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A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors in four of his papers

andrewgelman.com

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Re: A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors in four of his papers

#61

Post by closed »

wfunction wrote: post #5
Andys wrote: post #4

I still don't understand: Is there any good reason that raw data should not be published along with each paper?

> I still don't understand: Is there any good reason that raw data should not be published along with each paper? Confidentiality? What if correlations give away subjects' identities?

Most psychological researchers deidentify subject data, since you can only show it to a very small group of people otherwise. (which might prevent you from e.g. getting statistical help from someone outside the project).

Re: A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors in four of his papers

#62

Post by bryanrasmussen »

MR4D wrote: post #17

It's weird. If conservatives don't believe scientists, it's because the conservatives are labelled "morons". Could it be that conservatives just think there's a lot more of this crappy "science" out there, and that a situation like this is the canary in the coal mine? When presented with examples like this, it's actually _irrational_ to think that there aren't other egregious papers out there. Possibly just a few, bu…

Hey, most likely all of them that reach conclusions abhorrent to the financial backers of conservative politicians and media!

Re: A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors in four of his papers

#63

Post by tyingq »

nonbel wrote: post #3
tyingq wrote: post #2

I imagine Wansink does get it. Now that he's outed, he either trolling for fun, or hoping the blasé approach is the one that quiets all the fuss the fastest.

I wouldn't be certain. A lot of researchers really are clueless about anything to do with statistics. It takes much more work/time to do real research, so the funding system has actually been selecting for people who can remain ignorant (so it is not fraud) and just produce p-hacked "results". In many areas, this has been going on for multiple generations now and you are trained to do it as a grad student.

It's worse than just not knowing statistics. These errors were in a table in one of the published papers. Every single row is calculated wrong.

  > (43.67 - 44.55)/sqrt(18.5^2/43 + 14.3^2/52)
  should be 0.2551872, rounds to 0.26, he put 0.25
  > (68.65 - 66.51)/sqrt(3.67^2/43 + 9.44^2/52)
  should be 1.503114, rounds to 1.5, he put 1.38
  > (184.83 - 178.38)/sqrt(63.7^2/43 + 45.71^2/52)
  should be 0.556064, rounds to 0.56, he put 0.52
source: http://andrewgelman.com/2017/01/25/statistical-heartburn-att...

And that's just basic math, nothing fancy. So, he knows it's bad. I assume it's difficult to get a doctorate at Stanford and then become a professor at Cornell, so there's got to be more to this than him just being stupid.

Re: A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors in four of his papers

#64

Post by mtberatwork »

theWatcher37 wrote: post #43
throwaway729 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thought: ridiculous false equivalency. Conservatives don't distrust science carte blanc. Many of them will chuck money at asinine bullshit as long as it's billed as a way to kill the other team. Check out some of the more ridiculous stuff to come out of DoD. They distrust climate science. And they don't distrust the actual science, just the conclusions. And increasingly not even the most basic conclusion, just the…

Meanwhile, anti-vax is huge in liberal soccer-mom only-shops-at-whole-foods cities. The left has its fair share of science-denying morons as well.

> Meanwhile, anti-vax is huge in liberal soccer-mom only-shops-at-whole-foods cities.

Is it really "huge"? Some links to polling data might help here otherwise I would also be reticent to proclaim that it's comparable to climate denial-ism. After all, we have a president that has publicly proclaimed climate change to be a hoax and sitting members of congress that eagerly attack climate scientists on their research [1].

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/lamar-smith-unbound-l...

Re: A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors in four of his papers

#65

Post by fao_ »

theparanoid wrote: post #37
MR4D wrote: post #17

It's weird. If conservatives don't believe scientists, it's because the conservatives are labelled "morons". Could it be that conservatives just think there's a lot more of this crappy "science" out there, and that a situation like this is the canary in the coal mine? When presented with examples like this, it's actually _irrational_ to think that there aren't other egregious papers out there. Possibly just a few, bu…

Some areas of science are mostly quackery. Nutrition for one. Some areas are resistant to quackery like physics and chemistry. And most are a mix like medicine. In school we're taught that every field is as self correcting as physics. Reality seems to be different.

> Nutrition for one.

"Nutrition" isn't an area of science. Dietetics is, and is a very firm and established field. A lot of the false claims and bad dietary advice come from Nutritionists, which (in the UK at least) isn't a protected term. Anyone can claim to be a Nutritionist, and Nutritionists aren't known for rigourous data.

Re: A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors in four of his papers

#66

Post by hasteur »

sverige wrote: post #33

I went to high school with Brian Wansink. He is brilliant, funny, and affable. I could hear his voice speaking his responses to the objections raised, and snickered a little bit. I'm sure that Wansink cares about his research and its quality. He's that sort of person. I don't know what happened with these papers, but it seems likely that answering bloggers publicly would not serve the greater good. It seems to me tha…

If he is so unconcerned with verifying his test results, perhaps luminaries in his discipline should write to the journals where his papers are being published pointing out the uncorrected errors and suggest that the journal's editorial department be supplemented to fine tooth comb his assertions.

Re: A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors in four of his papers

#67

Post by dagw »

theWatcher37 wrote: post #44
kem wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had this same conversation with colleagues. I think there's a mixture of things going on. There's a lot more of this going on in a lot of fields, especially the biomedical and social sciences, but probably everywhere. I think conservatives are correct to pick up on this general phenomenon. They know there's a lot of systemic problems with research and academics, and approach things from that perspective. The pro…

Also some of them are older and remember the "2nd iceage" and "uncontrollable acid rain" doom and gloom. Unfortunately the media has done a lot to poison the well on these topics, coupled with politicians all too happy to never let a crisis go to waste. Republicans yelling "small government" while trying to make a government big enough to police your bedroom. Democrats yell about stopping climate change and pump bill…

Certainly with acid rain, a lot of policies where put in place to try to reduce acid rain in response to those predictions. Any analysis about whether the predictions about acid rain where correct or not cannot be done without also studying the effects of those policies.

Re: A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors in four of his papers

#68

Post by averagewall »

throwaway729 wrote: post #28
MR4D wrote: post #17

It's weird. If conservatives don't believe scientists, it's because the conservatives are labelled "morons". Could it be that conservatives just think there's a lot more of this crappy "science" out there, and that a situation like this is the canary in the coal mine? When presented with examples like this, it's actually _irrational_ to think that there aren't other egregious papers out there. Possibly just a few, bu…

My thought: ridiculous false equivalency. Conservatives don't distrust science carte blanc. Many of them will chuck money at asinine bullshit as long as it's billed as a way to kill the other team. Check out some of the more ridiculous stuff to come out of DoD. They distrust climate science. And they don't distrust the actual science, just the conclusions. And increasingly not even the most basic conclusion, just the…

Climate science is totally inaccessible to lay people. All we can do is trust. I'm a science teacher and when I teach climate change, it's just the bare basics and a few subjective facts. We can make cardboard greenhouses and draw pictures of IR rays getting absorbed in the atmosphere. But that's not what's in doubt. That's the stuff everyone's accepted for decades. The part people don't trust is the "it'll destroy the world". For that, I haven't got the faintest clue how right it is beyond trust. In most of high-school science, you can measure forces yourself, you can mix the chemicals yourself, you can observe stuff doing what the text book says it should. But not climate science.

Unless it can be made accessible to even science graduates to actually reproduce the results from a critical point of view, it's always going to have a lot of sceptics. Not everyone has so much faith in scientists.

Re: A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors in four of his papers

#69

Post by mafribe »

makomk wrote: post #56
theWatcher37 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also some of them are older and remember the "2nd iceage" and "uncontrollable acid rain" doom and gloom. Unfortunately the media has done a lot to poison the well on these topics, coupled with politicians all too happy to never let a crisis go to waste. Republicans yelling "small government" while trying to make a government big enough to police your bedroom. Democrats yell about stopping climate change and pump bill…

Yeah. It's certainly interesting watching conservatives pointing to the fact that acid rail didn't turn into a catastrophe to justify their opposition to the kinds of emission limit that actually put a stop to acid rain in the first place.

This is indeed an important narrative, but it's not a priori clear that you can infer from "the forests are alive and healthy in 2017" to "If we had not instituted limits on sulfur pollution in the 1980s, the forests would be dead now.

I grew up next to some of the world's largest coal-fired power plants that regularly featured in "worlds biggest polluters" lists. The forests were fine before flue-gas desulfurisation just as much as after. Some countries enacted flue-gas desulfurisation earlier than others. The forests were fine before flue-gas desulfurisation just as much as after.

Anecdotal? Sure. But one wonders ...

Re: A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors in four of his papers

#70

Post by MagnumOpus »

mtberatwork wrote: post #64
theWatcher37 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, anti-vax is huge in liberal soccer-mom only-shops-at-whole-foods cities. The left has its fair share of science-denying morons as well.

> Meanwhile, anti-vax is huge in liberal soccer-mom only-shops-at-whole-foods cities. Is it really "huge"? Some links to polling data might help here otherwise I would also be reticent to proclaim that it's comparable to climate denial-ism. After all, we have a president that has publicly proclaimed climate change to be a hoax and sitting members of congress that eagerly attack climate scientists on their research [1…

That same president has of course also publicly proclaimed vaccines to cause autism. He and his tens of millions of followers are the antithesis of the liberal soccer mum, of course.

[1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/trump-vaccines-autism-wrong-20...

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