it and start not with if the criticism is fair and to the point but if it can be used by your ideological enemies - you're doing it wrong. I.e. if you're in the political meeting, you're doing it exactly right, if facts are on your side, pound the facts, if not, pound the table. But if you're concerned about science as a way to expand our objective knowledge and not as a way to provide a dressing for your political ideas, whatever they could be - it is wrong.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]