121–130 of 257 posts
"For more than 150 trials, Carlisle got access to anonymized individual participant data (IPD). By studying the IPD spreadsheets, he judged that 44% of these trials contained at least some flawed data: impossible statistics, incorrect calculations or duplicated numbers or figures, for instance. And in 26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged — either bec…
With everything we've been seeing in recent years on HN, about science reproducibility and fraud, and the complaints about commonplace fudging and fraud that you might hear privately from talking with PhDs/students in various fields... I wonder whether science has developed a similar alignment problem.
How many people in science careers are doing trustworthy science? And when they aren't, why not?
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As someone who works in Data Science at FAANG - if you look hard enough - there is something questionably wrong in every step of the data funnel. And that's when I believe people do have a somewhat best effort to maximize profits. There are plenty of people that only care about career progression and think they can get away with lying and cheating their way to the top. They wouldn't believe that if it didn't work som…
Objectivity and honesty can be hard to find if all someone cares about is their reputation as a competent researcher or climbing the ladder. What do you think a potential solution would be for this? I feel like even in my own experience, trying something out and it not working feels like failure, when in fact to proclaim it a success or "fix" it is truly what harms both the endeavor for truth and the people reliant o…
It seems like destroying the reputation and career of people who fake science would be a great start. If you're willing to fake data and lie to get results, there will always be an industry who'd love to hire you no matter how tarnished your reputation is. We need a better means to hold researchers accountable and we need to stop putting any amount of faith in any research that hasn't been independently verified through replication.
Today the lobby for orange juice manufactures can pay a scientist to fake research which shows that drinking orange juice makes you more attractive, and then pay publications to broadcast that headline to the world to increase sales. We should have some means to hold publications responsible for this as well.
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Hmm -- in usual fashion I haven't read the original post here, but I'm guessing it didn't find that RCT trials that big pharma do are quite as useless as most 'medical studies' generally. Do you think well-funded RCTs (like those that support vaccine safety) are just as weak as any old observational study?
I've now read it. But my question to the person saying it's problematic to defend vaccine studies and attack food results is: isn't it possible that you feel the research procedures used in one are superior to those used in another? For example: vaccine safety study looks at 200,000 people and randomly assigns them to use or not use the vaccine. Coffee/red wine study looks at 30 people and surveys them about how they…
"For more than 150 trials, Carlisle got access to anonymized individual participant data (IPD). By studying the IPD spreadsheets, he judged that 44% of these trials contained at least some flawed data: impossible statistics, incorrect calculations or duplicated numbers or figures, for instance. And in 26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged — either bec…
It's more complex than just that. Sure, there's the people trying to make a dollar who are willing to do bad science in order to get the result they want. But there's also the general publication bias against replication studies - who wants to read them, and who wants to do them (they're not usually seen as prestigious academically: most academics want to test their ideas, not those of others. And then there's cultur…
Academia seems like the idea place for this. Why not require a certain number of replicated studies in order to get a degree? Universities could then be constantly churning out replication studies.
More importantly, why do we bother taking anything that hasn't been replicated seriously? Anyone who publishes a paper that hasn't been verified shouldn't get any kind of meaningful recognition or "credit" for their discovery until it's been independently confirmed.
Since anyone can publish trash, having your work validated should be the only means of gaining prestige in your career.
You know how (to use a familiar field) most of software development has become going through the motions, churning massive insecure bulk, doing nonsense rituals and making up myths about process and productivity, hopping jobs frequently, cutting corners and breaking rules, etc., and the purpose is usually not to produce trustworthy solutions, but only to further career and livelihood/wealth? With everything we've bee…
Well furthering wealth is the reason why tech companies exist. The incentives in academia are completely different. You might be right, but i see no reason to expect similar behavior across such drastically different situations.
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A lot who stay purely in Academia do it as well, presumably for the prestige.
Well you need peer reviewed papers in highish impact journals to get tenure. For some people, the only way they're getting that is by cheating.
I'm not nearly qualified to make this argument, but has anyone ever suggested that we collectively do away with the principle that one must publish original research in order to receive a PhD? Maybe in something like entomology, there are enough undescribed beetle species out there to supply myriads of dissertations, but in other fields it seems like you are just incentivizing trivial, useless, or fraudulent research…
Bachelors Which, of course, not not really the case. A PhD in is a specialization in creating novel research in . In terms of actually applying , a Masters ought to be as prestigious or whatever as a PhD. That it isn’t thought of that way seems to indicate, I dunno, maybe we need a new type of super-masters degree (one that gives you a cool title I guess).
Or, this will get me killed by some academics, but let’s just align with with the general public seems to think anyway: make a super-masters degree, give it the Dr title, make it the thing that indicates total mastery of a specific field (which is what the general public’s favorite Doctors, MDs, have, anyway) (to the extent to which a degree can even indicate that sort of thing, which is to say, not really, but it is as good as we’ve got). Then when PhDs can have a new title, Philosopher of , haha.