Comments on: The scientific method is alive and well

By: The Scientific Method is Alive and Well at thesocialsciences.com

The Scientific Method is Alive and Well at thesocialsciences.com — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 19:19:31 +0000

[...] To Read More… « Nahana Lewis to Speak at 2011 Social Sciences Conference in New Orleans [...]

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 01:20:42 +0000

@Joseph J Veverka (#2): Please don’t be ignorant. Dark matter, dark energy, gravity waves are all well motivated and scientifically reasonable hypothesis which have not yet been refuted. People are certainly not hunting nobel prizes–they are trying to understand the fundamental physics of our universe.

By: Karel Rei

Karel Rei — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 15:56:40 +0000

You do sound like a bit of an optimist.
We need some kind of evidence that in fact these distortions do go out of the literature
with time. Often they do not. They get in the textbooks
and all sorts of stuff are called ‘fact’ that are not really.
A second level critique of statistics really IS necessary.

By: daniel

daniel — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 18:05:03 +0000

@Jonathan (#18): I had corrected this earlier, but it was autosaved, and never went through. Hopefully this time it will take.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 19:51:09 +0000

I think it’s “Lo and behold”, not “Low and behold”.

By: costanza

costanza — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 19:46:48 +0000

This “decline effect” is well documented in the bio/medical literature, tho’ there it’s referred to as the Proteus Phenomanon”.

By: Slow Down, It’s Sunday « 'tis nobler – to learn and change

Slow Down, It’s Sunday « 'tis nobler – to learn and change — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:14:10 +0000

[...] Defending the scientific method. [...]

By: Can product management be scientific? « Evil Fish

Can product management be scientific? « Evil Fish — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 08:00:27 +0000

[...] The scientific method is alive and well (blogs.discovermagazine.com) [...]

By: réalta fuar

réalta fuar — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 20:29:09 +0000

How many comments on a science blog by Bob Kirshner equals one (probably wrong) astronomy publication in Nature? Like many things, it depends on who is counting. For me, it would be one, for a tenure committee probably a LOT more than that.

By: daniel

daniel — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:47:21 +0000

@Bob (#10): “Nature does not care how you feel.” That just about sums up the life of a scientist. The trick is not to take it personally.

By: AnotherSean

AnotherSean — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:24:39 +0000

Nothing is wrong with the scientific method, in so much as such a method can be defined. The problem is with some of its users. Does science conquer all, eventually? Thats a tremendous extrapolation, that I don’t think we can answer with any degree of confidence.

By: Curious Wavefunction

Curious Wavefunction — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 14:10:20 +0000

-So there’ll be a bunch of people out there who misread or cherry-pick the article (Deepak Chopra)

If I had a penny for every time that Deepak Chopra pounced on an article and cherry-picked and distorted it to his own misguided ends, I would be as rich as him.

By: Bob Kirshner

Bob Kirshner — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 13:09:52 +0000

Thanks for this thoughtful post. I had the same creepy feeling when I was reading this article. When you find a result, and further investigation makes it weaker, that’s telling you something you don’t want to hear, but, honestly, Nature does not care how you feel.

On the other hand, when we first published results on cosmic acceleration based on supernovae in 1998, the data were slim, but, we thought, adequate to support the claim. After a decade, the samples have gotten bigger, the systematic errors have been tracked down and made smaller, and there’s even a prediction that’s checked out OK (the cosmic jerk!) This is surely the signature of something real!

By: Scott B

Scott B — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 12:45:01 +0000

I think the problem is being underestimated here. It’s not proper to say the scientific method is broken but I think it’s fair to say that the peer review processes, publication requirements, and especially reporting of scientific “discoveries” needs to change. This may be the way science works, but with the internet people have access to far more news daily. If they keep hearing multiple findings such as X is healthy/unhealthy for your or arctic ice will be gone by 2010 or whatever else, then the results are overturned later, peoples’ confidence in real findings with a solid basis will be reduced. The general public is not going to read multiple papers and come to an understanding of why a previous finding ended up being proven wrong or realize the person that wrote the article hyped up the findings beyond what the paper supported. They are just going to think scientists don’t know as much as many would like them to believe.

I think scientists need to be far more critical of reports on their work and others. Not all publicity is good publicity. Also, somehow moving away from publishing in journals that require money to access the papers need to happen. The general public may not go through the papers, but they’ll read the opinions of the many people that would be willing to. If everyone had access to papers and preferably the data sets that went into whatever conclusions the paper reached blogs and other outlets could counteract some of the problems caused by inaccurate reporting.

By: sievemaria lucianus

sievemaria lucianus — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 11:14:36 +0000

“… Efforts at control are spurious, desperate and doomed ….”

By: sievemaria lucianus

sievemaria lucianus — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 10:55:22 +0000

I had an experience one time when working with 2 people when I called the girl wrongly by the name *heather* I was embarrassed and said I dont know why I said that, I dont even know anyone by that name and she said ,” My sisters name is Heather and I was just thinking of her” – when the fellow said – whoa – i am thinking of a number what is it ? and according to him I got it right 3 times – but who is to say – if she really had a sister named Heather – and was thinking of her – and the numbers …. impossible. For certain I could not do it again.

By: Simon

Simon — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 10:54:22 +0000

There was some discussion of this over at Jerry Coyne's blog here in December. And at Andrew Gelman's blog here. I think these guys both had some interesting thoughts on this article. My own point is that the general readership of this article need to realise there’s a huge difference between papers published at the ‘cutting edge’ of science and solidly established results that are found in repeated experiments, re-analysed by many teams, etc… There’s a lovely paper by John Ioannidis of “Why most published research findings are false” which I think more people should read. The conclusion (in the title) is virtually inevitable given noisy data and the number of hypotheses and tests being examined around the globe. But it doesn’t mean the method is no good. It just means new research papers should be only the start of the process – to be followed by critical analysis and replication by independent (or differently biased!) peers. The news media should therefore hold off publishing stories based on a single new result in a single paper, or risk publicising wrong results almost all the time. (Trouble is, the incentives within the news media world are such that this is not much of a concern.)

By: Bee

Bee — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 09:26:15 +0000

Physicists publish null and negative results all the time. They just call them ‘constraints’ on some more or less plausible modification of established theories.

By: Everything Is Fine, Science Is Not Broken « metadatta.

Everything Is Fine, Science Is Not Broken « metadatta. — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:51:01 +0000

[...] Unsurprisingly, the blogosphere has beaten these to death as well; two particular good posts are here and [...]

By: The Cosmist

The Cosmist — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 23:41:54 +0000

On the issue of statistical anomalies, I can tell you from my experience playing online poker for years that even very rational human minds have a hard time dealing with randomness. The apparent non-randomness of random events can be so bizarre, and our brains are so good at finding patterns, that it’s almost impossible not to start believing that something spooky is going on. This bug in our programming explains why superstition and pseudo-science is so widespread and persistent. As always, the limiting factor in the scientific enterprise is human beings themselves, and suggests to me that the way forward is to move beyond this bug-ridden substrate called homo sapiens ASAP!