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
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.”
This is a good description of how government money, which is always poisoned by politics and corrupted because it was stolen from the people at the point of a gun, has corrupted science to our great detriment.
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.
Smokey says:
January 20, 2011 at 11:04 am
You take this whole blogging thing *way* too seriously. PZ Meyers is another opinionated atheist who happens to have a decent opinion in this case. Lehrer isn’t *completely* wrong, just highly derivative and wrong about a number of important issues. He goes for a “big picture” view, as if he had actually done science and was now retiring and writing his memoirs so that we lesser scientists might profit from them. I thought Meyers did a nice job criticizing the article and that his take would be non-controversial. I was rather hoping not to write a line-by-line refutation of our lad Lehrer. Here’s an article more critical of Lehrer that hopefully hasn’t pissed off anyone at WUWT: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/neuro-atheism/201101/jonah-lehrers-decline-effect-now-in-decline. And here’s the person that Lehrer is deriving his “effect” from: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 although this paper too tends to take a bureaucratic “big picture” approach.
I have no idea what Pharyngula’s opinion of WUWT or global warming is; I don’t go there for climate news.
@Murray Sandland Duffin
Has not. You need to read down to the end of the article where Meyers says:
“But those last few sentences, where Lehrer dribbles off into a delusion of subjectivity and essentially throws up his hands and surrenders himself to ignorance, is unjustifiable. Early in any scientific career, one should learn a couple of general rules: science is never about absolute certainty, and the absence of black & white binary results is not evidence against it; you don’t get to choose what you want to believe, but instead only accept provisionally a result; and when you’ve got a positive result, the proper response is not to claim that you’ve proved something, but instead to focus more tightly, scrutinize more strictly, and test, test, test ever more deeply. It’s unfortunate that Lehrer has tainted his story with all that unwarranted breast-beating, because as a summary of why science can be hard to do, and of the institutional flaws in doing science, it’s quite good.”
Obviously, I’m a lot more critical of Lehrer than Meyers is, but, Meyers is an amusing writer.
Could the origins of the phenomenon be blamed on cheap Hindu Kush, I wonder. o_O
Interesting hypothesis. Have you also considered the interference of the blond Lebanese guy in the experiments?
Gary Hladik says:
January 20, 2011 at 4:00 pm
‘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.”’
Sure, I do not disagree. But we have made a big mistake by accepting the formulation that Darwinian Evolution is true if and only if Creationism is false. It prevents us from making critical claims about Darwin’s account. For example, Darwin’s highest level hypothesis is “All species evolved from some other species, except the first one.” In all of science, there is no other high level hypothesis with an exception clause. We should take this seriously, but we cannot because our PC culture will not permit criticism of Darwin, unless you are Gould or Lewontin.
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!”
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.
We are still at in in the 21st Century. The hypothesis from the 20th Century was that Drugs Cause Addiction. There was never any proof of this (look up the original heroin trials). But it was sold to the public and politicians. Comes the 21st Century and we are getting fairly unpoliticized science on the matter (contra monkey asphyxiation by Heath et. al.). And the NIDA now says addiction is about 50% genetic and 50% environmental factors. (Of course if they came out and told you what the environmental factors were – trauma – the persecution of users would be very difficult. Evidently there are still limits to how much truth you can tell on a government grant.) And yet no effort has been made to educate the public and lawmakers on this new understanding: you do not catch addiction from drugs. Drug use is a response not a cause. But ask the psychological intake nurse at the local hospital about it. The answer will come back – self medication. So at least the medical protocols have changed.
So we are not over acting like Nazis (3 AM no knock raids) based on ideas known (by some) to be false. I’m going to add a couple of links to start those of you who wish to look into the matter further. They should be a good springboard for further research.
Heroin
PTSD and the Endocannabinoid System
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.
I blame it on the anamides.
M. Simon, I learned something today. I didn’t know that breast milk can give you a kind of pot hit. Could be why I laughed a lot as a young mother. I coulda fed an Army base hospital maternity ward back then. It even affected my kids. My first born toddler was wanting to wonder around while having his morning cup of milk, so I filled a tippy cup and gave it to him just to see what he would do. I sat him down with the cup in his two hands. He took a swig, slammed the cup down on the floor, and laughed till tears rolled down his chubby little cheeks.
Wxcellent piece, although I find the title somewhat misleading. The science isn’t changing, it is merely the perception of the scientists examining it. Whether the delusion is deliberate or accidental confirmation bias is also worth examining. I would argue that the journals being biased towards publishing papers with positive results introduces an incentive for scientists to “find” positive results. I am sure the likes of Stephen Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) would have a field day with this stuff.
In a nutshell, if so many of the rewards in academia/research revolve around being published, and publishers are biased towards publishing positive results, then there is sufficient incentive for scientists to introduce confirmation bias (aka cheat). Whether it is deliberate or largely sub-conscious is debatable, but I think the case for CAGW papers is clear. The incentives are huge, therefore the likelihood of dubious results being published is particularly high.
I wonder if we are nearing a point where it will become “trendy” to publish counter-CAGW papers or whether the financial incentives will hold that at bay for many years yet.
“Hide the decline” could take on a whole new meaning 😀 OK, just being facetious there …
FRUTH. plu Fruths. Origin. faith and truth.
Meaning. What you believe to be true.
Examples: Tooth fairy, Father Christmas, Anthropogenic Global Warming.
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!?
Somewhere in the UK John Brignell is smiling.
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.”
UnfrozenCavemanMD:
“Quick, prescribe it while it still works!”
Now that’s funny right there.
And a perfect synopsis of the New Yorker article.
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.
Any day that I learn something new is a good day. Lehrer’s article crystallises some very important concepts — what I might have vaguely suspected to be the case I can now think and talk about with a new measure of clarity. Many thanks! It’s a great credit to Anthony and WUWT that such things abound here. And a pretty severe indictment of science as a whole that I get it from the New Yorker via WUWT instead of from those people and publications who purport to represent ‘science’ to the world.
Pamela Gray says:
January 20, 2011 at 9:13 pm
I coulda fed an Army base hospital maternity ward back then.”
Mamma Mia!
What are the specific cases? Is it the new “research” that is bad or the old?
(Health claims reported by the media tend to flip-flop, sometimes in short order, sometimes longer (remember saccharine vs cyclamate artificial sweeteners?). Some recent promotions may come from an agenda (one attack on canola oil looked to me like it came from an advocate of olive oil, others were just stupid). Considering all factors is another – a recent MSM article on coconut oil pointed to its much higher temperature threshold, because overheating oils can create carcinogenic compounds.
I once was being given advice by a relative about dietary fat. While waiting in the living room while she was preparing dinner I skimmed through two books she had been praising – and noticed that they contradicted each other on a key issue. (She was counselling what she had wanted to believe because of her up-bringing – foods from her pre-teen years were magical. Years later her very bad behaviour convinced me that she was a skilled rationalist – using logic to justify a conclusion that had already been determined by her emotions (so pseudo-logic I suppose, often based on false premises). She had the skill in persuasion (good talker and pushy) to get further than many people do, so is more dangerous than average.)
“polistra’s point about seeking the unknown factor is excellent”. David Harrimans’ book “The Logical Leap” includes that. It also covers whether science is superceded or just amplified and expanded (good science that is, I used to naiively think that phrase was internally redundant but words are so cheap to so many people). He also provides examples of scientists being slowed down or led off track by personal beliefs. “thingadonta”, I recommend Leonard Peikoff’s book “The Ominous Parallels” for backup to what you are saying about the path to National Socialism (“Nazi” in short) in Germany.