
Most research spending is wasted on bad studies - dankohn1
http://www.vox.com/2015/10/4/9440931/arnold-foundation-meta-research
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adrianN
I once heard a great talk by Eytan Domany, a physicist who moved to biology.
He had a look at Genome Wide Association studies, where you sequence a number
of people with an illness and without the illness, and try to find genes that
correlate with having the illness. The problem with these studies, he told us,
was that quite often the number of genes they find correlating with having the
illness is about the same order of magnitude as the number of participants in
the study. But because many biologists are not so proficient at statistics,
they don't see that this smells of overfitting their model to the data. He
took a particularly popular such study and applied a standard technique to
detect overfitting, cross validation, and indeed found that the correlation
they reported was spurious.

If I remember correctly, even after he destroyed the study, people kept citing
it...

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ap22213
Anyone in academic research able to give a summary of how grants are decided?

I'm under the impression that most science research is guided by military,
corporate, and imperial needs. And, far less pure science gets funded just to
empirically understand the universe.

It's a horrible shame in my opinion.

Can't crowd funding come into play somehow? I'd love to donate money to
scientific research. But, how is it possible for a layman to validate the
'real science' from the quakery?

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kevin_morrill
There is a great EconTalk episode on poor incentives in research:
[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/09/nosek_on_truth.html](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/09/nosek_on_truth.html)

Much of this research is funding through the NIH, which has a $30B budget. I
have to believe there are tremendous politics in that.

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ommunist
To be honest, try to compare overall expenses with outcome from good studies,
over relatively long period. You need ecosystem of bad studies, because this
is the agar from which bacteria of good studies can propagate.

