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The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science

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91–100 of 265 posts

Re: The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science

#92

Recently I have been beginning to question university education. It seems that today's education system has mismatched priorities which may have an impact on the reproducibility crisis. You see, to come up with a fantastic new alloy, you don't have to be a genius. Or even very good. You have to be persistent, and clever enough to realize when you've found something interesting. You will need to understand your field…

I'm not sure I see how low taxes inherently cause the misallocation of talent or more broadly, the underspending on R&D.

I do suspect that profit motive isn't enough to drive effective R&D, though, I just don't know exactly how to articulate a model for why except at the basic level that that truly searching R&D has a higher risk profile than other opportunities for profit.

I support the idea of more tax-supported public funding for a variety of things. I'd also support reshaping the tax code to incentivize R&D. But I'm also not sure that's a going to give everybody their opportunity -- I'd imagine there'd still be lucky ones there too. And we'd still have a lot of work to do to address incentives that drive reproducibility issues.

Re: The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science

#93
post #68

The site is down so I can't read the original report, but I've read reports on this topic in the past so I'm going to chime in with some "usual suspects" caveats: 1. No result is 100% reproducible because you can never completely reproduce the conditions of any experiment. The best you can hope to do is to reproduce the conditions that matter , but enumerating those has to be part of the theory you are testing, and s…

>For example, celestial events are almost never reproducible. Our understanding of celestial mechanics nonetheless rests on solid science.

I am not sure this is correct. The rules that govern celestial bodies is same as the ones that govern objects on earth. So why are they not reproducible? It does not require to measure forces between celestial bodies to measure the value of G. Measuring the forces between two masses on earth is enough.

Re: The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science

#94
post #68

The site is down so I can't read the original report, but I've read reports on this topic in the past so I'm going to chime in with some "usual suspects" caveats: 1. No result is 100% reproducible because you can never completely reproduce the conditions of any experiment. The best you can hope to do is to reproduce the conditions that matter , but enumerating those has to be part of the theory you are testing, and s…

4.) You mean that papers are published with P When did this become a "standard"? Most papers I have seen in respectable journals and other sources would not strive for such a high Pvalue, it would be much lower like 0.001.

> You mean that papers are published with PI'm guessing you meant to say that no papers are published with Pat least one paper in 20 will be "wrong". Then add self-suppression of negative results and the actual percentage of "wrong" papers becomes higher, potentially much higher if real positive results are rare.

> When did this become a "standard"?

I have no idea. You'll have a ask a historian.

Re: The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science

#95

Lets take a page from Marx. Science is many things, in particular a relationship between capital and labor. The scientific method is a wonderful idea, but it is subordinate to the economic forces that underlie scientific activity. Look at the conflicts and contradictions between those doing science (labor) and those deciding the science to be done (capital), and that is the ultimate source of these crises. The execut…

[deleted]

Re: The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science

#96
post #68

The site is down so I can't read the original report, but I've read reports on this topic in the past so I'm going to chime in with some "usual suspects" caveats: 1. No result is 100% reproducible because you can never completely reproduce the conditions of any experiment. The best you can hope to do is to reproduce the conditions that matter , but enumerating those has to be part of the theory you are testing, and s…

4.) You mean that papers are published with P When did this become a "standard"? Most papers I have seen in respectable journals and other sources would not strive for such a high Pvalue, it would be much lower like 0.001.

p>0.05 has been a mainstay in entire fields of study for quite some time. Most notably, the psychological and biological science journals have unofficially endorsed 0.05 as a cutoff for "significant" results.

While not everyone in a particular field has been a party to this myopic view of statistical significance, enough have been that the American Statistical Association released a statement on the topic not long ago. That may not seem like a big deal but, given the organization's historical reticence to officially weigh in on such issues, it really is.

ASA statement on p-Values: https://www.amstat.org/asa/files/pdfs/P-ValueStatement.pdf

Re: The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science

#97
post #68

The site is down so I can't read the original report, but I've read reports on this topic in the past so I'm going to chime in with some "usual suspects" caveats: 1. No result is 100% reproducible because you can never completely reproduce the conditions of any experiment. The best you can hope to do is to reproduce the conditions that matter , but enumerating those has to be part of the theory you are testing, and s…

> The statistical tests currently in widespread use as a criterion for publication in peer-reviewed journals guarantee that at least one result in 20 will be due to chance and not because the hypothesis being tested is actually true.

I have a pedantic correction, but a relevant one. If a journal makes a rule that results must have p < .05, and then scientists go off and do a bunch of well-managed science they will get results with a range of p-values. .05 will be a ceiling, not a floor, on the possible p-values. More papers have a p-values right around .05 than they would if results were being produced fairly, so that's actually evidence of bad practices.

Re: The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you'd ignore one of the most horrific and important examples of widely accepted science going wrong because of an internet meme?

Science didn't go wrong. The data was bad, the processes were bad, there was no replication. How was that science?

>The data was bad, the processes were bad, there was no replication.

People are really quick to say this, but how many people have actually studied the 'racial science' literature of the 20s and 30s and figured out to what extent it meets the methodological standards of today? Yes, we know that they drew incorrect (and reprehensible) conclusions. It doesn't necessarily follow that their methods were any worse (epistemically speaking) than methods that currently pass muster.

Re: The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science

#99

Lets take a page from Marx. Science is many things, in particular a relationship between capital and labor. The scientific method is a wonderful idea, but it is subordinate to the economic forces that underlie scientific activity. Look at the conflicts and contradictions between those doing science (labor) and those deciding the science to be done (capital), and that is the ultimate source of these crises. The execut…

I think this is pretty self evident, but the issue is that let's say you have some system where economic forces are removed. Essentially a researcher basic income in one scenario. This would suddenly massively incentivize people towards this direction since it's basically a career path that guarantees a stable livelihood, which is something that's extremely rare today. Well you need to ensure there's nobody just completely gaming the system and so inextricably you'll end up with some sort of qualifier for results. And now suddenly you've done nothing but kick the can since this new qualifier is what's going to be gamed.

Maybe the biggest problem is what you mention, but in another direction. For whatever reason there seems to be extremely little interest in the private direct funding of science. In times past the aristocracy would often fund scientific research on all sorts of topics. Today the practice seems to have all but disappeared, certainly if we measure relative ratios of the practice.

Re: The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science

#100
post #65

We know that weak classifiers can be bagged to produce a strong classifier al la Adaboost. Each study is a weak classifier and would have a 'reproducibility crisis' if retested on new data. However after lots of studies of similar phenomena, a strong classifier emerges. In the field, we call this converging lines of evidence.

I'm not sure I really agree with this, because in science studies are biased towards aligning with the results of previous studies. This can be due to many factors: authors' expectations, journals like to publish positive over negative results, peer reviewers will look more critically (in an analytical sense) at work that disagrees with accepted research, etc.... It can be very hard for many reasons to stand up and s…

I know someone who quit her PhD in part because she couldn't replicate someone else's experimental work on rat behaviour.

If the replication crisis had been as well-known back then, she might have fared better.

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