Group items tagged

Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist's field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist's and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants.

Why should there be such rapid advances in some fields and not in others? I think the usual explanations that we tend to think of - such as the tractability of the subject, or the quality or education of the men drawn into it, or the size of research contracts - are important but inadequate. I have begun to believe that the primary factor in scientific advance is an intellectual one. These rapidly moving fields are fields where a particular method of doing scientific research is systematically used and taught, an accumulative method of inductive inference that is so effective that I think it should be given the name of "strong inference." I believe it is important to examine this method, its use and history and rationale, and to see whether other groups and individuals might learn to adopt it profitably in their own scientific and intellectual work. In its separate elements, strong inference is just the simple and old-fashioned method of inductive inference that goes back to Francis Bacon. The steps are familiar to every college student and are practiced, off and on, by every scientist. The difference comes in their systematic application. Strong inference consists of applying the following steps to every problem in science, formally and explicitly and regularly: Devising alternative hypotheses; Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly is possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses; Carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result; Recycling the procedure, making subhypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain, and so on.

On any new problem, of course, inductive inference is not as simple and certain as deduction, because it involves reaching out into the unknown. Steps 1 and 2 require intellectual inventions, which must be cleverly chosen so that hypothesis, experiment, outcome, and exclusion will be related in a rigorous syllogism; and the question of how to generate such inventions is one which has been extensively discussed elsewhere (2, 3). What the formal schema reminds us to do is to try to make these inventions, to take the next step, to proceed to the next fork, without dawdling or getting tied up in irrelevancies.

On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties.

the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren’t any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. “In fact, sometimes they now look even worse,” John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.

More than 60% of the experiments fail to produce results or expected discoveries. From an objective point of view, this high percentage of “failed “ research generates high level pieces of knowledge. Generally, all these experiments have not been published anywhere as they have been considered useless for our research target. The objective of “The All Results Journals: Biology” focuses on recovering and publishing these valuable pieces of information in Biology. These key experiments must be considered vital for the development of science. They  are the catalyst for a real science-based empirical knowledge.

The All Results Journals: Biology is an online journal that publishes research articles after a controlled peer review. All articles will be published, without any barriers to access, immediately upon acceptance.

Every single contribution submitted to The All Results Journals and selected for a peer-review will be sent to, at least, one reviewer, though usually could be sent to two or more independent reviewers, selected by the editors and sometimes by more if further advice is required (e.g., on statistics or on a particular technique). Authors are welcome to suggest suitable independent reviewers and may also request the journal to exclude certain individuals or laboratories.

Being comfortable with uncertainty, knowing the limits of what science can tell us, and understanding the worth of failure are all valuable tools that would improve people's lives, according to some of the world's leading thinkers.

he ideas were submitted as part of an annual exercise by the web magazine Edge, which invites scientists, philosophers and artists to opine on a major question of the moment. This year it was, "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"

the public often misunderstands the scientific process and the nature of scientific doubt. This can fuel public rows over the significance of disagreements between scientists about controversial issues such as climate change and vaccine safety.

as new technologies emerge to better reveal people’s experiences, the law ought to do more to take these experiences into account. In tort and criminal law, we often ignore or downplay the importance of subjective experience. This is no surprise. During the hundreds of years in which these bodies of law developed, we had very poor methods of making inferences about the experiences of others. As we get better at measuring experiences, however, I make the normative claim that we ought to change fundamental aspects of the law to take better account of people’s experiences.

Researchers are trying to develop more accurate methods of detecting deception using brain imaging.    While many in the scientific community doubt that current brain-based methods of lie detection are sufficiently accurate and reliable to use in forensic contexts, that has stopped neither companies from marketing fMRI lie detection services to the public, nor litigants from trying to introduce such evidence in court.

Given the substantial possibility that we will develop reasonably accurate lie detectors within the next thirty years, our current secretive behaviors have already become harder to hide.

University of Michigan in Ann Arbor

Vipul Bhrigu, a former postdoc at the university's Comprehensive Cancer Center, wears a dark-blue three-buttoned suit and a pinched expression as he cups his pregnant wife's hand in both of his. When Pollard Hines calls Bhrigu's case to order, she has stern words for him: "I was inclined to send you to jail when I came out here this morning."

Bhrigu, over the course of several months at Michigan, had meticulously and systematically sabotaged the work of Heather Ames, a graduate student in his lab, by tampering with her experiments and poisoning her cell-culture media. Captured on hidden camera, Bhrigu confessed to university police in April and pleaded guilty to malicious destruction of personal property, a misdemeanour that apparently usually involves cars: in the spaces for make and model on the police report, the arresting officer wrote "lab research" and "cells". Bhrigu has said on multiple occasions that he was compelled by "internal pressure" and had hoped to slow down Ames's work. Speaking earlier this month, he was contrite. "It was a complete lack of moral judgement on my part," he said.

British sociologist Harry Collins asked a scientist who specializes in gravitational waves to answer seven questions about the physics of these waves. Collins, who has made an amateur study of this field for more than 30 years but has never actually practiced it, also answered the questions himself. Then he submitted both sets of answers to a panel of judges who are themselves gravitational-wave researchers. The judges couldn't tell the impostor from one of their own. Collins argues that he is therefore as qualified as anyone to discuss this field, even though he can't conduct experiments in it.

The journal Nature predicted that the experiment would have a broad impact, writing that Collins could help settle the "science wars of the 1990s," "when sociologists launched what scientists saw as attacks on the very nature of science, and scientists responded in kind," accusing the sociologists of misunderstanding science. More generally, it could affect "the argument about whether an outsider, such as an anthropologist, can properly understand another group, such as a remote rural community." With this comment, Nature seemed to be saying that if a sociologist can understand physics, then anyone can understand anything.

It will be interesting to see if Collins' results can indeed be repeated in different situations. Meanwhile, his experiment is plenty interesting in itself. Just one of the judges succeeded in distinguishing Collins' answers from those of the trained experts. One threw up his hands. And the other seven declared Collins the physicist. He didn't simply do as well as the trained specialist—he did better, even though the test questions demanded technical answers. One sample answer from Collins gives you the flavor: "Since gravitational waves change the shape of spacetime and radio waves do not, the effect on an interferometer of radio waves can only be to mimic the effects of a gravitational wave, not reproduce them." (More details can be found in this paper Collins wrote with his collaborators.)

no real evidence is ever offered for the original assumption that ordinary moral thought and talk has this objective character. Instead, philosophers tend simply to assert that people’s ordinary practice is objectivist and then begin arguing from there.

If we really want to go after these issues in a rigorous way, it seems that we should adopt a different approach. The first step is to engage in systematic empirical research to figure out how the ordinary practice actually works. Then, once we have the relevant data in hand, we can begin looking more deeply into the philosophical implications – secure in the knowledge that we are not just engaging in a philosophical fiction but rather looking into the philosophical implications of people’s actual practices.

in the past few years, experimental philosophers have been gathering a wealth of new data on these issues, and we now have at least the first glimmerings of a real empirical research program here

Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?

For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia.

What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world.

people have been talking about Phil Plait’s powerful talk, now known to the blogosphere as the “Don’t be a dick” speech (after Wheaton’s Law, an internet maxim that provided the theme of Phil’s presentation). In his talk, Phil argued that skeptics who have outreach goals should get serious about communication: In times of war, we need warriors. But this isn’t a war. You might try to say it is, but it’s not a war. We aren’t trying to kill an enemy. We’re trying to persuade other humans. And at times like that, we don’t need warriors. What we need are diplomats.

there many excellent reasons to tend toward treating people with respect and courtesy. It’s morally bad to be cruel (and usually unnecessary); it’s contrary to scientific and journalistic ethics (and the search for truth) to shout down legitimate alternate views; it blinds us to flaws in our own reasoning if we fail to seriously consider viewpoints we don’t like. Most importantly (this was the theme of Phil’s talk) science communication is more effective when it starts with warmth and respect.

a few skeptics are tempted to think there must be something special about those who don’t believe. That conceit hardly seems worthy of dwelling upon, and yet people have actually tried to convince me on this basis that it’s not worth teaching critical thinking. “The smart people already get it,” I’ve been told, “and the stupid people never will. Don’t waste your time.” I suppose it’s human to want to draw these lines through the world: on this side, the good smart people; on the other side, the bad dumb people. But the world is not nearly so simple.

Joshua Greene from Harvard, known for his research on "neuroethics," the neurological underpinnings of ethical decision making in humans. The title of Greene's talk was "Beyond point-and-shoot morality: why cognitive neuroscience matters for ethics."

What Greene is interested in is to find out to what factors moral judgment is sensitive to, and whether it is sensitive to the relevant factors. He presented his dual process theory of morality. In this respect, he proposed an analogy with a camera. Cameras have automatic (point and shoot) settings as well as manual controls. The first mode is good enough for most purposes, the second allows the user to fine tune the settings more carefully. The two modes allow for a nice combination of efficiency and flexibility.

The idea is that the human brain also has two modes, a set of efficient automatic responses and a manual mode that makes us more flexible in response to non standard situations. The non moral example is our response to potential threats. Here the amygdala is very fast and efficient at focusing on potential threats (e.g., the outline of eyes in the dark), even when there actually is no threat (it's a controlled experiment in a lab, no lurking predator around).

There are two ways that computers might add to our wellbeing. First, they could do so indirectly, by increasing our ability to produce other goods and services. In this they have proved something of a disappointment. In the early 1970s, American businesses began to invest heavily in computer hardware and software, but for decades this enormous investment seemed to pay no dividends. As the economist Robert Solow put it in 1987, ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ Perhaps too much time was wasted in training employees to use computers; perhaps the sorts of activity that computers make more efficient, like word processing, don’t really add all that much to productivity; perhaps information becomes less valuable when it’s more widely available. Whatever the case, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that some of the productivity gains promised by the computer-driven ‘new economy’ began to show up – in the United States, at any rate. So far, Europe appears to have missed out on them.

The other way computers could benefit us is more direct. They might make us smarter, or even happier. They promise to bring us such primary goods as pleasure, friendship, sex and knowledge. If some lotus-eating visionaries are to be believed, computers may even have a spiritual dimension: as they grow ever more powerful, they have the potential to become our ‘mind children’. At some point – the ‘singularity’ – in the not-so-distant future, we humans will merge with these silicon creatures, thereby transcending our biology and achieving immortality. It is all of this that Woody Allen is missing out on.

But there are also sceptics who maintain that computers are having the opposite effect on us: they are making us less happy, and perhaps even stupider. Among the first to raise this possibility was the American literary critic Sven Birkerts. In his book The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), Birkerts argued that the computer and other electronic media were destroying our capacity for ‘deep reading’. His writing students, thanks to their digital devices, had become mere skimmers and scanners and scrollers. They couldn’t lose themselves in a novel the way he could. This didn’t bode well, Birkerts thought, for the future of literary culture.

1. Distributed cocreation moves into the mainstreamIn the past few years, the ability to organise communities of Web participants to develop, market, and support products and services has moved from the margins of business practice to the mainstream. Wikipedia and a handful of open-source software developers were the pioneers. But in signs of the steady march forward, 70 per cent of the executives we recently surveyed said that their companies regularly created value through Web communities. Similarly, more than 68m bloggers post reviews and recommendations about products and services.

for every success in tapping communities to create value, there are still many failures. Some companies neglect the up-front research needed to identify potential participants who have the right skill sets and will be motivated to participate over the longer term. Since cocreation is a two-way process, companies must also provide feedback to stimulate continuing participation and commitment. Getting incentives right is important as well: cocreators often value reputation more than money. Finally, an organisation must gain a high level of trust within a Web community to earn the engagement of top participants.

2. Making the network the organisation In earlier research, we noted that the Web was starting to force open the boundaries of organisations, allowing nonemployees to offer their expertise in novel ways. We called this phenomenon "tapping into a world of talent." Now many companies are pushing substantially beyond that starting point, building and managing flexible networks that extend across internal and often even external borders. The recession underscored the value of such flexibility in managing volatility. We believe that the more porous, networked organisations of the future will need to organise work around critical tasks rather than molding it to constraints imposed by corporate structures.

We’re not here to defend peer review against its many critics. We have the same feelings about it that Churchill did about democracy, aka the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. Of course, a good number of the retractions we write about are due to misconduct, and it’s not clear how peer review, no matter how good, would detect out-and-out fraud.

With that in mind, a paper published last week in the Annals of Emergency Medicine caught our eye. Over 14 years, 84 editors at the journal rated close to 15,000 reviews by about 1,500 reviewers. Highlights of their findings: …92% of peer reviewers deteriorated during 14 years of study in the quality and usefulness of their reviews (as judged by editors at the time of decision), at rates unrelated to the length of their service (but moderately correlated with their mean quality score, with better-than average reviewers decreasing at about half the rate of those below average). Only 8% improved, and those by very small amount.

The average reviewer in our study would have taken 12.5 years to reach this threshold; only 3% of reviewers whose quality decreased would have reached it in less than 5 years, and even the worst would take 3.2 years. Another 35% of all reviewers would reach the threshold in 5 to 10 years, 28% in 10 to 15 years, 12% in 15 to 20 years, and 22% in 20 years or more. So the decline was slow. Still, the results, note the authors, were surprising: Such a negative overall trend is contrary to most editors’ and reviewers’ intuitive expectations and beliefs about reviewer skills and the benefits of experience.

t was the big news that wasn’t. Hyperbolic claims about the possible discovery of alien life, or a second branch of life on Earth, turned out to be nothing more than bacteria that can thrive on arsenic, using it in place of phosphorus in their DNA and other molecules. But after the initial layers of hype were peeled away, even this extraordinar

This is a chronological roundup of the criticism against the science in the paper itself, ending with some personal reflections on my own handling of the story (skip to Friday, December 10th for that bit).

Thursday, December 2nd: Felisa Wolfe-Simon published a paper in Science, claiming to have found bacteria in California’s Mono Lake that can grow using arsenic instead of phosphorus. Given that phosphorus is meant to be one of six irreplaceable elements, this would have been a big deal, not least because the bacteria apparently used arsenic to build the backbones of their DNA molecules.

The first group are those with an overly simplistic or naive sense of how science functions. This is a view of science similar to those films created in the 1950s and meant to be watched by students, with the jaunty music playing in the background. This view generally respects science, but has a significant underappreciation for the flaws and complexity of science as a human endeavor. Those with this view are easily scandalized by revelations of the messiness of science.

The second cluster is what I would call scientific skepticism – which combines a respect for science and empiricism as a method (really “the” method) for understanding the natural world, with a deep appreciation for all the myriad ways in which the endeavor of science can go wrong. Scientific skeptics, in fact, seek to formally understand the process of science as a human endeavor with all its flaws. It is therefore often skeptics pointing out phenomena such as publication bias, the placebo effect, the need for rigorous controls and blinding, and the many vagaries of statistical analysis. But at the end of the day, as complex and messy the process of science is, a reliable picture of reality is slowly ground out.

The third group, often frustrating to scientific skeptics, are the science-deniers (for lack of a better term). They may take a postmodernist approach to science – science is just one narrative with no special relationship to the truth. Whatever you call it, what the science-deniers in essence do is describe all of the features of science that the skeptics do (sometimes annoyingly pretending that they are pointing these features out to skeptics) but then come to a different conclusion at the end – that science (essentially) does not work.

Karl Smith argues that informal economic arguments — models in the sense of thought experiments, not necessarily backed by equations and/or data-crunching — deserve more respect from the profession.

misunderstandings in economics come about because people don’t have in their minds any intuitive notion of what it is they’re supposed to be modeling.

And Karl Smith is right: no way could Hume have published such a thing in a modern journal. So yes, simple intuitive stories are important, and deserve more credit.

The Templeton Foundation claims to be a friend of science. So why does it make so many researchers uneasy?

With a current endowment estimated at US$2.1 billion, the organization continues to pursue Templeton's goal of building bridges between science and religion. Each year, it doles out some $70 million in grants, more than $40 million of which goes to research in fields such as cosmology, evolutionary biology and psychology.

however, many scientists find it troubling — and some see it as a threat. Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, calls the foundation "sneakier than the creationists". Through its grants to researchers, Coyne alleges, the foundation is trying to insinuate religious values into science. "It claims to be on the side of science, but wants to make faith a virtue," he says.

in the magazine article Joshua mentions several studies of “folk morality,” i.e. of how ordinary people think about moral problems. The results are fascinating. It turns out that people’s views are correlated with personality traits, with subjects who score high on “openness to experience” being reliably more relativists than objectivists about morality (I am not using the latter term in the infamous Randyan meaning here, but as Knobe does, to indicate the idea that morality has objective bases).

Other studies show that people who are capable of considering multiple options in solving mathematical puzzles also tend to be moral relativists, and — in a study co-authored by Knobe himself — the very same situation (infanticide) was judged along a sliding scale from objectivism to relativism depending on whether the hypothetical scenario involved a fellow American (presumably sharing our same general moral values), the member of an imaginary Amazonian tribe (for which infanticide was acceptable), and an alien from the planet Pentar (belonging to a race whose only goal in life is to turn everything into equilateral pentagons, and killing individuals that might get in the way of that lofty objective is a duty). Oh, and related research also shows that young children tend to be objectivists, while young adults are usually relativists — but that later in life one’s primordial objectivism apparently experiences a comeback.

This is all very interesting social science, but is it philosophy? Granted, the differences between various disciplines are often not clear cut, and of course whenever people engage in truly inter-disciplinary work we should simply applaud the effort and encourage further work. But I do wonder in what sense, if any, the kinds of results that Joshua and his colleagues find have much to do with moral philosophy.