
Science Isn’t Broken (2015) - KC8ZKF
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/
======
averagewall
My pet idea for making science less wrong is to maintain a citation graph of
all papers. Then when a problem is found with any paper, every other one
downstream from it is automatically flagged as at risk of being wrong. Now all
those authors (or others) have to go back and re-evaluate how that citation
was used and how it affects their result. Once they decide it's OK, they
update their paper and remove the flag. If it's not OK then their paper is
retracted or flagged as wrong or simply keeps its at-risk flag if it's not
important enough for anybody to bother re-checking it.

This way, people will be reluctant to cite too many useless papers for their
friends, and will be reluctant to depend on unreliable ones. Work with good
methodology would be more popular to cite or rely on.

Maybe peer review could even become optional this way. If other researchers
trust your work enough to risk their own papers by citing it, that would act
as a peer approval in the long term. Actual peer review would only be needed
to give an immediate indication of the quality.

We would first need to solve the versioning problem where there's no way to
update a paper when mistakes are discovered or simply to improve it.

~~~
throwaway287391
> My pet idea for making science less wrong is to maintain a citation graph of
> all papers. Then when a problem is found with any paper, every other one
> downstream from it is automatically flagged as at risk of being wrong. Now
> all those authors (or others) have to go back and re-evaluate how that
> citation was used and how it affects their result. Once they decide it's OK,
> they update their paper and remove the flag. If it's not OK then their paper
> is retracted or flagged as wrong or simply keeps its at-risk flag if it's
> not important enough for anybody to bother re-checking it.

This is an interesting idea, but I don't know what real-world problem it would
actually solve. As someone who reads a lot of scientific papers, I can't think
of a single one whose correctness is actually _dependent_ on the correctness
of the results of a paper it cites, as though the paper in question is "buggy"
because it "calls another paper as a subroutine" and that subroutine is buggy.
Could you give an example or two of this?

I could see this making sense in mathematics since mathematical proofs really
do "call other papers as subroutines" (theorems), but not so much in science.

~~~
nonbel
>"As someone who reads a lot of scientific papers, I can't think of a single
one whose correctness is actually dependent on the correctness of the results
of a paper it cites"

What field are you reading where each paper is independent of all the others?
As the most obvious example, in biomed pretty much every paper says something
like "as done previously[ref x, y]" in the methods section. It is an extremely
annoying, but very common, practice (usually refs x and y contain somewhat
different methods descriptions and/or also contain the "as done previously"
phrase). There are many other ways the papers depend on each other too ("we
used these cells because they don't express this protein[ref z]", etc)

~~~
peteretep

        > > whose correctness is actually
        > > dependent on the correctness of the
        > > results of *a* paper it cites
    
        > where each paper is independent of
        > *all* the others
    

These are not describing the same thing

~~~
mekarpeles
If I understand, the author is suggesting something like pagerank for
axiomatic correctness where a paper's score can be interpreted per paper (in
terms of some binary promise of "correctness") even if the score is computed
by the weighted correctness of the papers it represents.

Really, the information should be abstracted away from the paper, a la
freebase or wikidata, and there should be strict rules (e.g. the protocols
stackoverflow enforces) such that no cycles can occur, such that propositions
can be resolved to axioms, and such that it is practical to compute scores in
a finite period of time with reasonable resource constraints...

See also gitxiv.org (at attempt at literate research for computer science and
physics papers that can be paired with code). It doesn't address the problem
described, but if statements of a paper are codified (e.g. curry howard
isomorphism) in a strict way, it makes it easier for "linked statements" to
have a quantifiable value.

------
pc2g4d
This is a nice summary of fivethirtyeight's science crisis work, but (as with
most treatments of the subject) it leaves me fundamentally unsatisfied.

Apparently we've identified the problem enough to say "there's a problem". We
can say "look at all the ways you can manipulate this analysis to achieve the
desired outcome". We can say "gosh, science is harder than we thought". But it
seems we're still far from a convincing solution.

The fact that statistical analysis is so liable to manipulation seems to call
the entire thing into question. In the article they take comfort from the fact
that many of the labs analyzing the red card/race data arrived at similar
conclusions. One would assume this is because they made similar choices in the
analysis. But what says those were the right sorts of choices? Could it not
simply be that the labs shared the same biases and errors, making that outcome
more common? Is a proper analysis really determined by (essentially)
democratic vote? If that's what we've arrived at, it gives me less rather than
more confidence in the robustness of the scientific process.

It feels like something fundamental has to be reimagined. It's difficult to
prove things about the world---but maybe it's actually near-impossible? Or
maybe we need to get real about the cost of actually demonstrating anything
reliably. Instead of individual labs running one-off experiments it becomes
researchers collaborating openly to build the perfect experiments, which are
then run by many different labs, then analyzed collectively in the open for
strengths and weaknesses, then reformulated, sent out again, and so on
iteratively until at the end of years of research one little bit of probably-
truth drips out the bottom of the system.

But that bit would be something we could build on.

~~~
tpetricek
Maybe the thing that needs to be reimagined is the naive image of science as
an infallible way of always getting true answers. Science works, just not in
as simple way as one might naively think. Feyerabend's "Against Method" is my
favourite place to start :-).

------
soperj
Science isn't broken... here's a bunch of ways that people cheat?

Science itself can never be broken, but when people are cheating the system
that makes it effective to actually figure out what is true and what isn't,
for personal gain, then that system is broken.

~~~
NobodyRalph
Science is a people-driven system of acquiring knowledge. If people can cheat
the system, then the system (science) is broken.

~~~
AstralStorm
The answer then is "propose a better one".

Unconstructive criticism is worse than non-constructive mathematical proofs,
as those tend to further actual results later.

------
theprop
I know tons of scientists, post-docs, lab heads.

It's _WAY_ too hard to be a scientist. The kind of salary and other sacrifices
scientists are asked to make are unfair and surely deter many to leave
science.

Science is the only thing moving everything forward and if the funding
strategy is look for irrational people who will work insanely hard for next-
to-nothing salaries...it doesn't sound like a great strategy.

------
pottersbasilisk
Science a huge pr problem, one so bad you might as well say science is broken.

The average person is losing faith in science because of high profile
failures, and the distrust is only increasing.

I fear Nasim Talib is right.

[https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-
idiot-13211e...](https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-
idiot-13211e2d0577#.pbipdn1dg)

~~~
bsder
> Science a huge pr problem, one so bad you might as well say science is
> broken.

Science has a huge PR problem in that it is _FAR_ less funded than the people
with money and power whom it sometimes comes into conflict with.

------
Analemma_
I think the most damning thing to come out of the replication crisis was when
they asked a bunch of scientists to place bets on whether a given paper (with
p < 0.05) would replicate, and it turned out these bets were right quite often
([https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-tell-good-
studie...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-tell-good-studies-from-
bad-bet-on-them/)).

That shouldn't be possible! Science is supposed to be the best possible
epistemological methodology, and here it is being beaten in "success rate of
determining true from false" by guessing. What's immensely frustrating is that
it's not a question of whether we're just not smart enough to tell true from
false, we clearly have the power (since the guesses were often right) but
we're not using it. Whatever "truth compass" the guessers were using should be
part of the scientific process somehow. That's what is "broken".

~~~
whatshisface
That "truth compass" they used was reading the method section, which is far
from guessing and very close to the scientific process.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
It shouldn't be, though. It may be easy for a scientist to look at the method
sections of two papers that had p<0.05 results and say of the first "that
looks like a solid study with a reasonable conclusion and robust controls" and
of the other "that's bogus".

The problem is that without this expert panel making these calls, both studies
got published, were given the same credibility, and got consumed by non-
experts. Peer review and the publishing process are supposed to weed out the
obviously bad studies, but they're not doing so.

~~~
haihaibye
Scientists are familiar with the literature and are taking into account
information from other papers when judging a particular one.

Individual papers are not a source of truth, they're bits of cumulative
evidence hopefully leading to the truth.

------
crawfordcomeaux
If a person's mental state can impact their decisions and the quality of their
work, why aren't we tracking the subjective states of those conducting
research? And does
[http://eqradio.csail.mit.edu](http://eqradio.csail.mit.edu) provide a tool
for doing so?

~~~
devoply
This sounds very scary and totalitarian. We have the law and the police that's
the maximum level of intrusion I am willing to tolerate in terms of monitoring
my personal state and behavior. Anything more than that and I am gone.

~~~
crawfordcomeaux
I agree. Thankfully, as human beings, we're capable of coming up with systems
using this technology to solve the subjectivity problem in a responsible,
ethical manner. It doesn't have to be one involving the law.

~~~
devoply
Not sure if you are being sarcastic or not. I hope you are being sarcastic
because we know that more or less any such technology not only has the
possibility of being abused but has been shown to be abused in practice over
and over again.

~~~
crawfordcomeaux
And yet the technology exists.

Who would you rather use it: those who sell to develop a responsible framework
for using it or those who seek to abuse it?

This tech is only going to become more accurate and more widespread over time.
Ignoring it isn't an option. We've got little to no idea how to responsibly
use human emotion as an input and decades worth of collective experience on
how to exploit it.

The potential for abuse is high, which means extreme transparency is needed,
at the very least.

Operating at an emotional level requires a whole new set of metrics and a
fundamental shift in how we do anything. Better to figure it out now than to
wait until the tech becomes ubiquitous. Those looking to exploit the tech most
definitely won't wait for that day. A few people I've spoken to about it were
eager to explore the tech purely for the sake of improving sales of various
things. I changed the subject with them after realizing they had little regard
for human life in this context.

People concerned about this need to band together to find ways to productively
use it and defend against its misuse.

I've been working on such a framework, if anyone's interested in exploring it
with me.

------
jostmey
Science isn't broken... the academic system is

------
bhk
> It’s no accident that every good paper includes the phrase “more study[1] is
> needed” ...

[1] read: FUNDING

Let's distinguish "science" \-- the scientific method, the general advancement
of human understanding over the centuries, etc. -- from "pork":
institutionalized government funding, the establishment pursuing that, and all
of the mundane, bureaucratic processes that ensue, and then the resulting
hype, pettiness, recriminations, and sacrificing of ideals that it inculcates.

There is nothing wrong with science, although it may be harder these days to
recognize it.

Pork, on the other hand, is approaching a singularity.

------
Pica_soO
Nobody is claiming that the basic principle is not working. What is warped and
bend is the pipeline, that would allow for science to proceed faster, for the
results to be transferred to companies faster, for the companies to actually
apply the results in buy-able products and for that revenue to feedback into
science endeavors.

That machine- is broken, leaking and actually in parts moving contrary to the
scientific interests of humanity.

The quality issue of science itself, could easily be remedied by replacing
citations with partial repeatable experimental coverage in citations this way
also ending inflation.

------
mwnivek
This article is from August 2015. Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10085698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10085698)

~~~
surement
This should have "(2015)" in the title.

------
ouid
The answer is clear.

Hypothesis driven experiment.

Drive it into the brains of everyone who might enter the scientific
profession, and then, when someone is caught with an _experiment driven
hypothesis_ , we don't have to speculate whether or not it was fraud, because
they will have known better, by simple virtue of having their credentials, and
we can then safely revoke those credentials.

------
paulsutter
> Scientists who fiddle around like this — just about all of them do,
> Simonsohn told me — aren’t usually committing fraud

Yes they are

------
graphememes
Glad to see journals finally omitting p-value cases for more substantiated
findings.

------
cmansley
Social science isn't broken. Math and physics are like what's p-hacking.

------
Kenji
There are actually ways in which science can come up with the wrong answer -
for example if we lived much later, the universe would be expanding so rapidly
that we could not see the stars around us - the night sky would be dark. We
would wrongly conclude that nothing is out there.

Sadly, what people call science these days has nothing to do with the
scientific method, it's just a bunch of idiots doing correlation and thinking
it's causation.

~~~
Retra
If the sky is dark, it is because there _is_ nothing out there. That's what
"nothing" means: that which provides no evidence or experience from which to
demonstrate its existence.

