YES, SCIENCE IS BROKEN!

It's the truth-Science is broken...it has been for quite a while...deliberate cheating, bad math, presuppositions and wrong assumptions going in, issues that make for poor experimentation and results!  Presidential decrees and  television journalism becomes science...give me a break! The  Obama administration and Bill Nye are a bad joke! How can I say that? Let's look at a broader picture from psychology to man-made climate change!

Yes, Science is broken! That's the thesis of a must-read article in First Things magazine, in which William A. Wilson accumulates evidence that a lot of published research is false. But that's not even the worst part.

Advocates of the existing scientific research paradigm usually smugly declare that while some published conclusions are surely false, the scientific method has "self-correcting  mechanisms" that ensure that, eventually, the truth will prevail. Unfortunately for all of us, Wilson makes a convincing argument that those self-correcting mechanisms are broken.

For starters, there's a "replication crisis" in science. This is particularly true in the field of experimental psychology, where far too many prestigious psychology studies simply can't be  reliably replicated. But it's not just psychology. In 2011, the pharmaceutical company Bayer looked at 67 blockbuster drug discovery research findings published in prestigious journals, and  found that three-fourths of them weren't right. Another study of cancer research found that only 11 percent of pre-clinical cancer research could be reproduced. Even in physics, supposedly  the hardest and most reliable of all sciences, Wilson points out that "two of the most vaunted physics results of the past few years — the announced discovery of both cosmic inflation and  gravitational waves at the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica, and the supposed discovery of superluminal neutrinos at the Swiss-Italian border — have now been retracted, with far less  fanfare than when they were first published."

What explains this? In some cases, human error. Much of the research world exploded in rage and mockery when it was found out that a highly popularized finding by the economists Ken  Rogoff and Carmen Reinhardt linking higher public debt to lower growth was due to an Excel error. Steven Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, largely built his career on a paper arguing that  abortion led to lower crime rates 20 years later because the aborted babies were disproportionately future criminals. Two economists went through the painstaking work of recoding  Levitt's statistical analysis — and found a basic arithmetic error.

Trans-Gender Assignment Science a fraud!

Then there is outright fraud. In a 2011 survey of 2,000 research psychologists, over half admitted to selectively reporting those experiments that gave the result they were after. The survey  also concluded that around 10 percent of research psychologists have engaged in outright falsification of data, and more than half have engaged in "less brazen but still fraudulent behavior  such as reporting that a result was statistically significant when it was not, or deciding between two different data analysis techniques after looking at the results of each and choosing the  more favorable."
Then there's everything in between human error and outright fraud: rounding out numbers the way that looks better, checking a result less thoroughly when it comes out the way you like,  and so forth.
Well, maybe not. There's actually good reason to believe the exact opposite is happening. Bruce Jenner (Caitlyn) may be a hero to some poor confused perverts but not to the population with a conscience and good sense!

The Sokal Affair

The peer review process doesn't work. Most observers of science guffaw at the so-called "Sokal affair," where a physicist named Alan Sokal submitted a gibberish paper to an obscure social  studies journal, which accepted it. Less famous is a similar hoodwinking of the very prestigious British Medical Journal, to which a paper with eight major errors was submitted. Not a single  one of the 221 scientists who reviewed the paper caught all the errors in it, and only 30 percent of reviewers recommended that the paper be rejected. Amazingly, the reviewers who were  warned that they were in a study and that the paper might have problems with it found no more flaws than the ones who were in the dark.

This is serious. In the preclinical cancer study mentioned above, the authors note that "some non-reproducible preclinical papers had spawned an entire field, with hundreds of secondary  publications that expanded on elements of the original observation, but did not actually seek to confirm or falsify its fundamental basis."

This gets into the question of the sociology of science. It's a familiar bromide that "science advances one funeral at a time." The greatest scientific pioneers were mavericks and weirdos.  Most valuable scientific work is done by youngsters. Older scientists are more likely to be invested, both emotionally and from a career and prestige perspective, in the regnant paradigm,  even though the spirit of science is the challenge of regnant paradigms.

Why, then, is our scientific process so structured as to reward the old and the prestigious? Government funding bodies and peer review bodies are inevitably staffed by the most hallowed  (read: out of touch) practitioners in the field. The tenure process ensures that in order to further their careers, the youngest scientists in a given department must kowtow to their elders'  theories or run a significant professional risk. Peer review isn't any good at keeping flawed studies out of major papers, but it can be deadly efficient at silencing heretical views.

All of this suggests that the current system isn't just showing cracks, but is actually broken, and in need of major reform. There is very good reason to believe that much scientific research  published today is false, there is no good way to sort the wheat from the chaff, and, most importantly, that the way the system is designed ensures that this will continue being the case.

As Wilson writes:

Even if self-correction does occur and theories move strictly along a lifecycle from less to more accurate, what if the unremitting flood of new, mostly false, results pours in faster? Too fast  for the sclerotic, compromised truth-discerning mechanisms of science to operate? The result could be a growing body of true theories completely overwhelmed by an ever-larger thicket  of baseless theories, such that the proportion of true scientific beliefs shrinks even while the absolute number of them continues to rise. Borges' Library of Babel contained every true book  that could ever be written, but it was useless because it also contained every false book, and both true and false were lost within an ocean of nonsense. [First Things]

This is a big problem, one that can't be solved with a column. But the first step is admitting you have a problem.

Climate Science: 

Let's talk for a minute about the man-made climate change epidemic among noted scientist and some so-called psuedo-scientist like Bill Nye!

May 20, 2015 was a banner week for the unquestioning apostles of science,  specifically in the area of climate science—the one scientific discipline for which all questions have already been  exhaustively answered(at least in their narrow point of view).

First, there is flooding in Texas which everyone knows beyond all doubt is a result of man caused climate change. There is no other possible explanation. Just ask Bill Nye the Mediocre- Television-Comedian-With-A-Bachelors-In-Engineering Guy:

Second, a “study” was released which purports to tell us how the Montreal Protocol saved the planet from certain doom at the hands of the ozone hole (the notion that the dire predictions  about the ozone hole may not have come to fruition is not to be considered.) Like most of the unrealized predictions about man-caused global warming, the ozone hole study is based on  man-made simulations.
As it’s not possible to do a controlled laboratory experiment on an entire planet, computer simulations are the best we can muster. Unfortunately, that means we are required to take it on  faith that those who created the simulations did so with infallible knowledge of how a planetary atmosphere and climate will react to different inputs. That is “settled science” after all.

As I was pondering the god-like omniscience of climatologists and children’s television show hosts, I happened across a post on Slashdot asking whether “bad scientific practice” can be  fixed. Bad scientific practice? Is such a thing even possible? Has anyone told Neil deGrasse Tyson?
The post refers to an editorial in The Lancet by editor-in-chief Richard Horton. The Lancet is one of the world’s leading peer-reviewed medical journals. In a recent issue, Horton wrote this  heresy:
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory  analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant  put it, “poor methods get results”.

What? How can this be? He went on:
The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they  retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours.

Horton even suggests that a purely objective search for truth may not be the only thing driving scientists. Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivised to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivised to be productive and innovative.
Granted, Horton is focusing on a different area of science, but is it unreasonable to believe the same problems exist in other fields of research? I submit that it is unreasonable to assume  that they do not.
In 2011, Stanford professor John P.A. Ioannidis wrote an article titled An Epidemic of False Claims in Scientific American.

Much research is conducted for reasons other than the pursuit of truth. Conflicts of interest abound, and they influence outcomes. In health care, research is often performed at the behest  of companies that have a large financial stake in the results. Even for academics, success often hinges on publishing positive findings. The oligopoly of high-impact journals also has a  distorting effect on funding, academic careers and market shares. Industry tailors research agendas to suit its needs, which also shapes academic priorities, journal revenue and even public  funding.

Wouldn’t it be foolish to presume that these factors don’t come into play with regard to the most politically contentious scientific claims of our time? The crisis should not shake confidence in the scientific method. The ability to prove something false continues to be a hallmark of science. But scientists need to improve the way they do  their research and how they disseminate evidence.
And therein lies the reason to be skeptical of dramatic climate predictions. There is no possible experiment that can prove them false. Claims that cannot be tested and falsified are not  really scientific, but Science! zealots still claim man made climate change is responsible for everything from drought to floods, wildfires, even terrorism. Yet while some scientists are  decrying an epidemic of shoddy research, skeptics of man-made climate change are derided as simpletons by journalists and politicians who know nothing about science themselves.

Science, at heart an enterprise for mavericks, has become an enterprise for careerists. It's time to flip the career track for science on its head. Instead of waiting until someone's best years  are behind her to award her academic freedom and prestige, abolish the PhD and grant fellowships to the best 22-year-olds, giving them the biggest budgets and the most freedoms for the  first five or 10 years of their careers. Then, with only few exceptions, shift them away from research to teaching or some other harmless activity. Only then can we begin to fix Big Science.

See you next blog,
Ted