Below is an excerpt from an excellent article in The New Yorker which describes a recognition of curious phenomenon spanning many different fields of science:
Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.
But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.
For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. 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? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer#ixzz1BYjefYnF
h/t to WUWT reader Edward Lowe
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This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.
If I may, I propose the name for this could be: confirmation entropy
Well, it kinda does. It’s “Postnormalism”, and it’s rife. It’s like a cancer spreading through scientific discovery – very much including climatology – and it has to be stopped.
“excellent artic in The New Yorker” should read “excellent article in The New Yorker”.
Just for fun, let’s project this idea to the “applied science” arena–engineering, then on to consumer goods. Say I build an MP3 player that doesn’t “reproduce” the music contained on it because as an engineer I didn’t think reproducibility was a critical factor how the unit worked–would that be a fair item to sell to customers? Don’t you think they’d get ticked off in short order? Don’t you think they’d at least demand their money back? Nobody tolerates pseudoengineering or pseudomarketing. Nobody!
So it is with the climsci people–we demand reproducibility in their work. The consuming public just isn’t buying their pseudoscience.
Science has been reduced to a process to obtain grants.
Never let the facts get in the way of robust science.
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!
I dont think that there is anything new about science being potentially ‘corrupted’. There are certian things which cannot be easily proved or disproved, and so there will alwalys be the potential for certain research fields to become hopelessly tainted. Such a thing has been around a while, but I would be more inclined to say that it is academia itself that has the potential to become corrupt, rather than ‘science’ per say.
Academia by nature has a certain freedom of expression, because of the need to obtain knowledge through free enquiry. But this ‘expression’ has to be consistent with, and be conducted within, the context of broader community values. The requirement of obtaining consent before conducting research on individuals is just one example of this.
One can give several historical examples where academia has gone of the rails. Social Darwinism in the late 19th century and early 20th is a good example. Eugenics was one result (Michael Crichton was keen on pointing this out), Hitler and Nazism was another. Withouth going into details here, suffice to say that Hitler derived many of his more radical ideas, (as did the Nazis in general), from academic culture and beliefs prevalent in German academia from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. (Source: Weikart-“from Darwin to Hitler”). This is part of the reason the Nazis got into power and got away with so much, the ‘soil was prepared’ by academic ‘research’ for many decades prior. (Note that Darwinism doesnt actually support radical Social Darwinism, it is radical intellectuals within academica who corrupted the data to make it fit into their ideology. Hitler simply took many ideas already matured within academia, and put them in practice). I bring this sort of unsavoury history up up because we dont want the same sort of thing to happen in the 21st century, academic culture ‘preparing the soil’ for radical changes to energy policy through corruption of data, and by research ‘values’ which are inconsistent with broader community values.
Richard Pipes of Harvard also points out that Bolshevism-Communism has its origins in what he calls ‘radical intellectualism’ within academica of the mid 19th to early 20th century. So I would argue, and others have also done, that 2 of the greatest ideological evils of the 20th century-Nazism and Bolshevism-Communism, had their origins within corrupted academic culture.
If we keep academic culture and values consistent with generally agreed community values, we have at least one way of stop radical intellectuals from springing more nasty surprises on humanity. Parts of the modern green movement are no doubt being driven by radical academic culture, and it is important that somebidy keeps the system honest and consistent with broader community values. A better internally regulated academic culture will also go a long way. (Keep those FOI requests coming).
I dont think corruption in ‘science’ is really the problem, I think its the general lack of regulation within academic culture.
Be fascinating to see if there was a correlation between the reported efficacy of new drugs, and their time to patent expiry.
It’s the “Red Queen” at work… The “facts” that no longer hold true about humans and reactions to various drugs and chemicals (presented examples of “facts”) may very well be due to genetic adaptation to the drugs. Evolution is driving the train, and the “Red Queen” ensures that the genome doesn’t get too far before equalizing genetic changes enforce the status quo. All drugs will become ineffective once the affected cells make changes to the DNA…
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.
Must have drunk from the post modern fountain.
The experimenters in a group think obviated replicability, and it is the fault of nature, not the experimenters!
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!
I recall reading this article. It so reminded me of Climate Scientists at work. It should be disseminated as widely as possible.
Couple this above with
Anthropic bias: observation selection effects in science and philosophy
http://tinyurl.com/67fhvxk
and confirmation bias, adjusting data, hiding data, outright lies and you have modern climate research.
http://www.bmj.com/content/326/7404/1453.full
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!
I like “Confirmation Entropy”
Is it related to “Truth Entropy”?
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?
I think you would want to call it confirmation bias and think a number of people already use that term. However, I don’t really care what you call it I’d like to comment on the following statement at the end of the italiziced paragraph.
“Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.”
As a scientist, I must say a bigger issue is that the different answers that nature gives us are often more interesting than the ones we were looking for. We may find that the limits of our thinking are actually limiting our opportunity. The thing you thought you understood were not possible suddenly become feasible. That’s the real loss going forward.
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.
A couple of thoughts-
-The concept of unrecognized bias is very important. I teach my students that scientists are just people, and subject to biases they don’t even notice. How many of us would submit for publication every ‘what-if’ hypothesis we have that doesn’t pan out? None, of course. We submit only the ones that survive the tests with promising results. But sometimes, those results are statistical accidents. And sometimes we overestimate the significance, due to hidden variables. All entirely honest.
-I remember reading or hearing a comment once that if you have to rely on statistics to ferret out some result, it’s probably not real. Statistics, the comment continued, are best mainly for proving what’s plainly obvious to the eye. The article concentrated on studies based on statistical analyses of complicated phenomena. I suggest that the ‘failure’ of science, the ‘nontruth’ of ‘facts,’ is probably concentrated in such studies. Clearly, science continues to work awfully well in general- my smartphone is sufficient proof to me that we have an awfully good understanding of electronics and materials, for example.
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.
Concerned Jew,
Trenberth intends to give his speech to the American Meteorological Society, 23-27 January 2011, Seattle, Washington.
Perhaps a number of those who will be present are readers of this blog; perhaps even our host will be present.
Would it not show Dr. T what people think of him if as many people as possible could attend his talk, and simply get up and leave if/when he uses the term “denier”?
The first thing that struck me in the article is that the “decay” was always in experiments involving biological systems. As a “hard” science guy myself (BS Geology), I’d say that research bias and measurement error is a gazillion times worse (to use a highly technical term) than in chemistry or physics. Even the physics experiment the article did mention was regarding a highly dynamic system, the Earth. Taking gravity measurements in deep bore holes is going to be complicated by the density of the rock, the possibility of unknown gravitational anomalies (which the experiment may have disclosed), and many other possible factors.
As in the case of the Mars mission that crashed because a NASA engineer used metrics instead of English (or vice-versa, I forget which it was), is it a matter of “the science is getting harder,” or “we’re not doing science as well as we used to”?
Go to the New Yorker and read the entire article. It is worth it. Again, read the whole thing.
Thanks Anthony and Mr. Lowe
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.
Having spent some time working in pharmaceutical research, I am reminded of the reason why I curtailed that segment of my career!