
To an alarming degree, science is not self-correcting - martincmartin
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble
======
tokenadult
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/10.338...](http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2012.00020/full)

[3] [http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/](http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/)

~~~
shanusmagnus
This beautiful (parent) comment, in contrast to the main article, actually
contains links and references to the items it refers to. Is there some
compelling reason I don't understand why _so_ many magazines / websites, even
high profile reputable ones, cannot manage to link or cite?

~~~
cousin_it
I suspect the reason is that outbound links drive traffic away from ads and
internal links. The more visitors you have, the more profit you lose by adding
outbound links... It's sad and I wish there was some way to fix the
incentives.

~~~
sdoering
That's exactly what people in charge fear in my industry (working in online
publishing). The do fear, that the people find the linked ressources better,
so that they may never even return.

Kind of like the fear of becoming obsolete. But instead of testing and maybe
even becoming better, they just forbid us to link out.

------
pnathan
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
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)

~~~
NAFV_P
Nobody has yet mentioned a very well known negative result... the Michelson-
Morley experiment, a complicated and time consuming endeavour.

------
capnrefsmmat
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-
ar...](http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/p-value.html#taking-up-arms-against-
the-base-rate-fallacy)

~~~
guelo
Nice article, but copying an xkcd image without copying the image's tooltip
text is criminal.

~~~
andrewflnr
Um, you mean in the sarcastic sense?

~~~
PakG1
The tooltip text is half the joke a lot of the time.

------
jacoblyles
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.

~~~
pnathan
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.

~~~
aharrison
In my experience, when most engineering-oriented people use the word truth,
they (wittingly or unwittling) mean the pragmatic definition of "allows us to
make stronger-than-previous predictive models about something". Most of the
argument in philosophy of science circles strikes me as meta-interesting, not
eminently relevant to the practice of science.

Especially when dealing with psychology, a lot of those "what, exactly, is an
electron" sort of deeply epistemological statements are not really asked,
because we have enough trouble with the simplistic models we have.

So yeah, my recommendation (for what it is worth) is to always assume "most
predictive model available" when someone says truth, and be aware that you are
making that assumption and that simplification.

~~~
pnathan
That's a reasonable approach when talking with people who have sort of day to
day experience with data and systems. Unfortunately, this doesn't per se hold
true when talking with people from other disciplines. Some people hold truth
as a platonic thing: it's either true or not true, and new research disproving
old things _implies falsehood_ , not a less accurate model. Tackling the
elephant in that room, I'm not even talking about religious discussions, just
normal discussions on physics research being found out.

A historian could speak more pertinently to this, but my understanding is that
in 50s-60s "middle" USA, scientists were pretty much treated as oracles of
divinity by a great deal of the common population.

~~~
aharrison
I agree and have run into that problem myself. Unfortunately, fixing that
impression takes time and to my knowledge there isn't any real way to explain
the problem with "Platonic truth" as a tangent off of a discussion around
research journals, for instance. It requires a full step back and a couple
hours of discussion to explain it at all, if you haven't been exposed to it
before.

If anyone has any recommendations on that front, I am all ears.

------
haberman
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
>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.

------
cantankerous
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
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-
Philo...](http://www.amazon.com/Science-Relativism-Controversies-Philosophy-
Foundations/dp/0226469492)

~~~
dnautics
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.

------
timr
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".

~~~
saraid216
It sort of amuses me that there are HN climate change denialists, but there
aren't really any HN creationists.

~~~
crassus
Hacker 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-
proje...](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/14/90-climate-model-projectons-
versus-reality/)

[2] [http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-
technology/2157446...](http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-
technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-
emissions)

~~~
timr
It'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.

~~~
guscost
Argumentum ad verecundiam.

~~~
saraid216
Not actually a fallacy, even the informal kind, despite the Latin name.

------
DanielBMarkham
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
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.

------
Theodores
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-
ph...](http://www.badscience.net/2013/10/why-and-how-i-wrote-bad-pharma/)

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
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.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
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.

~~~
dredmorbius
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.

------
pasbesoin
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-
chol...](http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2013/03/09/895-the-great-cholesterol-
myth/)

------
tensor
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
>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.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
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
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.

------
danielharan
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?

------
SeanDav
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.

------
snowwrestler
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.)

------
Strilanc
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)

------
thisisnotatest
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
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.

------
ballard
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.

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

~~~
001sky
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.

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

