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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

#71

Post by viggity »

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.

The difference between vaccines and climate change is that we have hard evidence on vaccines. You can create a hypothesis and do a randomized double blind experiment. The results are conclusive.

Climate Science is a bunch of computer models are not testable. When they're run and compared to what actually happened they're always off. e.g. Name a single climate science model that predicted "the pause" starting in '98?

Climate Scientists don't release their model's code. They don't release the exact data that went into their model. Shit, isn't that one of the complaints about Wansink? That he isn't sharing his data?

I'm not saying climate change isn't real, I'm saying that the level of certainty that climate scientists proclaim is problematic. I'm saying that labeling dissenters as deniers (reminiscent of holocaust deniers) is beyond the pale. I'm saying that fossil fuels have done more to advance the human condition than anything else in history of mankind.

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

#72

Post by nonbel »

viggity wrote: post #71
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.

The difference between vaccines and climate change is that we have hard evidence on vaccines. You can create a hypothesis and do a randomized double blind experiment. The results are conclusive. Climate Science is a bunch of computer models are not testable. When they're run and compared to what actually happened they're always off. e.g. Name a single climate science model that predicted "the pause" starting in '98?…

>"The difference between vaccines and climate change is that we have hard evidence on vaccines. You can create a hypothesis and do a randomized double blind experiment. The results are conclusive."

I tried to find this a few years ago in the case of measles and it turned out to seem no such studies existed. Have you seen one?

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

#73

Post by MarkMc »

averagewall wrote: post #68
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…

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 t…

My understanding is that there isn't really a scientific consensus that "it'll destroy the world". But there is a consensus that "human activity is causing global warming" - yet this is something that a significant minority of people do not believe.

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

#74

Post by throwaway729 »

averagewall wrote: post #68
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…

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 t…

EPA has a website describing the mid and long term effects of climate change in N America. With plenty of citations a dedicated student or teacher could follow up on. Very accessible, and did not include "will destroy the world".

Incidentally, your critique also applies to literally most science, including very good and obviously successful science.

Can you really prove to your students that Intel doesn't have magic pixie dust it uses to speed up its processors? Probably not without expensive equipment your classroom cannot afford.

And can you reproduce the LHC experiments? Of course not.

edit: Here's the EPA website: https://www.epa.gov/climate-change-science/future-climate-ch... There are 5 references, all larger reports which themselves link into the actual literature.

The National Climate Assessment in particular is presented in the form of a slick website with hundreds of citations into the literature for curious readers: http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report

The information is there, in extremely digestible form, and at the top of google search results. Naturally, reproducing the results of literally hundreds of cited papers is going to take you a while, but in most cases, there's nothing actually stopping you...

And here's a list of climate models, some of which you can download. The others have links to contact info: http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2009/06/getting-the-source-c...

It's also worth noting that scientists are usually fairly transparent about when they're guessing WRT effects of climate change and when they're pretty certain. The near-term stuff (~hundred years) is largely guess work based on simulations -- we can't do much better. The most certain prediction is that weather will become harder to predict. The longer-term stuff (~hundreds to thousands of years) is much more well-understood because there're historical records relating GHG levels to climate.

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

#75

Post by MarkMc »

viggity wrote: post #71
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.

The difference between vaccines and climate change is that we have hard evidence on vaccines. You can create a hypothesis and do a randomized double blind experiment. The results are conclusive. Climate Science is a bunch of computer models are not testable. When they're run and compared to what actually happened they're always off. e.g. Name a single climate science model that predicted "the pause" starting in '98?…

> I'm saying that fossil fuels have done more to advance the human condition than anything else in history of mankind.

I don't think this point is relevant to your argument.

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

#76

Post by viggity »

nonbel wrote: post #72
viggity wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between vaccines and climate change is that we have hard evidence on vaccines. You can create a hypothesis and do a randomized double blind experiment. The results are conclusive. Climate Science is a bunch of computer models are not testable. When they're run and compared to what actually happened they're always off. e.g. Name a single climate science model that predicted "the pause" starting in '98?…

>"The difference between vaccines and climate change is that we have hard evidence on vaccines. You can create a hypothesis and do a randomized double blind experiment. The results are conclusive." I tried to find this a few years ago in the case of measles and it turned out to seem no such studies existed. Have you seen one?

it took a little searching, but I found one for an alternative manufacturing process of the measles vaccine.

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01536405?term=AMP&ran...

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

#77

Post by throwaway729 »

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.

> The left has its fair share of science-denying morons as well.

Sure. Stupid knows no political affiliation, other than strong and unsubstantiated belief.

Meanwhile, the right (in America) also has its fair share of unscientific beliefs about vaccination: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...

FWIW the only two anti-vaxxers I know in person are a retired west-coast life long democrat, and a super neo-conservative soccer mom. It seems to be more of an "anti-establishment" thing than a "left/right" thing.

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

#78

Post by throwaway729 »

tyingq wrote: post #63
nonbel wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> a doctorate at Stanford and then become a professor at Cornell

As an aside, academia is no meritocracy. A lot of what's required to get posts at schools like these amounts to self-promotion and luck (graduating in the right year & from the right lab).

Of course hard work and technical competence is also required, so your point stands.

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

#79

Post by throwaway729 »

kem wrote: post #30
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you're being sarcastic. I'm a bit hesitant to provide examples, but a lot of top results in computer science are sold as being much more far reaching than what they really are.

Speaking from my own areas of experience, I've been struck by how much some celebrated methods and results in machine learning, broadly speaking, basically amount to tinkering without any hard generalizable proofs. In at least one case I'm aware of, there was a statistical proof later that made it clear the original researchers were close, but if they had a different dataset they would have come up with a different r…

The problem is that universities have a strong incentive to optimize for juicy press releases. A theorem -- unless it's 100 years old or otherwise somehow easy to relate to the general public -- does not have this effect. Winning a competition or "outperforming humans" does.

Aside from bumping up the quality of K-12 science education by at least an order of magnitude or two, I'm not sure there's a good solution to this problem. It's the human condition to be impressed by some things and not others, regardless of their relative actual importance.

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

#80

Post by tyingq »

throwaway729 wrote: post #78
tyingq wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> a doctorate at Stanford and then become a professor at Cornell As an aside, academia is no meritocracy. A lot of what's required to get posts at schools like these amounts to self-promotion and luck (graduating in the right year & from the right lab). Of course hard work and technical competence is also required, so your point stands.

Yeah...wasn't saying that path implies genius. It should, though, denote the ability to do basic math, or the common sense to have someone proofread your papers. This is just so odd to me, has me wondering if he's trolling.
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