"It’s as if our facts were losing their truth"

This is the result of permitting corruption be rationalized as post-normal science.
It has been very very lucrative: Climate science is perhaps the most extreme example.
If we can work up the backbone to reject post-normal science and return to real science, I will be pleasantly surprised.

“Below is an excerpt from an excellent artic in The New Yorker which describes a recognition of curious phenomenon spanning many different fields of science:”
My guess is that it should read
“….excellent article in The New Yorker which describes a recognition of a curious phenomenon spanning many different fields of science:”
(presumably not)
“….excellent article in The New Yorker which describes a recognition of curious phenomena spanning many different fields of science:”

The most relevant section in the article is later on:

Jennions, similarly, argues that the decline effect is largely a product of publication bias, or the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results, which is what happens when no effect is found. The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven per cent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for.

Researchers may attempt to be objective, but editors and peer-reviewers certainly aren’t. This might be termed “Black is SO last year” or “New Shoes” science.

An excellent article, worth reading in full.
This statement: “… the decline effect is largely a product of publication bias, or the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results, which is what happens when no effect is found.”, combined with the pal review prevalent in climate science, seems to me to describe why cAGW still isn’t dead yet in scientific journals.

Does an explanation lie, unexamined, in the phrase ” ..across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology”. That’s not a wide range. I expect that no experimental result of mine has diminished in accuracy, save for any where (dear God, I hope not) I simply made an unrecognised blunder. But then my field is a “hard” science not a “soft” one. Heavens, isn’t that a large part of the distinction between hard and soft?

With these comments here “This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, and If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved?”
The answer to both is what we used to call Magic Numbers, and both deserves to go under that name.

Anthony,
Do you ever sleep?

Green friends tell me the science can be trusted because science is self-correcting.
But how long does it take to self-correct? And how do you know when you’ve reached that point?
They boldly apply the “it is self correcting” mantra to stuff that’s only a couple of years old!!
The truth is in the system pipeline somewhere, deep down, and will take centuries for it to come to the surface.

In my experience, this happens when the empirical ‘facts’ are expressed in terms of a simplistic model, which is subsequently found to be naive. When the simplistic model finally collapses, the textbooks must be rewritten.
This is not to say that old ideas don’t go out without a fight.
There are typically some folks who are heavily invested in the old orthodoxy, and they tend to scoff mightily at the new framework.
RR

So that is what they meant by hide the decline!
This was an extemely well written and interesting piece. I would have found it more disturbing if I had not suspected it already.
My guess is that the likelihood of false results increases proportionally to the amount of money at stake and the degree of polarisation of competing theories.
However I won’t try to prove it because the effect will surely wear off in time.

Very thoughtful article. I can see only one thing he missed: Failure to replicate shouldn’t tell us to abandon the line of research. If scientists were operating out of curiosity instead of the need to justify grants, a failure to replicate would guide us toward a better theory. His example of the cocaine-fed mice is perfect. The Edmonton mice ran a lot farther despite every known factor being held identical. The difference was dramatically beyond expectable variance; it should lead to seeking the unknown factor that isn’t identical.
But nobody [or rather, nobody who gets published!] is operating out of curiosity. Nobody has the time or money. All science is based on the need to satisfy grantors within an annual budget goal, so all published science is stuck on bad theories.

When politics trumps what the scientists find
You get what you pay for – more of the same kind.
The peer review process
Abounds with sheer excess.
Who paid for it anyhow? – Ah, never mind.

“It’s as if our facts were losing their truth”. Well, there lies the problem. In what sense were they ever ‘facts’ and in what sense were they ever ‘truth’? Hasn’t this shift been going on for centuries? It’s hardly going to stop now. We can argue about whether it is gradual or paradigmatic (after Kuhn), but there has been no time in the last 500 years at the very least when this has not been happening. I was amazed to find that (apart from the Aristotle worship) science books that were written in the Middle Ages were still being used as textbooks, seemingly without need for revision, for hundreds of years. With mathematics it was millenia – Euclid was still on the curriculum in the twentieth century.
Just see how science changes. Very little of what was considered science orthodoxy, whether in physics, astronomy, medicine etc in 1900 is accepted as orthodoxy today. It has always been thus if you care to study history. I feel quite confident in asserting that little of what is considered orthodoxy today will be considered orthodox by the end of the century. As Richard Lindzen and others have pointed out, folk will look back at today’s climate science and hysteria the way we look back and sneer and guffaw at the cranky ideas that scientists held not that long ago.
And as for science itself, there is no consensus either currently or through history as to what the objects of scientific investigation are, nor a scientific method, nor what relationship empirical results have with reality. The whole question of what scientist can know, and how they can know it has never been settled. Many have given up on the philosophical, epistemological and metaphysical issues and just got on with science in an instrumental way. There is far too much scientific practice based on fallacious reasoning, induction and design of experiments to find the thing you are looking for. Popper’s falsification criteria, while logically true and powerful, is considered by many to be an impediment to scientific progress.
Anyone who says ‘the science is settled’ is either mad or moronic.

“excellent artic in The New Yorker” should read “excellent article in The New Yorker”.

Science has been reduced to a process to obtain grants.

Replication has gone from laboratories to computers, from reality to virtuality, from hard work and hardware, to light work and software, a kind of a “sophisticated” move. It´s so “cool” now!. The analysis and peer reviewing has turned into something resembling to the discourse of a “Critic of Art” , a collection of words of inextricable meaning filled up to the rim with the purest of vacuums. The more difficult to understand, for those nasty commoners laymen, the more “intelligent” and better.
It doesn´t matter if it is wrong, we are the wise ones and…anyway we can always fix it by an elegant adjusting or kindly massaging. Ya know, those fools will never realize it!

Be fascinating to see if there was a correlation between the reported efficacy of new drugs, and their time to patent expiry.

Corporate, political, sponsored science is in denial of a serious problem. They get the results that they pay for regardless of the science. Truth be damned!
This is bad enough in climate research, but when entire studies are falsified to get dangerous, but profitable drugs onto the market, people die in large numbers.
I still have faith in science. I do not have faith in the money motivated political b’stards who pervert science to falsify reality and make money and gain power and influence over others.
We need a careful true scientific audit of the methods scientists have actually been using to get their results.

Great article that proceeds from an incorrect assumption. That being that the science that was performed was correct in the first place.
One of the most intriguing books I have ever read was Dan Ariely’s ‘Predictably Irrational’. In that book, he takes a good deal of time to address the medical and pharmaceutical industries and basically turns them on their heads. In particular, was the glaring lack of proper control and placebo comparison on both drugs AND operations.
For real, if people even knew the half of the fraud by way of non-scientific “scientists”…
I am reminded of this quote from “Around the World in 80 days” (2004):
Monique La Roche: Where’s your proof?
Lord Kelvin: This is the Royal Academy of Science! We don’t have to prove anything!

The complete article in ‘New Yorker’ is superb and illustrates just how silly, inconsequential or just plain dangerous much peer-reviewed and widely-accepted science may possibly be.
The article remindded me of a behavioural psychologist I worked with many years ago who was the absolute ‘kiss of death’ for any simple textbook experiment he attempted to replicate in his lecture or labs for his students. No matter how exactly the poor guy wrote up his experimental specifications, his fruit flies, his mice, his pigeons and his rats would behave in extraordinary ways under experimental conditions which were totally contrary to the behaviours carefully documented in the text books.
But a clue to this trail of disaster occurred when he designed and commissioned a device made from a 20-gallon steel drum, that had been used to ship peanut oil, to barbecue a suckling pig as the centrepiece for his leaving party.
The drum was split longwise into halves complete with hinges and a lock to keep the drum closed, then welded to an axle which was turned by a small geared electric motor. I attempted to warn him that his design had a major flaw, but he insisted he was merely following information from some of the world’s most successful cooks of suckling pigs.
On the night, a charcoal barbecue fire was lit under the drum which rotated slowly as the psychologist and his guests toasted each other with increasing hilarity. The time duly arrived for the fire to be extinguished, the drum was stopped and opened, the guests crowded around to see the beautifully-cooked suckling pig and…it had, as I had warned him, become a pig-shaped block of charcoal, complete with charcoal apple in its mouth!
As I had warned him, he had designed and commissioned a very effective charcoal-producing kettle!

Whatever the ultimate “cause” of this phenomenon turns out to be, my advice to those seeking to uncover it is to follow the money. If there’s corruption of any sort to be found, it’s usually found with a tenner in it’s back pocket, eh?

The writer doesn’t seem to “get” that the “sciences” he is referring to (psychology, ecology, medecine) deal with very complex phenomena and that “replication” — in the true sense of the word — is virtually impossible. High energy physics is a piece of cake by comparison. He’s also failing to “get” that the conclusions too many scientists claim as the result of an experiment frequently go far beyond what the experiment actually demonstrates. The chains of logic verge on fantasy. The core corrupting mechanism is the mechanism for funding. Pure and simple. The science bureaucracies of the Federal Government are the root cause.

This is not a phenomenon of only or even mostly of post-modernism, but it seems a genuine human trait that has affected scientific research from the beginning. There never was a golden period. It is a “perception bias” (to use a term from the full article) and a sample bias, because the history of science is told through the successful pioneers, disregarding the failures, and those who stubbornly persisted in their wrong beliefs due to personal gain, hanging to fame and pride.
The full article is a great read.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain.
This seems like more post-normal philosophical ‘science’.
The article does not expand on this with but one example, which was probably a sampling problem, too small, at the onset. The example of psycho-tropic pharmica does not really count as science, considering the confounding of a subjective field, psychology, with subjective/mutable diagnosis’, and big pharmacological dollars at play. IIRC, Lilly buried 30% of the original prozac studies that showed it was ineffective without talk therapy.

This article should be required reading for all first-year university science students.

The problem is lack of critical/sceptical attitude, which should be required of every scientist. The more the better. This problem has existed since there is science, but it increased with time. Meanwhile it is so huge that all established or consensus science is BS. All of it. Just try to be sceptical of any established science/theories and watch the attacks, dogma and suppression rear their ugly heads.
It can be solved, but it needs first to be recognised/acknowledged/admitted widely.
One of my favorite scientists of all time, Thomas Gold:
“The inertia of scientific thought”
http://www.suppressedscience.net/inertiaofscientificthought.html

Girma says:
January 20, 2011 at 4:01 am
“But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.”
I disagree.
Nature has only one answer.
It is our interpretations that are different.
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Of course, but this sentence is very precise because it underscores the fact that results decline over time using methods thought to “eliminate” subjective interpretation. That’s why I actually love that particular sentence.
BTW, thanks for posting this Anthony. I’ve read it a good while ago as it actually applies to my field of research in judgment/decision making, heuristics and biases in psychology. Solving this problem of, up until recently, unnoticed area of human logical fallacy could be one of the greatest contributions to modern science. It would surely revolutionize many, but not all, fields of science. I guess you could call me a skeptic of climate science BECAUSE of my preoccupation with cognitive biases. Research methodology is THE most important factor in making sense of data. Currently I am sadened to say that the climate science movement are making incredible errors in basic epistemology. History will not be kind to those who broke the most basic principles.

In the 60s an international study into lifestyle and longevity included a detailed study in a remote mountain area in Ireland, close to where I live.Their health and longevity stats were impressive. The diet was largely full dairy, fat meat, vegetables and potatoes, the lifestyle was a physical, spartan one. Their data never became part of the published study. The agenda drives the result in too many cases.

W Abbott says:
January 20, 2011 at 3:43 am
“….if your experiment needs statistics, you need a better experiment” I wish I could remember who said this. It’s a big problem. We need better experiments.
I think that was Rutherford.

I think another thing at work here is simply the complexity of what current science is bumping up against. It seems to me that the advance of science inevitably leads to attempts to conquer ever more complex conundrums. As that process proceeds through time it gets increasingly complex to design and execute a good experiment.
Climate science is a wonderful example of this taken to extremes. The ‘experiments’ have moved into simulations because our incomplete knowledge of climate in the real world has not yielded easily to experimentation. Contrast the complexity of a climate experiment with one meant to confirm something from Newton.
I would submit that climate science has outstripped its experimental underpinnings because the grant writers can create far sexier submissions for simulation than for those that would be aimed at the root mechanisms that drive the system. It might well be true that this is a factor at work in every modern (complex) scientific endeavor.

Steve Keohane says:
January 20, 2011 at 5:25 am
IIRC, Lilly buried 30% of the original prozac studies that showed it was ineffective without talk therapy.
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You have perfect recollection 😉 (although I am not familiar with the percentage)
This, and many other findings like this, led to an enormously influential meta-study published in the british medical journal “the Lancet”. It gathered all research (published AND not published findings on newer generation anti-depressants) and found NO effect when put together, except for a minor effect for people with very severe depression. Remember then that placebo worked just as well, but with NO side effects which can be very harmful in some SSRIs (anti-depressants).
The time is perhaps ripe for a big meta-study conducted of all research on climate data to establish if there is an active confirmation bias in the publishing part of the field. I think there is. Even though it might still prove CO2 effects, they are likely to be seen as less severe if viewed as a whole. A problem with such a study is that much research is concluding what computers are saying. This is an enormous problem, and could perhaps lead to a fall of the “modelling paradigm” in the future if found to be very influenced by biases.

This is incredible. I know that drugs are ineffective for schizophrenia. [sarc]
The new model,
http://img837.imageshack.us/img837/1986/aquecimentogobal300x210.th.jpg

Another comment:
If the review process in climate science in any way resembles the “bore hole” standard of realclimate.org, I am very confident there is a fundamental and rotten problem to be concerned about. It would then, in my view, be a case of serious corruption to be dealt with as a serious legal problem.

People in the UK should watch the BBC’s “Horizon” program about the “attack on science” (or rather, the credibility of scientists) next week.
[Monday, 21:00 on BBC Two (except Northern Ireland (Analogue), Wales (Analogue))]
According to the “Time Out” TV reviewer, the new head of the Royal Society, Sir Paul Nurse, will effortlessly demolish all the “deniers” claims that AGW isn’t happening in an interview with the Daily Telegraph’s “denier-in-chief” which left the journo “spluttering that he is an interpreter of interpreters”.
This is what the BBC have to say about the program:
“Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse examines why science appears to be under attack, and why public trust in key scientific theories has been eroded – from the theory that man-made climate change is warming our planet, to the safety of GM food, or that HIV causes AIDS.
“He interviews scientists and campaigners from both sides of the climate change debate, and travels to New York to meet Tony, who has HIV but doesn’t believe that that the virus is responsible for AIDS.
“This is a passionate defence of the importance of scientific evidence and the power of experiment, and a look at what scientists themselves need to do to earn trust in controversial areas of science in the 21st century.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y4yql
—
So there you have it; AGW exists because the Royal Society, the BBC and the “Time Out” TV reviewer said so.
Of course, the main question everyone here will be asking is why did Sir Paul Nurse interview a journalist for the AGW bit of the program and real scientists for the rest of it?

Grade inflation, too many “scientists” for academic positions or research institutions, and pal reviewers. Stop it all now: a) the subject matter must be mastered or you do not advance or graduate; b) no more government grants for “scientific” research; c) peer review process open to the public, at the very least. Transparency and accountability along with replicability. A free market system in “science”.

“So there you have it; AGW exists because the Royal Society, the BBC and the “Time Out” TV reviewer said so.
Of course, the main question everyone here will be asking is why did Sir Paul Nurse interview a journalist for the AGW bit of the program and real scientists for the rest of it?”
Horizon ceased being an objective and rational science programme a long time ago. Sadly they are tied in to the same vested interests who abuse and pervert the scientific process to achieve profits and power.
I will be willing to bet that this episode will not be interviewing scientists who have admitted to falsifying “double blind” tests and experiments in order to get the results that pharmaceutical corporations want in order to licence the selling of highly toxic chemicals in the guise of medicines.
There is nothing wrong with science and it is highly decietful of the AGW alarmists to even claim that sceptics are attacking the science of climate change.
On the contrary, most climate realists attack the perversion of the scientific method and the sloppy and dishonest deviation from the scientific method which Alarmists have become well known for.
It is the climate realists and not the alarmists which uphold and support real science. It is the Alarmists who do not.

kcom says:
January 20, 2011 at 6:49 am
Page 5: “Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests.”
The problem with global warming theory is that it never fails. Rather, the true implications of it only become obvious in hindsight. Then the theory is adjusted as if it was always thus. The science becomes settled. And then, when the next mysterious unpredicted phenomenon pops up, it gets settled again. So, at all times, it’s always settled. It’s just not the same.
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Yes. It has all the flaws of what is called retrospective studies. They are fundamentally flawed as there is too much openness for biases to infect the conclusions. It can be useful, but it is widely held to be very poor at finding causes to observed effects.
Prospective studies are more in line with good scientific philosophy. You make a hyopothesis (e.g. this level of CO2 will cause these effects by this time) and discard the hypothesis if it is not matching the real world data in a meaningful way (i.e. statistical significance).
Now, to be fair, the climate is extremely tough to study, but knowing this shold make scientists extremely humble when presenting predictions due to uncertainty. This is not what we see. We see the URGE for a consensus. A trend towards labelling the wholy grail of science (‘skepticism) as “denial”. And we sometimes see absurd claims such as: 95% certainty such and such, and claims such as: “the world will warm by 6degrees celsius by April 3rd in the year 2087 with sea level rises of 787.9 mm.
I’m glad this article came up, bc this is (IMO) the biggest Achilles heel of climate science, and it is a crime against the science.

Actually it does have a name – it’s called activism.

When I was a kid, hot weather would cause me to feel light-headed (eventually becoming a bad headache), weak & listless.
Eventually at the doctor’s office, it was determined to be low blood-pressure in hot conditions (my blood-pressure was normally average). He said there wasn’t anything to do (even then, salt was already politically-incorrect).
In high-school football, they offered salt-tablets during practice in hot weather. Somehow, the listlessness & headaches disappeared! Didn’t take long to figure out the connection. Not suggesting that anyone take salt in hot weather or otherwise, but in my situation, it was an extraordinarily simple “cure”. It still works for me in hot weather.
I bet those salt tablets have long been removed from HS football practice fields. I know, Gatorade has “replaced” it.

Now look at the problem from the layman’s point of view as a recipient of the mainstream media’s outpourings:
Breast milk good, breast milk bad, breast milk good …….etc
MMR good, MMR bad, MMR good ……….etc
Statins good, statins bad, statins good ……etc
London will be under water in ten years time, make that twenty, make that next year ….etc.
The problem of the lack of consistency in science is the ‘Ego Loop’
Nowadays, scientists have lost objectivity and scientific rigour caused by the urge to publish something/anything to satisfy their overinflated egos. They will grasp for funds from any source but the government is the best one because the pot is bottomless.
Journalists, another ego-driven ‘profession’, compound the problem of poor science by simply regurgitating the scientists’ press releases without analysis. This appears to be because they no longer have the education needed to determine pertinent questions nor to understand the answers if they had been asked. Newspapers and TV broadcasters (some of whom, despite being publicly funded) also have political agendas that influence their reporting and determines their servility.
Finally the politicians. Politicians, are amongst the leading examples of ego-mania. Unfortunately because of a low IQ problem, they haven’t got a clue about the science; any science. Their scientific advisers are hand picked ‘yes men’ who are paid handsomely to advise as required. The politicians, therefore, compound the ‘poor science’ problem further by throwing money at the purveyors of that aspect of the science they think is likely garner the most votes; thereby closing the ego-loop. And we all know what positive feedback leads to.
And the public is confused. As far as they are concerned they would rather that the scientists, journalists and politicians grew backbones and followed that well known aphorism:
“Oh Lord help me to keep my big mouth shut until I know what I am talking about”

“Between 1966 and 1995, there were forty-seven studies of acupuncture in China, Taiwan, and Japan, and every single trial concluded that acupuncture was an effective treatment. During the same period, there were ninety-four clinical trials of acupuncture in the United States, Sweden, and the U.K., and only fifty-six per cent of these studies found any therapeutic benefits. As Palmer notes, this wide discrepancy suggests that scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don’t want to see. Our beliefs are a form of blindness.”
Paradigm blindness or paradigm paralysis has been well documented, and is very common. Scientists with a cherished belief that has a lot of ego integrity invested in it have been shown data/studies that invalidate the belief, and only days later cannot recall seeing the data/study.
Read Joel Barker

Be skeptical. Be very skeptical.

This is what you get with government funded science. Something Eisenhour warned us about. It sounded like a good idea at the time….

Having read the whole article, I agree Pamela, this is excellently thought out and written. If, as others have mentioned above, the author is a true believer of CAGW, this article is a perfect example of the underlying problem of human nature, and our perception of what we divine as reality. A mind, obviously capable of rational perceptive thinking won’t apply the same to itself, i.e. cognitive dissonance. Further, I would proffer that this is a necessary survival mechanism. In order to have a sense of self, and to be able to function moment-to-moment, we can’t be questioning whether gravity works every time, or if fire burns the finger each and every time the two meet. The intellect will arrive at some conclusion, even lacking enough evidence, unless we are conscious enough to notice that it does that. Basically we gloss over a lot and go on.

Fortunately for everyone, now that this phenomenon has been described and discussed, it will gradually happen less in the future…

It seems obvious to me: the laws of the universe are mutating.

Very thoughtful article. I can see only one thing he missed: Failure to replicate shouldn’t tell us to abandon the line of research. If scientists were operating out of curiosity instead of the need to justify grants, a failure to replicate would guide us toward a better theory. His example of the cocaine-fed mice is perfect. The Edmonton mice ran a lot farther despite every known factor being held identical. The difference was dramatically beyond expectable variance; it should lead to seeking the unknown factor that isn’t identical.

With respect, I think you missed the main point of the article. You are assuming that an unknown factor exists, when it’s also quite possible that all that happened is that the Edmonton result was in the far tail of the distribution of possible results. For that matter, the other two could also have been in the far tail, but in the other direction. The norm of the unknown, but actual, distribution of results might be, say, 2,000.
That’s the point of regression to the mean. If the mean of the actual population of results is 2,000 then, over time, replication will drive away the original “discovery” of an “Edmonton Effect,” whatever that might be.
And to take the point of the article further, if you could happen to identify one tiny little difference in the layout of the Edmonton experiment, the publication bias toward finding unexpected results might even get you published. Then others would do the same sort of experiment, with the null results not getting published, while the few supporting an “Edmonton Effect” do, though showing a diminished “effect.”
Meanwhile Edmonton fills up with coke heads looking for that special “Edmonton Buzz” and junk science destroys yet another economy.
All in all, a very interesting article.

Re Abbott’s comment:
““….if your experiment needs statistics, you need a better experiment” I wish I could remember who said this. It’s a big problem. We need better experiments.”
I have heard this attributed to Rutherford, but I haven’t seen a citation to support that.
[Reply: It was the late British physicist Ernest Rutherford. ~dbs]

In comment to Pamela’s comment…
The intolerance in science of other views was birthed by the response to creationists. There has long been an absurd fight between Biologists who are certain that random processes in ordinary organic chemicals billions of years ago led to consciousness and religious crazies who are certain that a magical hand from the sky shaped dirt into the first human being. It is a stupid fight, it’s always been a stupid fight, but neither side sees the reasoning that BOTH can be correct. Science can only tell us what we can prove, and we cannot prove/disprove the existence of magical intelligent creator, so there truly is no conflict. The whole argument would have died immediately 200 years ago if some scientist had simply kept his mouth shut and said, “Yes, uh-huh, I see how you could see it that way.” and moved on. But those of us who use our brains too much tend to impose our views on others when they appear to be wrong. Yes, human nature causes problems; sun rises in east; water is wet.
What is unforgivable is the degree to which this fight has been ratcheted up. The religious people feel like they’re being attacked, and I don’t blame them so much because they’re the unarmed people in this fight. They’re the ones who insist on believing in Santa Claus, so it’s best to just let them have their harmless beliefs rather than force a certain viewpoint on them. The scientists feel like science is being attacked, and I don’t blame as school boards have held actual hearings to determine whether an unprovable “creationism” should be taught alongside calculus.
The religious people responded to this fight how they always do, they threw money at clever people to make their case for them in a political theater.
The scientist response, however, is what should have been different. The scientists turned into activists. Regardless of how wrong someone else is, you cease being a scientist when you tell someone else what to think, you become an activist altering perception in others. As a scientist you should be trying to make the obvious plain to someone, while continuing to let them determine their own reality. The truth has a way of sneaking up on people, or smacking them in the face; but the perception of truth does not obey the whim of anyone even the smartest communicator on the planet. Scientists were choosing a horrific battle when they decided to directly battle overt human stupidity, and Einstein warned them a long time ago about it. Science *will never* win the battle against creationists or any other battle in the political arena. Let me repeat that, Science *will never* win any battle in the political arena. The reason is simple, in order for scientists to win a political battle, they must CEASE being scientists and become activists. It has happened to countless scientists thus far, and many more are seduced daily into becoming activists, rather than simple investigators of the universe.
What’s worse, is that it is now clear that this fight against creationism has made the idea of being a scientist/activist the trendy thing to do. Suddenly all these pompous PhD’s with desires for fame have a way to make a name for themselves without writing a single worthwhile paper. All they have to do is make a “principled stand” against the “Darkness and danger of belief in _____ (Insert cause here),” and the fame can roll in. You can even pick up funding this way, but who cares if you don’t? With fame you can simply write a book, throw PhD after your author name, and make money that way. It used to be the case that scientists remained locked away from the media because the only thing less palatable to a scientist than being misquoted, was being misquoted publicly by a liberal arts major.
And this is why we arrive here, ready to move on to… something. It is now OK for scientists to become activists and treat opposing scientific views in the media as if they are of the same ilk as creationism. This is because it is now OK to be a scientist and activist and never hold two opposing viewpoints in your mind at any time (something that good scientists do REGULARLY). It is all a response to trying to poke the eye of creationists. It’s stupid.., and now I’m rambling off the rails..

1. ScientistForTruth:
Quit picking on Euclid. What is taught is a couple of thousand years of revision of Euclid. The Muslim mathematicians did a lot of work on the 5 postulates. Much has been discovered since Euclid himself. Get the 3-volume Dover Euclid set and enlighten yourself. No one teaches Euclid’s formulation of the Fifth Postulate anymore.
2. etudiant:
Three sigmas? I’m sorry, but 95% confidence is not 3 sigmas.
95% is two sigmas. 3 sigmas is 99.7%.
And all data sets are not necessarily normal, either.
Please get your stats straight.
3. General observation: the lurking variable. A lurking variable is an input to the study which is not documented, not studied, and not included. In the social sciences, such lurking variables are very difficult to identify.
It is bad enough in the hard physical sciences to control all but one variable. Just ask a structural engineer about high winds and earthquakes.
The New Yorker article vividly illustrates the problem with lurking variables, chief of which is the expecation of the person establishing the study and setting forth the parameters for data collection.
In the alleged field of climate science, the lurking variable is, of course, the consistency and reliability of recorded temperatures. What happened to all of those sites which are no longer included in GISS? What, precisely, are the details of the inferential statistics used to populate the unsurveyed locations with temperatures? What, precisely, is the relation between max/min and average temperature? How is it even conceivable to infer temperatures from proxies?
What the *** is going on with the Sun? I know She is variable, but the dearth of radio emanations is quite striking. My Sky and Telescope is suspiciously silent on the question. Galileo was accused of seeing what was not there during the Maunder Minimum. His observations could not be replicated, as the Sun went very quiet. It got really cold from 1660 to 1715, too.
While I am on the subject, what is the whole carbon dioxide budget of the Earth? How does the absorption/release of carbon dioxide by the oceans depend on the PVT of the bordering atmosphere and the ocean temperature? What are the time frames for absorption/release of heat energy (all frequencies) for all gases in the atmosphere, and how do these vary with altitude and latitude?
And while I am on the subject, where is that computer model which will predict cloud cover?
And we are unlikely to learn much, due to the substantial lack of data. Just do a quick calculation of the surface area of the Earth, and figure out how many data points one would need for one each square mile or even each square kilometer. And then figure that one would need vertical data, up to 100,000 m. The cost of such a grid is out of sight!

Matt:
Achtung! Es ist Eisenhower!

I would venture to suggest that this is not a new phenomenon. Researchers have always interpreted their results in ways that favour their view of life and how the world works. They may also have interpreted them in ways that favour their own researches and careers. That’s the whole point of replication that the same work is done by different people who have a different take on things.
It’s more obvious now for three reasons. One, the internet and the more rapid dissemination of science and the easier access to previously published work. Two, increasingly research focuses on smaller and smaller changes in more and more complex systems. Proving to everyone’s satisfaction that an apple, when released, always falls towards the centre of earth is not complex and there are few factors involved. Proving to anybody’s satisfaction that anthropogenic CO2 emissions have warmed the earth is extremely difficult given the complex nature of climate influences, temperature measurement over the globe and doubt over earlier temperatures.
Three, the rewards for making exciting findings is much greater than it ever was.

If you give a 100 question survey to a random sample to see if they are different from the population at large, you expect to have 5 of the questions show a significant difference (at the 95% level). Thus if only 5 out of the 100 show a difference you shoud conclude that they are spurious and conclude that none of the questions truly show a difference.
We have so many people doing so many experiments that as a society we are in the position of the person doing the aforementioned survey. We expect a large number of studies to show siginificance at a 95% (or whatever level you choose) even if no real effects are there. This will result in many spurious false positives from the studies.
We cannot even measure the effect of this as the many studies that do not show a positive wil not be published, and may not even be written up.
It’s like the person doing the 100 question study just published the 5 that showed a difference and neglected to mention the 95 questions that showed no difference.
Normally, we would expect that with replication the spurious effects would be weeded out. But 5 of 100 spurious results will again show positive results when retested. and with the number of studies done, 5% of 5% of 5% still leaves a lot of spurious results out there accepted as fact.
Then when you add confirmation bias and friendly peer review, which waters down the effect of replication, It’s no wonder that many findings are spurious.

The article first discusses the disappearing efficacy of second generation anti-psychotic drugs. That problem is well known.
All studies have a baseline, and some commentators believe the problem results from comparing every new generation of drugs to placebo. The first generation drugs were proven to be more effective than placebo in double blinded trials, and so were the second generation drugs. So how does one determine whether the second generation is more effective than the first, when the two have not been tested head to head? There doesn’t seem to be much of a basis on which to make claims of superiority, beyond researcher enthusiasm and drug company advertising.
When a drug exists that is generally considered to be safe and effective, some commentators believe that newer drugs should be tested against the older, not against placebo. Only new drugs that are safer and/or more effective than their predecessors would be approved. Other commentators strongly condemn this research design because it leads to a shifting baseline over time.

dave38 says:
January 20, 2011 at 8:47 am
W Abbott says:
“….if your experiment needs statistics, you need a better experiment” I wish I could remember who said this
It was said by Ernest Rutherford.

Wasn’t it also Rutherford who said “All science is physics. The rest is speculation”?

I’m sure The New Yorker didn’t intend this as an indictment of Climate Science. But their emphasis on replicability has been at odds with the way Climate Scientists do their work, as evidenced by their resistance to publishing their raw data and correction methods, even when faced with legal ramifications.

Anthony:
Jonah Lehrer is a dilettante with good connections. His only scientific experience is being a middle author on a single paper in Eric Kandel’s lab. He is wrong on many points and has been effectively destroyed elsewhere: see http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/12/science_is_not_dead.php for example.
I knew this guy was wrong when I read his “article”. Why didn’t you?

climatebeagle says: Any idea if “Tony from New York” was a real scientist?
…No, I don’t, but it will be interesting to find out… especially if he is!
The BBC is continuing its tradition on this issue of never letting any sceptical scientist anywhere near a camera or microphone. Rules of impartiality be damned! Let the AGW shill have the entire program to himself!

JPMiller hit the nail on the head. There are a lot of individual scientific phenomena that we understand quite well. Gravitational effects near the surface of the earth, for example. Galileo showed that a feather and an iron ball are both accelerated at the same rate. However, wher you try to do an experiment by dropping them from the same tower at the same time, the results contradict the fundamental scientific principle that the “consensus” accepts, because there are more phenomena at work here than just acceleration due to gravity.
In the case of medicine, ecology, and psychology, and many other fields, it is not possible to isolate one phenomenon and then make a broad conclusion based on your discovery about that one phemonenon, because there are usually many phenomena at play in determining an outcome. We are a long way away from understanding enough about those fields to really call them “science”. Rather, they might best be called proto-sciences, where the facts have not yet come together enough to be able to make real, testable predictions. In some cases (e.g., the social “sciences”) I suspect that this time is far in the future, and these fields should just be called speculation.

This does turn out to be a fine article, though it nearly lost me at the beginning by using the alleged superiority of the second generation of psychiatric drugs as a prime example. Those particular drug trials were simply rigged — not merely my opinion, but the FDA’s, which forbade the drug companies to advertise them as superior to the first generation. But the drug companies have bought so much of the psychiatric establishment, they didn’t have to say it in ads, their paid doctors said it in interviews with all the big publications, and the false message got spread. Now that the second generation is getting old enough to lose patent protection, we are allowed to “discover” it wasn’t ever that good, and rigged tests are being prepared for a third generation’s patents and profits. (See Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic.)
So the author does under-estimate the influence of lying and corruption. Yet by the end, he does persuade me that even without those factors, we would see problems.

Pat Frank says:
January 20, 2011 at 10:05 am
“Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get.”
Total crock. Written by someone who has never done an experiment.
Written by someone who has never done a grant applications Pat??
Perhaps the most important implication of this excellent article is the failure of the self-correction peer review feedback loop to act early enough to cancel the influence of faulty research.
That assumes there is any impulse at all to question fashionable results. The fact is that some researchers are able to insulate themselves from any real attempt to probe their findings by pronouncing “ex cathedra” that their conclusions are too urgent and significant to be put to the test.
With the enviro reporters covering this being urged to “forget objectivity and go with your gut” the results, I theorize, are predictable.

“The disturbing implication of the Crabbe study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise. The hyperactivity of those coked-up Edmonton mice wasn’t an interesting new fact—it was a meaningless outlier, a by-product of invisible variables we don’t understand. ”
If Crabbe had read Dougleas Adams he would realise that it was the white mice that are conducting the experiment , not the humans. They do this sort of thing and then analyse how we deal with it.

As a scientist, I absolutely agree with that article. It is completely true. Repeatability is one of the founding pillars of science, and anything unreproducible is not science; just a phenomenon or observation (the lowest level on the scientific method, before hypothesis).
The truth is, a lot of papers are published and only YEARS LATER does another lab come along and reproduce the results. It is when this occurs that suddenly it’s found out that things weren’t what they seemed as of the first paper. The antidepressants are a perfect example. More research was done only when it became apparent the original work wasn’t living up to expectations. And low and behold, it was true.
But there’s another disconnect. Sometimes something in the lab is completely reproducible, but ONLY IN A SPECIFIC INSTANCE AND CASE. Only when the variables are exact, only when the absolutely same buffers and concentrations and test organism are used do those results occur. Once you transition from the lab to the real world, suddenly things no longer work like you thought. Even clinical trials, which are what test this transition from lab to reality, can be biased by picking a unique subject pool, and only that subject pool gets the results, while the majority of everyone else differs.
This is the hard fact of science, and why medicine is still such a black box. In science we control the variables very exactly, but in the real world the variables have high variability and even worst are often changing on the fly–rather than being held steady. And there is where so much of the disconnect creeps into the scientific literature, and when going back with new machines and testing old procedures can suddenly grant you completely different results.
Heck, in computer modeling, even the very processor you are running the model on will change the results, sometimes significantly so.
So, I believe in the end, this dichotomy of lab and variables verses nature and reality, coupled with science sometimes being lazy (you don’t get funding for doing the same experiment as someone else! You only get funding for new experiments!) about reproduction of results, is what is leading to this current shake up of all our “facts”.
The world is just so much more complex than a particular lab…

rw says:
January 20, 2011 at 1:25 pm
One of the most perceptive observations about empirical science that I’ve ever encountered was the following: “Science is not like going to the supermarket”… What the author meant (which I only appreciated after a time) was that the world does not come neatly packaged like goods in a supermarket; so the image of Science as a kind of consumerism where one wanders down the aisles and selects items of knowledge from the shelves is a travesty of the actual process of gaining empirical knowledge.

This is also a very important point. The public is all too eager to accept prepackaged sound-bytes from experts on how to handle their daily lives. Very few actually dive into the details where the real understanding comes from. It would easily appear to the layperson that “our facts are losing their truthiness” when in fact the truth they had subscribed to was simply the label on the package. They had been considering a bazooka-joe gum wrapper of factoids to be gospel and they’re only now coming into contact with reality.

W Abbott says:
January 20, 2011 at 3:43 am
“….if your experiment needs statistics, you need a better experiment” I wish I could remember who said this. It’s a big problem. We need better experiments.
think it was Dr Michael Kelly at one the parliamentary inquirys

Jeremy says (January 20, 2011 at 8:45 am): [on creationism v. evolution] “The whole argument would have died immediately 200 years ago if some scientist had simply kept his mouth shut and said, ‘Yes, uh-huh, I see how you could see it that way.'”
I’ve always liked this way of putting it: “The past and present diversity of life on earth may have been intelligently designed, but if so it was done in a way indistiguishable from evolution.”

A couple of posters commented on the on again, off again nature of scientific media. Too wit:
“Breast milk good, breast milk bad, breast milk good …….etc
MMR good, MMR bad, MMR good ……….etc
Statins good, statins bad, statins good ……etc
London will be under water in ten years time, make that twenty, make that next year ….etc.”
As a mother of three children, I can put to rest the first one. Breast feeding has got to be the funniest thing I’ve ever done. Laughed till I cried. First of all, the stuff comes out in seven different directions through tiny nozzles that are capable of squirting it into your own nose as well as that of your baby. Hell, I even had the stuff squirt across the ceiling in the maternity ward. Second, it is the best tasting stuff ever made. I love honey nut cheerios right out of the box. I love even more the taste of honey nut cheerios milk. That’s what human breast milk tastes like. And every mother I have talked to will admit that they have either tasted it on accident (I refer the reader to the multiple spigots in each nipple capable of taking paint off a house), or on purpose. No wonder kids love it. I don’t care whether or not the stuff is good or bad for you. It tastes good. Too bad I’m too damned old for that kind of thing anymore. It would be right convenient and quite tasty in my morning coffee.

In medicine, we have a cynical saying about this. “Quick, prescribe it while it still works!”
In climate science, they could say about carbon dioxide production, “Quick, tax it while it still causes climate change!”

As somebody who considers the AGW theory to be broadly proven (subject to a lot of unanswered questions such as the extent – and sign – of cloud feedbacks) I would not generally post here but your pointer to this article is the single most useful thing I have read here – ever!
What a brilliant piece, and what a great service to science generally it would be if it were compulsory reading for every scientist and also for anybody reading scientific papers.
I think there may be two forces at work here, cognitive biases (which is what the article focusses on) and just the general weirdness of the universe – in particular the utter incomprehensibility of quantum mechanics.
The classic demonstration of this is the fact that the result of an experiment changes simply by observing it or – more accurately – by trying to remove uncertainty from the result. The classic demonstration of this is the “two slit” experiment. In that experiment, if you do not know which of two slits photons pass through the resulting pattern they make on the detecting screen is a wave interference pattern. If you then put a detector in that will definitively tell you which of the two slits the photons pass through the pattern is indicative of a random particles passing through two slits. There is no change in the randomness of the photons, just on how they are observed.
Maybe this quantum uncertainty effect has more subtle effects on the results of experimentation generally? Observing the world changes it. How weird is that!?

Not just the soft ‘sciences’ which are affected…
“The same holds for any number of phenomena, from the disappearing benefits of second-generation anti-psychotics to the weak coupling ratio exhibited by decaying neutrons, which appears to have fallen by more than ten standard deviations between 1969 and 2001. Even the law of gravity hasn’t always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.) Despite these findings, second-generation anti-psychotics are still widely prescribed, and our model of the neutron hasn’t changed. The law of gravity remains the same.”
My take is that the human ego is an almost insurmountable obstacle to making progress on the BIG questions in science.
Our perception of reality is all through various proxies (our senses), which are not reliable in all circumstances.
Much scientific data is just noise – a by-product of unknown/perceived unknowns we we can’t account for.
Our beliefs are a form of blindness which prevents objective observation.
The observer is an integral part of the system being observed – a small shift in position (and/or belief) can change the observed result.
Statistical correlations and trends have no worth when dealing with deterministically chaotic systems and produce misleading results. They have little worth when used for analysing linear systems, unless sample size is enormous.
So where does this leave science?….
“We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.”

i was just reading about how the astrological signs have shifted. it’s God’s way of pointing out how assumptions and beliefs can change without negating the divine.

Pamela Gray says:
January 20, 2011 at 9:13 pm
I coulda fed an Army base hospital maternity ward back then.”
Mamma Mia!