Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 282 posts

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#241

Post by dalke »

jerf wrote: post #237
dalke wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Science" is no longer on a pedestal. The PR campaigns against conclusions for leaded gas, smoking, acid rain, global warming, and vaccine safety, and the scientific development of leaded gas, ozone-depleting CFCs, Agent Orange/dioxin, etc., plus concerns like GMOs and Monsanto, mobile phone safety, plasticizers/hormone disruptors, and more make for a decidedly mixed view of science by the general public. As you can…

I think it's on a pedestal where it matters, where the funding decisions are being made. The public's opinion only matters in the long term. Though, admittedly, the long term is probably coming up pretty quickly. There's a lot of things that have had their opinion trending negative for so long that people have become blase about the negative trends suddenly coming due this year.

On reconsideration, I'm wavering on my belief. NIH and NSF get a lot more support than, say, the NEA. HST, fine as it is, was extremely expensive.

I still maintain that the military is still on a higher pedestal than science, in terms of funding and prestige. You hear stories of people buying military people in uniform their meal, to honor their service. That's much less common for scientists.

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#242

Post by greglindahl »

misnome wrote: post #151
welterde wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, LHCb, etc. are all different experiments that just happen to share the same accelerator. They are done using different detectors, designed, built, operated and the data is analyzed by different groups of people. If you follow your logic, that the different experiments using the same accelerator negates the whole thing, to the extreme then doing two experiments on the same planet/solar system/univer…

I think you've got my argument completely backwards - I'm pointing out that if repetition as implied by the article is everything, then results from e.g. the LHC are discounted. Similarly, I am not saying that you don't need to repeat - just that it isn't the be all and end all of what defines 'science'. Supporting this interpretation is that I mentioned DAMA. Nobody is accusing them of not taking care, but nobody re…

I read the article carefully, and was unable to find where it says what you say it says.

In particular, you're making super-strong statements like "be all and end all of what defines 'science'" -- that's not what I see in the article. The article is reasonably pointing out that we have a repetition crisis and that more emphasis should be placed on it. That's not the various super-strong things you're claiming you see in it.

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#243

Post by greglindahl »

Armisael16 wrote: post #229
andrepd wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we can measure gravity in faraway galaxies. We don't need to actually go there, we have telescopes :)

How can you measure the strength of the gravitational constant if you don't know the masses of the objects in question?

The Chandrasekhar mass depends on G and a bunch of fundamental constants, and that's the mass of a type Ia supernova. Unfortunately this Wikipedia article doesn't talk about astronomy much:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant#History...

But it does point at one measurement of G on cosmological timescales and distances from 2006:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.1534

There are other papers with similar measurements published in the past two decades.

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#244

Post by dalke »

logfromblammo wrote: post #240
dalke wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You calculate the fair market value of the public resources you used" Which is very hard for things with no market. I use government libraries. They are free to me. What is the fair market value of that? There are private and subscription libraries, so it's not like no market exists. What is the fair market value of time on Hubble? > "if you use that government-paid intern for several hours ... You pay for what yo…

The public does not want its funds diverted into private profits, period. Allowing any exceptions or leeway is a wide-open door to a trough filled with corruption and deceit. You receive no special additional benefit from a library by being a researcher. Everyone can read the same materials as you do. Time on the Hubble costs more than any individual astronomer could pay. If you are keen on closed, private astronomy,…

> "The public does not want its funds diverted into private profits, period"

Sure. But no grants allow the diversion of fund into private profits, so I don't know what you're referring to.

Take the SBIR grants. It's a way for the government to help small, for-profit companies do the R&D that might lead to results that will benefit the overall US economy and policy. The hope is for the companies to commercialize the results and do well.

It's not money that the SBIR recipients can use to party on Maui. The SBIR system has accounting and oversight in place to help prevent that.

Or, take the (infamous) Bayh–Dole Act. Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act :

> The key change made by Bayh–Dole was in ownership of inventions made with federal funding. Before the Bayh–Dole Act, federal research funding contracts and grants obligated inventors (where ever they worked) to assign inventions they made using federal funding to the federal government. Bayh–Dole permits a university, small business, or non-profit institution to elect to pursue ownership of an invention in preference to the government.

That sounds very much like that the public, through its elected officials, don't actually want what you say they want, because what we had was more like what you say we should have, and they decided to change it.

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#245

Post by pshc »

appleflaxen wrote: post #15
undergroundOps wrote: post #7

I'm a physician and I've been suggesting this to my colleagues for a few years, only to be met with alienated stares and labeled cynical. The doctors and doctors-in-training I work with have altruistic motives, but place too much stock in major medical studies. They also frequently apply single-study findings to patient care, even to patients that would've been excluded from that study (saw this a lot with the recent…

but in medicine, what is the practical alternative? how do you incorporate these findings? ignore them? if so, it's probably bad for your patients. the only thing worse than a single-study finding is a zero-study finding.

Apply Bayesian reasoning. Weigh results appropriately.

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#246

Post by euyyn »

greglindahl wrote: post #242
misnome wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've got my argument completely backwards - I'm pointing out that if repetition as implied by the article is everything, then results from e.g. the LHC are discounted. Similarly, I am not saying that you don't need to repeat - just that it isn't the be all and end all of what defines 'science'. Supporting this interpretation is that I mentioned DAMA. Nobody is accusing them of not taking care, but nobody re…

I read the article carefully, and was unable to find where it says what you say it says. In particular, you're making super-strong statements like "be all and end all of what defines 'science'" -- that's not what I see in the article. The article is reasonably pointing out that we have a repetition crisis and that more emphasis should be placed on it. That's not the various super-strong things you're claiming you see…

The very title claims that unrepeated results shouldn't be accepted.

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#247

Post by texthompson »

mmierz wrote: post #120

I see a lot of people commenting here that there's no incentive to repeat previous research because it's not useful for getting grants, etc. This kind of true but I think it misses something important. At least in life sciences (can't comment on other fields), it's not that scientists don't repeat each other's results. After all, if you're going to invest a significant fraction of your tiny lab budget on a research p…

Why is it not in anyone's interest to write an explicit rebuttal?

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#248

Post by sn9 »

euyyn wrote: post #246
greglindahl wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the article carefully, and was unable to find where it says what you say it says. In particular, you're making super-strong statements like "be all and end all of what defines 'science'" -- that's not what I see in the article. The article is reasonably pointing out that we have a repetition crisis and that more emphasis should be placed on it. That's not the various super-strong things you're claiming you see…

The very title claims that unrepeated results shouldn't be accepted .

The contents of the article are the only thing that ever matters.

The title is picked by editors to get the most people to click on it.

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#249

Post by Armisael16 »

greglindahl wrote: post #243
Armisael16 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you measure the strength of the gravitational constant if you don't know the masses of the objects in question?

The Chandrasekhar mass depends on G and a bunch of fundamental constants, and that's the mass of a type Ia supernova. Unfortunately this Wikipedia article doesn't talk about astronomy much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant#History... But it does point at one measurement of G on cosmological timescales and distances from 2006: https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.1534 There are other papers with similar meas…

That's only true if all the other physics involved are the same wherever that supernova is; your own link mentions this. We can't prove that's the case since we can't test the individual parts of that theory - it's possible to construct a different set of physics that produces results identical to the physics we're familiar with.

That isn't a particularly fruitful approach since it doesn't permit any real discovery - it's rather brain-in-a-jar - but it is still something you have to assume away.

Re: We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated

#250

Post by johncolanduoni »

anotherhacker wrote: post #230
johncolanduoni wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done enough mathematical proofs that I don't think I need to "google it", but I read the Wikipedia page anyway. It failed to explain how a mathematical proof could have anything to do with "proving" General Relativity in absence of empirical evidence. He certainly proved that (as I said before) it agreed with existing (experimentally backed) theories using mathematics, but if you have a method which allows you t…

Interesting points. I still disagree, or perhaps I'm not doing a good job explaining. My point is this: Something is true whether one accepts it or not. E.g. the earth was proven to be round before anyone actually went around it. Another example is climate change deniers. To them there's no proof of; 1) Climate change; 2) That it's man made. Another example is people who believe the earth is 10,000 years old (I'm not…

Epistemical simplicity is one of the things I love about math, but it's hard to extend it wholesale to physics. GR will almost certainly be proved wrong some day, at least in some regime (Einstein was ironically one of the first to feel it needed something more, as an alternative to the inelegant cosmological constant). If GR had been mathematically proven, this would be terrible, as it would prove our mathematics are inconsistent!

As for the existence objective reality, that's another thing that seems hard to prove conclusively. I'd suggest looking at some of the basic epistemology surrounding modern science (e.g. Popper[1]) for some thoughts on this.

As an interesting aside, while it's true that mathematical proofs (idealizing here and assuming incorrect proofs are never accepted by the mathematical community, because they on occasion are) are absolute statements of truth, they may not be stating precisely the truth you expect. Thanks to Godel[2], we know that it is not possible for any consistent mathematical theory rich enough to talk about addition and multiplication of natural numbers to prove it's own consistency. As a result, we may have a proof that 2+2 != 5, but that actually doesn't exclude the possibility that there is a proof of 2+2 = 5. In fact, his result shows we will never be able to prove such a thing does not exist (since it would imply the consistency of our mathematical system). So our absolute truths from proofs of X are actually of the form ZFC implies X, where ZFC is the background theory which is generally taken to underly modern mathematical works unless otherwise specified. So things are not so clear cut even here.

[1]: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/ [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompletenes...

Post reply on HN