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We do. Even just recently, US presidents have been cutting off China’s access to US tech out of fear.
If they're so much better than we are at this stuff, why does it matter? Why do they need access to US tech? Our tech is made by idiots who can't pass AP Calculus AB.
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I think the better question is, if we didn't think they were so good at this stuff, why would we limit their access? I believe the US possesses the human capital within it to compete with the likes of China in terms of STEM, but American society does not value this ability at nearly the same level as Asian (including India) countries. Anyone who grew up in the US can gut check this. Which is more prestigious: MIT/Cal…
Why is that the better question? My question seems simpler. Can you answer it?
And it only "matters" to the extent that we care about whether China surpasses the US technologically within a few generations. If you don't care, then I suppose it shouldn't matter to you.
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All a small retraction rate tells us is that it’s very difficult to get a retraction. But as with peer review, whether or not there’s a lot of retractions tells you little about the quality of the unretracted papers. Think about how much attention has to be paid for retractions to happen, how long the work existed without retraction, how difficult it was to get a retraction for outright fraud (ignoring work that itse…
> All a small retraction rate tells us is that it’s very difficult to get a retraction. You're just making the data fit your preconceived beliefs, which would is how we get fraudulant research.
You’re the one making definitive statements of a position and then claiming the data backs up your position and then arguing with anyone who posits that your interpretation of the data may be flawed.
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You're just making up results, sans data. Your paper won't even pass peer review - on HN.
And you downplay evidence of fraud. You mentioned studies where 1/3 to 1/2 of reviewed papers are found to not be replicable and say they get similar but weaker results. This is evidence of p-hacking or data manipulation. You should expect far less papers to not be replicable given proper statistics.
Shoddy science is (currently) not a reason for retraction. So just because a paper's results aren't replicable doesn't mean it should be retracted. Deliberate falsification is. But you'd need to distinguish those from not-perfect science.
Last, a sanity check: your comment implies/suggests that 1/3 to 1/2 of published science is fraudulent because it's not replicable. But fraudsters might accidentally hit upon the truth - at least sometimes. Moreover, plenty of research answers a binary question (yes/no, which of the two has a greater effect, etc). For those research questions, just guessing the answer gives you a50% chance of being right.
All of that implies that, following your logic, a huge portion of published research is based on fraudulent practices - not mistakes, but deliberately falsified contents. Add to that the "meta-fraud" (playing with authorship, citations), and one has to wonder if every second scientist on the planet is cheating and faking everything they publish.
To me, that is an obvious sign that the reasoning went off rails somewhere - much like the result of a sine function being outside of [-1, 1]. So no, you shouldn't expect 1/3 to 1/2 of all published research to require retraction.
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I am an engineer so I know very well that industrial replication is far from easy, but that's a whole different topic here. That's why when manufacturing at scale you implement numerous controls for each step to ensure you remain into "whats known" territory. Now, when you publish a discovery in a paper, common sense demands that you are sure that you results are not random, and the only 100% reliable way to do that…
"Difficult to replicate" does NOT mean "wrong". The fact that your experimental technique sucks is not my problem, thanks. Go get some better grad students. And this is before we start getting into medicine which has both ethical and expense issues with running multiple experiments. Your position is both unrealistic and untenable. Medicine and science would literally grind to a halt. > the incentives to cheat are obv…
Medicine and Science would grind to a halt if we try to replicate things? Did I read this correctly?
If you don't do replication, you are not doing Science, period.
> This retraction is Tessier-Lavigne’s fourth in as many months, a stunning turn of events for a researcher of his stature. That says a lot about how worthless the whole science journal and peer review process is. At this rate your assumption is that 50% of what is published is complete junk.
Given how difficult it is to know what’s true in some of these fields and what’s fiction, that might be a pretty good rate. I think the bigger question is why is fraud and sloppy work so important? Maybe the incentive structure of academia is the actual problem and the peer review system is an imperfect, but perhaps effective, control? What’s the alternative to peer review?
it's fairly clear that it is the case. You are rewarded with tenure for pushing lots of papers, regardless of their validity, since nobody actually cares about replicating anything.
> peer review system is an imperfect, but perhaps effective
The peer review system is just about checking points of details or calculation in a study, they never bother to actually check if the original results are valid. It's a mostly useless process that does nothing but remove the most obvious problems in the writing stage.
> the alternative
just like we did for hundreds of years now, proper replication baked in, by different people in different places, following the exact same conditions or protocol.
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What was the interview pass rate for MIT grads and people without a college education?
Is that really the point worth focusing on here?
For those not familiar, this is the paper which first proposed the amyliod plaque theory (the original link mentions protiens, but not beta-amyloid or Tau specifically). https://www.drugdiscoverynews.com/what-now-for-the-amyloid-h...
Wow, even as a lay person I hear other lay people talk about amyloid plaque. It’s scary to know how far into common knowledge misinformation can burrow.
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Given how difficult it is to know what’s true in some of these fields and what’s fiction, that might be a pretty good rate. I think the bigger question is why is fraud and sloppy work so important? Maybe the incentive structure of academia is the actual problem and the peer review system is an imperfect, but perhaps effective, control? What’s the alternative to peer review?
> Maybe the incentive structure of academia is the actual problem it's fairly clear that it is the case. You are rewarded with tenure for pushing lots of papers, regardless of their validity, since nobody actually cares about replicating anything. > peer review system is an imperfect, but perhaps effective The peer review system is just about checking points of details or calculation in a study, they never bother to…
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Here's my anecdote: In extensive exposure to a top-25 global university, and to a top-10 elite one, there was a big difference in the student body and the education. The latter was a different world; the education was innovative, brilliant, demanding at a very high level that I didn't anticipate. The students operated at a different level, world-class talent with shocking intelligence and, for their age, experience,…
Throwing out numbers like 83% and 33% seems like a handwavy attempt at precision and diminishes your argument. The real world is not like university, unless you live in the very small subset of the world that makes its living off research. Formal education / book smarts !== leadership.