
Why Is So Much Reported Science Wrong, and What Can Fix That? - tokenadult
http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/winter-2015-breaking-news/giving-credence-why-so-much-reported-science-wrong-and
======
bloaf
It seems to me that the problems with science as it is done today are open
secrets, and can essentially be summarized as:

1: Publication pressure. There is too much emphasis on creating publications.
The end result is that people rush out unfinished work, or end up diluting
their findings by unnecessarily spreading them across several papers. People
are also discouraged from undertaking projects that may take a long time to
"pay off" with a publication.

2: Scientific networking. In scientific fields, people get to know each other,
and those relationships still heavily influence the process. Fame and
reputation matter when getting published, not to mention friendships with
publishers or reviewers.

3: Bias towards excitement/positive results. This, I believe, is not entirely
the fault of the scientific community. If left to their own devices, I think
there would be plenty of scientists willing to double check old findings, or
publish negative results. However, it's hard to convince people to pay you or
employ you if your work is perceived as "boring," "negative," or as some sort
of failure.

There are a handful of smaller issues (e.g. excessive emphasis on "impact
factor") but I suspect that they are mostly symptoms of the above issues.

I've always believed that the whole "publication model of science" is due for
review. It seems to be a product of the 18th century rather than something
we'd decide was a good idea today. If we do it right, I feel like the positive
results bias would immediately go away.

I don't think we can "fix" issue #2 in any really meaningful way. Even if you
were to take people's names off of publications, they would still chat with
each other at meetings or through collaborations. I think the best thing to do
is not try to prevent people from influencing each other, but simply to make
the whole process more transparent.

~~~
danieltillett
The problem is not the publication model, it is the incentive structure that
encourages scientists to rush out publications without checking their data in
enough detail, or in putting them under so much pressure to generate
“exciting” results that they falsify the results.

I will share an anecdote about a paper I was involved in. The work was done in
collaboration with another lab within my school. One of the results suggested
that one of the instrument was out of alignment and possibly giving false
results. I raised this with the head of the other lab and after speaking with
his post doc he said that everything was fine. I asked to see the calibration
data (there was none), but I was assured that everything was fine and they
were going to submit it as it was. At that point I went thermonuclear and said
if this paper was submitted without the dubious values being checked I would
write to the journal asking for it to be withdrawn. This caused a huge ruckus
within the school including visits from the head of school and the dean
telling me I was being “unreasonable”. I stood my ground and the post doc
eventually ran the calibration experiments which showed the instrument was out
of alignment and the results were wrong.

Of course this burned a lot of bridges for me and it would have been better
for me to just shut up and let the paper go out wrong.

~~~
88e282102ae2e5b
I'm glad you stood your ground. But what I don't get is the mindset of
everyone who wanted to publish the potentially-faulty data. The moment anyone
tries to build on the result, its faultiness will be known. Is that not more
embarrassing?

~~~
danieltillett
The reason is pressure to get the papers out as fast as possible or else you
won’t get any more grants. It should be embarrassing to publish garbage, but
for lots of people who have succeeded in the current system it appears not to
be.

Everyone involved was rather sheepish afterwards except the post doc. He had
felt much the same as me, but didn’t feel he could raise the issue with his
boss. Privately he was very grateful I had stood up to his boss, as he didn’t
feel he could do the same and was under enormous pressure to pump out the
data. All round not good.

~~~
88e282102ae2e5b
Sometimes I wonder if I'm in a bubble. My PI thanked me when I told him I had
discovered that out our data was systematically biased and it would take weeks
to correct the issue.

~~~
danieltillett
Yes most PI’s are happy to avoid the embarrassment and only want to publish
good data.

The problem is not that most scientists are not trying to do the right thing,
but that they are under enormous pressure to pump out the results. It only
takes a few falling to this pressure to destroy the public’s faith in science
- the consequence of this are catastrophic.

We must solve this problem or we will not have science.

~~~
netcan
I know very little about academia. But, in the context of today's world of
information and collaboration, it always seems to me that it should be a
better time than any to (A) have a better than publication and (B) put a lot
more into reproducing results independently. I mean what is the whole
publication, review, reproduction system if not an early system of
crowdsourcing.

To take a simplistic example: a publication norm which includes instructions
for reproduction, ideally requiring as little resources as possible.

~~~
88e282102ae2e5b
Instructions for reproduction are mandatory already. That said, you probably
can't pick up any paper and reproduce the experiments exactly without asking
the authors a question or two, at least in biology.

Systems are getting increasingly complex as well. In my lab, it literally
takes several weeks for people to learn how to do our assay, and that's with
constant feedback from an experienced user. Every step is published but that
still doesn't help when things don't go according to plan. Also, not every lab
has the same equipment. Even if we provided free training, a lab would still
need to drop $300k to get all the machines required, which are not common.

Not every result is worth reproducing either. If someone publishes a paper
that shows several lines of evidence for the same thing and they've done all
reasonable controls, and it doesn't disagree with any existing models, why
would you reproduce that? Outside of deliberate fraud, it's a pretty solid bet
that it's true, and you can save enormous amounts of time and money by
proceeding to build off of it instead of reproducing it first. And that's
really what it comes down to: no one's paying you to do this kind of work.
Governments would have to fund it, because you're fundamentally asking for
twice as much work to be done, which will cost twice as much money (and time).

But take heart: when someone DOES make an outrageous claim, it's very common
for labs to try to reproduce it (or really, disprove it). See [1] and [2] for
recent examples.

[1] "STAP stem cell controversy ends in suicide for Japanese scientist"
[http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-stap-
ste...](http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-stap-stem-cell-
suicide-20140805-story.html) [2] "Water bears’ genetic borrowing questioned"
[https://www.sciencenews.org/article/water-
bears%E2%80%99-gen...](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/water-
bears%E2%80%99-genetic-borrowing-questioned)

~~~
danieltillett
If I was a fraud this is exactly what I would do. Take an existing paper and
just make up the results that confirm the work with a slight twist to make it
publishable. Rinse and repeat and nobody will ever catch you.

------
EvanPlaice
"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is
placed upon it for control purposes." \- Goodhart's Law

Awarding scientists for publishing works -- whether or not they've passed
rigor -- is the mistake.

The monetary system for awarding grants is completely broken. Nobody wants to
admit they have their hand in the cookie jar for fear of having the lid
slammed down on their hand. Universities take a cut of the grant money to
subsidize their staff payroll. Professors gain notoriety and a significant
increase in income when their published work leads to being awarded a grant.
Industry/NGOs have their own financial incentives to 'influence' scientific
reporting that favors their own bias'. Nobody calls attention to the
corruption because... Woohoo! Free money!

I find it _very_ difficult to trust any of the scientific reporting related to
current affairs and/or politics. The incentives for 'bad actors' who commit
intellectual dishonesty are too high.

------
danieltillett
As with everything to do with smart people it is all about incentives. If you
create a system where accuracy of results don’t matter and where you must
publish or die then don’t be surprised if what you get are lots of crap
publications with dubious or false results. Hoping for a different outcome
without changing the incentives is fantasy thinking.

The positive is there is lots we could do to change the incentives, but there
are some powerful forces benefiting from the current structure.

Edit. I should actual say what we could do. We need to focus on the incentives
rather than the problem. Fix the incentives and the problem goes away on its
own, focus on the problem and you just end up shifting it to somewhere else -
the "squeezing on the balloon" effect.

The best solution in my opinion is to move from our crude "most publications =
funding" model to a hurdle + lottery model. With this you have to publish
enough to prove that you are capable of doing good research (the hurdle) and
once you have done this you go into a lottery from which we pull out grant
winners until we have used up all the funding available.

The reason this idea is not popular is it would not work in favour of the
current grant winners.

~~~
OopsCriticality
Are you aware of any implementations of that lottery model in the wild?

~~~
danieltillett
No I am not. It gets brought up every so often as the most rational approach,
but those who have climbed the greasy pole of the current system, and hence
control it, are none to keen to change.

The usual argument against a lottery is it does not reward the best scientists
and will give grants to third rate hacks. This is true, but it can be solved
by having different lotteries with different thresholds. Publish one paper in
the Journal of Useless & Pointless Results and you go into Pool A where you
might have a 0.1% of getting a grant. Publish 20 articles in Nature and
Science and you go into Pool H where you have a 75% chance. We would just need
to be careful that we are not recreating the same perverse incentives that the
current system encourages, but this is not insurmountable.

------
kelukelugames
I am more cynical after seeing people I agree with cite tenuous studies as
facts. All of social science is sketchy, especially studies with results that
make you feel good. For example, my friend and I read an Economist article
that said 10% of American doctors are Muslim. We could not verify the source,
but people are going to believe it's true because it was in the Economist.

~~~
iak8god
> All of social science is sketchy... We could not verify the source, but
> people are going to believe it's true because it was in the Economist.

It seems like your real beef here is with _journalism_ (even the higher-than-
average quality journalism that normally appears in the Economist). The fact
that some news magazine doesn't include citations for claims in an article[1]
has nothing to do with the sketchiness (or non-sketchiness) of "social
science."

It is too bad though that the Economist doesn't provide citations for claims
like this. Did they pull "10%" out of thin air? Are 10% of new medical
doctorates currently earned by Muslims? Did they include all kinds of
doctorates (PhD, etc) in the calculation? A simple link to the source for this
number would clear that all up...

[1] [http://www.economist.com/news/united-
states/21679823-despite...](http://www.economist.com/news/united-
states/21679823-despite-attack-san-bernardino-americas-defences-against-
jihadism-are-high)

~~~
kelukelugames
Both.

Paper: "We put three women and three men in a room for 10 minutes and they
brainstormed 1.3 extra ideas than a room of 6 men."

Article: "Study proves gender balance leads to better meetings!"

~~~
iak8god
Amusing, but I don't quite agree with this characterization of "all of social
science."

But here's something interesting: I've tracked down _a_ source for the 10%
claim, and it's absolutely bonkers:

* An editorial[1] in the Detroit Free Press makes the following claim:

| "an analysis of statistics provided by the American Medical Association
indicates that 10% of all American physicians are Muslims"

That certainly makes it sound like the AMA thinks that 10% of American
physicians are Muslims.

* The source provided for this claim, "Muslim Doctors Abundant, But Muslim Hospitals Non-Existent"[2] is a 2008 post on a site called The Muslim Link.

Here's how that post arrived at the 10% claim:

* 113,585 Physicians in the US (2006)

* 7,000 current and retired physicians are members of the Association of Physicians of _Pakistani Descent_ of North America

* 5.9% of African Americans are Muslim; 3.5% of physicians are African American; therefore there are 2000 African American Muslim physicians

* 7000 + 2000 = 9000; 9000 is just about 10% of 113,585

I shit you not, that's the most straightforward reading of the analysis at
[2]. Now it's in the Economist. I seriously hope _they_ got that number
somewhere else.

[1]
[http://www.freep.com/article/20140128/OPINION05/301280121/da...](http://www.freep.com/article/20140128/OPINION05/301280121/dave-
agema-racism-gay-remarks-muslim-republican-gop-michigan)

[2]
[http://www.muslimlinkpaper.com/myjumla/index.php?option=com_...](http://www.muslimlinkpaper.com/myjumla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1440)

------
jackcosgrove
Scientists are seen by lots of people as secular priests or shamans. In this
respect science is a victim of its own success. It now commands the attention
of a lot of people who expect it to perform some of the social functions that
religion used to play. "Science" is more likely to be hijacked by charlatans
because of this totemic value.

~~~
pron
That's very interesting. I think people need answers from the "answer
authority", and once that authority is established, it is treated reverently
and pressed to provide answers. As the "priests" are humans, too, there's no
reason to believe they themselves are immune to this effect, even when they
know how the sausage is made.

------
n0us
> Science and journalism seem to be uniquely incompatible: Where journalism
> favors neat story arcs, science progresses jerkily, with false starts and
> misdirections in a long, uneven path to the truth—or at least to scientific
> consensus. The types of stories that reporters choose to pursue can also be
> a problem, says Peter Aldhous, a teacher of investigative reporting at UC
> Santa Cruz’s Science Communication Program, lecturer at Berkeley’s Graduate
> School of Journalism, and science reporter for BuzzFeed.

Seeing that someone from Buzz Feed has this kind of sober non-delusional
perspective on journalism restores my faith in the idea that the internet
might not have ruined reporting.

I used to avoid Buzz Feed like a disease, a cess pool of listicles and ADD
style click bait but it seems they have a real goal of producing quality
content.

Respect.

~~~
fbbbbb
One intelligent mind in the combine that is BuzzFeed, doesn't account for the
horde of mindless drones who write a huge majority of click-bait material.

I don't see where do you see the support for the idea that their goal is
quality articles.

------
davidgerard
Speaking to scientists I know, quite a lot of the problem is university press
offices. The bullshit articles start as bullshit press releases, bearing
little resemblance to any actual facts in the original paper (or arXiv
preprint). Not sure of a way around this one.

~~~
danieltillett
The solution is requiring the scientist to approve the press release before it
goes out and having the power to force errors to be corrected.

~~~
davidgerard
Well yes, but this ignores all power relations and incentives involved. The
press offices aren't sending out BS press releases for the sake of it, they're
sending them out to get the university's name positive press; and the
university has all the power over the scientists.

------
peter303
Most journalists post email addresses. I drop them a note when I clearly see a
need to improve. But most of the time they dont apply the suggestion.
Therefore in any publication I sometime prejudge an article by the history of
the author.

------
jwatte
Bias against negative results are a problem. Frequentist "p values" are
another, especially when samples are small and biased ("20 undergraduate
students") and 0.05 is considered "significant."

Now, the system is still designed to correct itself for errors over time, and
reinforcing this design is the most important meta-thing we can do. So it's
not all doom and gloom. It's just that "over time" is a longer and messier
horizon than we would like!

------
melted
Easy to fix for a lot of comp sci papers. Require that to be accepted into a
conference the papers must have a working, open source implementation that
confirms the results, preferably in the form of a Docker container(s) or a VM
image(s). Publish papers with reproducible results alongside.

------
dools
Beautiful irony: the only part of the site that doesn't work well on my old
android browser is the popup telling me my browser is out of date.

------
jhoechtl
1\. To many scientists treating correlation for causality

2\. Pressure to publish (requirement of funded projects or because of
organisations target objectives)

3\. Too many scientist

------
wavefunction
"Why Is So Much Reported Science Incorrect,"

There's my contribution. This is from an illustrious institution like
Berkeley?

------
badwolf93
if science is wrong then science moves is not that the goal of science?

------
J_Darnley
Because journalists and audiences are incompetent. Journalists only get a
press release from Big Corporation which is worded to give the best impression
possible. The journalists then need to dumb it down for the masses. Then when
Adam tells Bob he only repeats what he remembers and understands. In a massive
game of Chinese whispers it is no wonder that "So Much Reported Science
Wrong".

