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We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

nautil.us

31–40 of 282 posts

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#31
post #13

I thought this was in the definition of "scientific"

Peer review is how most science is defined as science and peer review does not require reproduction of the work.

You've illustrated the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive definition nicely.

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#32
Looking good is, sadly, better rewarded than doing good in many areas of life. It's doubly sad that this affects our body of scientific knowledge. Even claims that are reproduced can suffer from funding bias and confirmation bias. The truth hopefully comes out in the end, but I'm sad for the harm that's caused in the interim.

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#33
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about defense research?

Well, there's the GPL-styled approach: anyone with access to the results must also have access to the associated data. This doesn't mean it is mandatory to make it public, though you'd have to restrict the redistribution freedom.

I recently used a large dataset of tweets in a research project. As far as I know, I do not have the rights to distribute these.

I also used a dataset consisting of newspaper articles. It cost me $1.000 to get access to, and I definitely do not have the rights to redistribute it.

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#34
post #11

The big issue right now is funding of replicated research, who wants to fund a research to prove someone else was right? Most of these funds are granted based on potential outcome of the new discovery like: potential business, patents, licenses, etc... not being the first one would probably wipe most of these benefits, cutting down to a small probably getting funded... Now, straight to the point, who's going to pay f…

> Now, straight to the point, who's going to pay for the repeated research to prove the first one?

Who is and who should are two different questions. The body who funded the original research should be best placed to fund the verification of the research. If the research isn't compelling enough to fund verification then why was it funded in the first place? And if the principle research group is requesting additional funding for more research that builds on the initial unverified research then that sounds like poor governance.

I realise that this simplistic view gets messy and confused when research is really academic led innovation and incubation.

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#35
I disagree.

One part of science is observation. Including observations which cannot be, or at least have not been, repeated. For example, consider a rare event in astronomy which has only been detected once. Is that science? I say it is. But it's surely not repeatable. (Even if something like it is detected in the future, is it really a "repeat"?)

Some experiments are immoral to repeat. For example, in a drug trial you may find that 95% survive with a given treatment, while only 5% survive with the placebo. (Think to the first uses of penicillin as as real-world example.)

Who among you is going to argue that someone else needs to repeat that experiment before we regard it as a proper scientific result?

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#36
post #11

The big issue right now is funding of replicated research, who wants to fund a research to prove someone else was right? Most of these funds are granted based on potential outcome of the new discovery like: potential business, patents, licenses, etc... not being the first one would probably wipe most of these benefits, cutting down to a small probably getting funded... Now, straight to the point, who's going to pay f…

On a low level, I think it should be mandatory for masters students to do a pre-thesis project, which is replicating findings in a published paper.

It would do something about low hanging fruit in terms of testing reproduceability and since there is a published paper, the student has access to guidelines for setting up and reporting on a large project, which will help them learn how to do their own, original thesis.

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#37
post #35

I disagree. One part of science is observation. Including observations which cannot be, or at least have not been, repeated. For example, consider a rare event in astronomy which has only been detected once. Is that science? I say it is. But it's surely not repeatable. (Even if something like it is detected in the future, is it really a "repeat"?) Some experiments are immoral to repeat. For example, in a drug trial y…

The point of science is to discover truth in a way that is objective and convincing. That's not to say there isn't other truth out there. I think people mixing 'science' up with 'truth about the universe' is causing some unnecessary cognitive dissonance.

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#38
post #17

We learned the importance of this in high school science and it baffles me that it's not already the case.

We have some kind of weird hero-worship of scientists where the general public just believes what they say, even if they never even attempt to replicate their results. They do an experiment (which may or may not be scientifically sound to start with) and then publish results, and the public eats it up. And then people have the nerve to say, "Last week chocolate was bad for me, now it's good? Make up you mind!" No, st…

Good point about the public involvement. The public and the news systems are part of the problem.

I've lost count of how many 'battery breakthrough' articles I've come across, but they seem to pass the newsworthy test.

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#39

Sometimes in cs if your research is embedded in a huge ecosystem, it can become quite expensive to reproduce results. I mean proper reproduction, not just rerunning the Benchmarks. If you are dealing with complicated stuff, the reproducer might also just not be able to do the same thing technically.

Maybe, maybe not. Do you have something specific in mind here?

I hope researchers and scientists don't considers others not capable enough, and therefore withhold info on how to reproduce.

Even if the experiment is crazy expensive and complex right now it might be considered much more tractable in 10 years, or someone builds upon your work and invents a simpler method to show the same thing.

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#40
post #6

Maybe conferences should have a "reproducibility" track for that purpose? Also, I don't know about other fields, but I'm pretty sure that in CS, if you just took a paper and tried to reproduce the results, you'll get rejected on the ground that you offer no original contribution; no original contribution => no publication => no funding.

For CS, reproducing should be easy given the code and input data right? Other sciences' input isn't so easily shared

Ideally you should re-implement the algorithm based on the description in the paper to verify that the description of the algorithm is correct. You should also test with your own data to make sure that the algorithm works on all reasonable data and not only on some provided cherry picked data. If you can't get the expected results with your own implementation and your own data then the results aren't reproduced.
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