181–190 of 257 posts
> ...it would help if journals routinely asked authors to share their IPD Why couldn't a bad actor just fake the raw data? Isn't that what Climategate was all about?
Edit: See the Dan Ariely drama for an example.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"And that's when I believe people do have a somewhat best effort to maximize profits." Nope. I actually think that if you do scientific research as a company (profit) it may make you less bad/less likely to do fraud compared to academia (non-profit). Reason is that there are more ways to punish you, employees, board, investors, etc in a profit seeking vehicle, and as a profit seeking vehicle being caught must be part…
In academia, you essentially have the student who does the work, the professor, and the person who funded the grant, and that's essentially the sum total of people supervising the data. There's not a lot of people to call you out on fudged (or outright faked) data, and all of them are likely to be very invested in the success of the research.
Turn to industry, and you have a similar set of people--the worker, the manager, and the head of the research department--except maybe a few more levels of manager (depending on the scale of the project). But since the goal is usually productization in industrial research, you usually have to turn to the product divisions and convince their executive chain as well of the merits of your research. And unlike everybody else mentioned so far, this group of people isn't invested in the success of the research. You might even be competing against other research teams that have different alternatives, and those people are going to be actively invested in the failure of your research so that their research makes it instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"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…
Increasing seems like peer review is a waste of everyone's time, and it's be better to just publishing when you think your ready on the likes of arXiv, and let everyone examine and criticize it.
Run it up the flagpole, see if it gets saluted or shot down. Seems like there's be much more of an incentive to run confirmation studies.
"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…
Two relevant perspectives to share: "It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine." -Marcia Angell "If the image of medicine I have conve…
"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…
Why? Because its just cargo cult science at the end of the day. Once you incentivize clinical trials to be used as a tool to unlock massive profits through an arbitrary process with a single regulator as judge it WILL be hacked. At every possible part of the process including regulators.
"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…
Pretty sure most studies about the effects of coffee and red wine are flawed.
That cynicism you have about those studies is probably because you don't eat enough eggs. Or too many. I'm not sure...
1. Evidence of widespread error and fraud in science in general?
2. Evaluations of many sub-fields of science like we do for drug studies showing how true or false they are?
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…
This is not necessarily bad, as there is a lot of drudge work that needs doing in science. The problem is the pressure to over-promote everything you do. The reality is that very few people, even among PhD's, have the capacity to do really original work. There was a study many years ago on the physics community that found that less than 10% of physicists published even one thing in their career that someone else found worth citing.