In 2005, John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, published a paper, “Why most published research findings are false,” mathematically showing that a huge number of published papers must be incorrect. He also looked at a number of well-regarded medical research findings, and found that, of 34 that had been retested, 41% had been contradicted or found to be significantly exaggerated.
Since then, researchers in several scientific areas have consistently struggled to reproduce major results of prominent studies. By some estimates, at least 51%–and as much as 89%–of published papers are based on studies and experiments showing results that cannot be reproduced.
We all know of results which are singularly difficult to verify – even in molecular physics. I am thinking in particular of some Rayleigh scattering experiments in noble gases. Nobody was trying to fake anything. But one group as I recollect just wasn’t up to it.
And then there is lack of confidence and fear. One chemist of my acquaintance came up with some curious findings about dissolution of copper. He required a lot of psychological support before he would publish, and even then he didn’t check the results as he should have.
NSERC and NSF simply encourage sloppy work, and sloppy work is more likely to be wrong and to produce “interesting” results than careful results.
We need the old Presbyterian Scots, and the Lutheran Prussians. They had a good ethos.
If they removed the AGW studies, the percentage of accurate published findings would likely improve markedly…
I will forever BLESS the lives of ALL the practicing attorneys who successfully SUE America’s Anthropogenic Global Warmist … so called “scientists” (I call them computer statistics undergrads) for FRAUD. Just like the example set by Australia. Time to pull off the mask. Time for the Wizards to come out from behind their government curtains.
I trust TRUMP to git er done.
Except when it comes to climate change “science.” 97% of the “scientific” papers written by scientists like Al Gore and the IPCC are “peer reviewed,” therefore “science” so therefore “prove” CAGW is real and happening now except when it’s happening in the future or even not happening at all.
There’s no “denying” that. Those that do are obvious racists, given Obama agrees with the watermelons.
Apparently we’re nice hair phobic racists in Canada. We all need to stop our fear of government taxing everything we have to chase climate farts, kind of like legalizing marijuana keeps it out from the kids. Truly enlightened send money to general revenues because that obviously saves the environment and keeps us out of our cars. No job to go to anyway; we’d just waste it on beer and popcorn anyway.
Just remember, lower incomes = lower emissions. Problem solved, except taxes will still have to rise, given our economy has cratered. No worries, we’ll just take a little bit from the few rich and give a lot more to the many middle income earners, they end up being the same people anyway. Look at Greece, that always works; it’s called equality of misery, er income. Egalitarians are so cool right; and green – OPM green.
Poor people? Only a racist would worry about them; they’ve been screwed many times, they have strong tolerance. They’re tough, so if they starve in the dark & cold, they just weren’t good enough vanguards for Gaia. If we hate that, well that’s our fault. If we were good little progressives then we could take what we hate and turn into others’ hatefulness. It’s quite simple if you don’t think about it.
I said stop thinking about it. Let me explain – shut up.
That’s much nicer than what I call them. 😉
Unfortunately, much of this can be blamed on the “publish or perish” mentality that pervades the system.
For university professors, one’s eligibility for tenure is dependent upon how many publications one has. The renewing of funding can also be influenced by that as well, as whoever’s bankrolling the effort wants a return on the investment and that’s usually in the form of new papers being produced.
The same thing applies when one is being considered for promotion, even after having been granted tenure. If one isn’t publishing, one isn’t considered to be doing anything. Never mind that one might want to be sure of one’s data or that the results one gets is different than what was expected.
It’s an idiotic system.
I’m from the Government and I’m here to tell you that the world is going to end in 150 years unless you allow we Tax and Spend Liberals to raise your taxes.
Considerably. On everything.
But wait! That’s not all.
There is a very good chance, based on evidence to date, that there will also be plenty of lying, misdirected funds, deforestation, freezing old folk, mega job loss, ornithological devastation, weather misrepresentation and cold,cold Canucks.
Seems like a fair trade for a celebrity PM with a possibility of becoming a world wide symbol of a Canada out of touch with reality.
t q Kate, I have my evening’s reading.
the stairs are coming along well, got a complement from a tenant, and had the idea to put an additional O/L half way down so I could put in some nite lites to illuminate the steps and also painted the metal edging fluorescent yellow for visibility.
The problem with policy based evidence manufacturing, is when those policies change.
Actual science changes with the evidence and has no consideration for policy needs.
Disrespect for authority is a hallmark of the scientific method.
Respect for authority is for priests, the opposite of science.
Strange how , our very futures depend on this government science or so we are told, but there is no funding available for replication or verification.
Just Trust us,respect our authority and the final insult”Environment Canada’s Science”.
yes indeed they have their very own.
24 hours a day, not one nanosecond more or less, for everyone on the friggin planet.
having done post secondary research, quite a bit actually, it puzzled me how some faculty had 100s and 100s of papers to their credit. where the fcuk did they find the time? I would ask myself.
this is the answer; fudge the results. don’t EVER do a halt, reset, restart due to unexpected results, because that will permanently impair the tally.
It’s an odd situation, having a quasi-physical science that is run like most social sciences. And we tend to forget or overlook the fact that social sciences have changed markedly over the same period that climate science went from being mundane record-keeping with very little political flavour (the case into the 1970s) to this almost transparently obvious gateway to international socialism.
Sociology and psychology have changed over roughly the same time period and have become far more progressive and political. Consider for example that until 1971 the APA considered homosexuality to be a form of anti-social behaviour and a mild form of mental illness. This has been 100% purged from the social sciences in favour of what can only be called an aggressively pro-homosexual agenda. The nuttier parts of that are already coming into the mainstream with proactive changes to definitions of gender and such matters as who may legally use what public toilets.
I would not call evolution a physical science although it’s closer to being one than sociology or some parts of psychology. But there again, the almost hysterical boundaries between Darwinian evolution and any hint of intelligent design, no matter how common-sense or non-fundamentalist, reveals that we have another politicized science fully developed.
Signs of paradigm creep might be found elsewhere but they remain subtle. Astronomy, by and large, is an objective discipline without an agenda. I assume particle physics to be as well. But I have to admit that I find super-confident descriptions of how the universe came into being one day thirteen billion years ago to be open to an atheistic bias, although perhaps more significantly, just rather humorous in their degree of precision about something that clearly we cannot even begin to fathom.
Your comments remind me of my first graduate supervisor. He had a habit of exploiting his grad students. If one ever finished their degree within the time allowed by the university, it was accidental and he was going to make sure it never happened again.
In one case, he published results that one of them had obtained and did it under his name–no credit given to the student in question. That grad student found out, filed a complaint, and, from what I heard, the matter nearly went to litigation.
In another, the chap was a foreign student and came with a master’s degree. He failed his Ph. D. defence and was left with a second master’s in the same discipline. This happened after he had spent several years on it. He tried again, spent about the same amount of time, but finally succeeded. It took him more than a decade to get his doctorate. In the meantime, I’m sure that our supervisor milked him for as many papers as possible.
I remember reading some of my supervisor’s publications. It soon became apparent that, instead of writing one really good paper, he got at least 3 which weren’t as good. How? It appeared that he took the data set he had, published half of it in one paper, published the other half in another, and took half of each sub-set and produced a third. Three papers for the price of one.
I quit after a year because he didn’t do anything and transferred back to my alma mater. It occurred to me a long time later that he was trying the same stunt with me like he pulled on those other students.
While I mentioned only grad students, I heard stories about how many post-docs at certain universities were exploited in a similar manner.
When I started grad studies, one rarely heard anything about that because few people talked about it. Those who did, and who were found out, soon found that their academic careers came to a screeching halt. It’s only in the last 20 years or so that incidents such as these are coming to light thanks, in part, to the Internet.
The post-secondary system is indeed quite corrupt.
Peter. I appreciate that astronomers, cosmologists et al don’t assume their confidence is proven hypotheses. In fact their operators are open and collegial with many interesting postulations on the composition of the universe studied and discussed. As the observable universe simultaneously becomes infinitesimally tinier but immeasurably larger, that is a good attitude to have. Despite their precision, they accept the chaos of the science and observations around them.
The CAGW cabal, utilizing 1/cosmology scientific precision, simply refused to try to disprove their cockamamie theory, then one day just claimed it “proven,” so others must disprove, but it’s obvious so only cretins would object. Well except for the hockey stick, Climategate, high level defections, ignored satellite measurements, and such other slight errors.
I also find the age of the universe discussion most interesting, actually fascinating with respect with the show the telescopes are giving us and the food for thought in pursuit of knowledge. I remain somewhat enjoyably critical. As dark matter and energy, most of the universe apparently, are substituted for proof just to keep the research together, cosmology is clear on the idea they won’t consider counter views heretical, that certainty is subjective. My own non-scientist observation is they like to push infinity around, but are giving us sound science and yes we are accelerating our learning, expanding perhaps faster than the universe? What happens to thought? Anyway I digress.
I’m sure grant money fits into their lives too, but nothing compared to the obscene climate change rental of prosperity, some non-refundable.
WRT intelligent design; no need to argue with evolution. I find it amusing that even after the theoretical dark stuff (though unlike global warming, actually observed), leads them to the moment space/ time begin, big bang creation, the question of what goes bang, matter? Or energy, where did it come from?
Maybe it came from another universe with different properties. Like heaven perhaps. No, it’s definitely not “God.” I wonder when our telescopes can look out further and further will we see stars and galaxies beyond our expanding universe calculations? What then will explain that – dark time? I jest somewhat, but love these guys because they care about scientific integrity, they’re the current vanguards of science imho.
As you pointed out that integrity thing is becoming less of a rule and more of an exception.
“I’m from the Government and I’m here to tell you that the world is going to end in 150 years…”
Great, then we can all relax.
That’s w-a-a-y past the “check-out” date for anyone of us living today – including the children.
Peter and Shamrock, both interesting reads.
When it comes to a god, however, I have learned to make a definite distinction. I believe it is preposterous to imagine a personal god that watches over everything every second, caring what you eat, what you wear, who you sleep with, etc. Or, for that matter, one that keeps a scorecard on morality, punishes or rewards certain behaviors or that demands to be worshiped or issues orders to murder unbelievers. Those gods are invented by man to control man.
On the other hand, when it comes to creation, we simply cannot rule out the possibility of an intelligence somehow being involved. As Peter aptly put it, we are far too removed from the incident itself to know a damn thing for sure. It is not unfathomable to me to imagine that DNA may have had a “designer”, for example.
Now, that in no way means I support “intelligent design” as I believe that is nothing more than a desperate attempt to give scientific legitimacy to some religions and thus protect people’s belief in their personal god. No one can coherently argue that a compassionate, loving god would design us to suffer such brief existences in bodies that, while somewhat “miraculous”, are also riddled with countless serious flaws. You simply can’t give a god all the credit for making flowers, sunsets and rainbows but then ignore all the horrendous suffering and waste of life inherent in that same “design”. Fact: About 99.9% of all species to ever inhabit the earth are now extinct.
I believe scientific methodology is our only hope if we are ever to learn the unbiased big answers to the big questions. Glad to read I’m not the only one to still have some confidence in the integrity of most scientific fields because how we handle scientific discovery in the future will determine if the human race becomes part of that 99.9% or not.
My daughter is a scientist in a fairly non-controversial field. She says there are the journals that actually have articles reviewed by peers in your field, and the journals that have articles reviewed by peers who couldn’t find your field with a GPS. Then there are the lengthy, expensive experiments that produce inexplicable results, usually yielding a “you did what?” moment during review. There is plenty of incompetence out there, nevermind the charlatans and frauds.