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Fraud, so much fraud

science.org

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#431

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #249
antisthenes wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud. Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as "never trust science", when in reality science is still the best way to push humanity forward and alleviate human suffering, _despite_ all the fraud and misaligned incentives that may influence it.

> Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as "never trust science" Unfortunately many "smart" people insist on telling "dumb" people how to think instead of having the introspection and humility to examine where we've gone wrong and spending a lot of time and effort on fixing it. No, easier to gaslight the idiots

A lot of people are working to fix the K-12+ educational system which is the root cause of many stupid people, but beyond that, it's objectively hard to fix stupid.

Most people, stupid or otherwise, wouldn't take a critical thinking course, for example. Many would have no time for it, to say little of motivation. Fewer are proud of being stupid and will shun anything they consider "intellectual".

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#434

Post by dekhn »

vostrocity wrote: post #301
greenavocado wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A true scientist never says, "trust me" or even worse, "trust the science." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnPFL0Dr34c

Reminds me of this tweet that calls out the problem of the popular position "science is real" "Science isn’t real - that’s terrible epistemology. It’s a process or method to generate and verify hypotheses and provisional knowledge, using replicable experiments and measurements. We don’t really know the real - we just have some current non-falsified theories and explanations that fit data decently, till we get better…

It's probably better to say that engineering based on science is usually real. Engineering cares a lot less about falsifying theories and more on what existing theories seem to have general predictive value, and can be used to do stuff, including things where human lives are at risk (tall buildings, fire reduction materials, airplanes). And if there are failures out in the field, they're inspected, and those results are fed back to update both the practices, and the theories.

Personally I believe we live in an objective universe that can be understood by human brains (possibly using AI augmentation) and that our currently most advanced experimentally verified theories correspond to some actual true aspect of our universe. In that sense, science is real when the current theories match those aspects well enough to make generalizable predictions (general relativity and quantum mechanics).

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#435

Post by tedk-42 »

fluoridation wrote: post #428
klenwell wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my favorite Simpsons gag is the episode where Lisa enlists a scientist (voiced by Stephen Jay Gould) to run tests to debunk some angel bones that were found at a construction site. In the middle of the episode, the scientist bicycles up to report, dramatically, that the tests "were inconclusive". In the end, it's revealed that the bones were a fraud concocted by some mall developers to promote their new mall.…

Well, the incentive is that he didn't want to run the tests out of laziness (i.e. he lacked an incentive to run them). He ran to Lisa to give his anticlimactic report not to be deceptive, but rather he just happened to be cycling through that part of town and just needed to use the bathroom really badly.

The writers of these episodes were really on another level considering it was a cartoon.

Lisa's first word is still a personal favourite of mine, especially now as a father.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#436

Post by ammbauer »

calebh wrote: post #164
jimbokun wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My recommendation is for journals to place at least equal importance to publishing replications as for the original studies. Studies that have not been replicated should be published clearly marked as preliminary results. And then other scientists can pick those up and try to replicate them. And institutions need to give near equal weight to replications as to original research when deciding on promotions. Should be…

This stuff happens in Computer Science too. Back around 2018 or so I was working on a problem that required graph matching (a relaxed/fuzzy version of the graph isomorphism problem) and was trying algorithms from many different papers. Many of the algorithms I tried to implement didn't work at all, despite considerable effort to get them to behave. In one particularly egregious (and highly cited) example, the algorit…

Name and shame :)

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#437

Post by nobody9999 »

tim333 wrote: post #417
bboygravity wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one only cares about democrats vs dems (or left vs "far right" in Europe) one also doesn't REALLY care about politics. Caring = caring to understand how the system works and how the incentives work for participants in it. If I'm super generous I would guess maybe 0,1 percent of the population cares by that definition.

There's a problem that if you care, as an average person, it's hard to do much with it. Every few years you can vote left or right, which unless you happen to live in a marginal constituency or swing state, has no effect.

>Every few years you can vote left or right,

If you're talking about the US, you can vote center-right (Democratic) or far right (Republican). There is no viable left wing party in the US.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#438

Post by mistercheph »

bashfulpup wrote: post #383
dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

owenpalmer, as I stated in my side note I will not be explaining myself, my sincere apologies for this. You see there are some things that cannot be taught, or it cannot be easily taught more so for adults i.e healthy skepticism and questioning of statements/facts that come from authority figures ( example:science/religion etc). A person will have to make his or her own effort. External influences especially debates…

I love this, do tell the direction to be nudged in. I wish to experience this new level of understanding.

There's two approaches here:

Pick one phenomenon in the world that you observe and don't have an account for, and try to come up with an account, assuming nothing except for your own observation and experimentation, of the causes of the phenomenon. Once you're done, follow the trail, reading only original or translated original documents, of the history of human descriptions of the phenomenon, do the "science" of "science" by observing the phenomena of observing and describing phenomena.

Go in the woods and read Plato and Aristotle and Sophocles for a year.

:D

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#440

Post by ipaddr »

jfengel wrote: post #398
acchow wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Average joe”. Humanity evolves slowly over long periods. The average joe today is far more educated than one from 200 years ago.

Far more educated. But certainly not smarter. And it's not at all clear if that education does anything other than magnify their intellectual predispositions. The smart people can make great strides, but the stupid will be stupid louder and harder. And the average may well just be... more average.

IQ levels has risen on average because of nutrients, not using lead and education.

An increase in blood lead from 10 to 20 micrograms/dl was associated with a decrease of 2.6 IQ

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