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a podcast (as opposed to, say, a book, or a technical paper) is a summary for a lay audience, and is not in any way a scholarly pursuit towards defining new ideas on the topic. This means that it isn't even clear how the very concept of plagiarism could possibly apply in this context. Nevertheless, we asked Jennifer — multiple times — to provide us with a detailed list of her charges, such as at what points in the podcast we used exactly what from her book. We thought that was fair, considering that she was the one making the potentially damaging charges. She refused, stating that we should do that kind of home work on our own. So we did. Below is a table that Julia and I put together, with a minute-by-minute summary and commentary of the entire podcast.

c) Those ideas that do overlap with Jennifer’s are common knowledge in the field. 

We deeply regret this incident, particularly the manner in which Jennifer has chosen to exploit social networks to smear our reputation before even attempting to contact us and hear our side of the story. We stand by the content and form of our podcast, which we think is intrinsically interesting (while certainly not groundbreaking!). We also still profess admiration for Jennifer’s work, not just about happiness, but in her other books as well, and hope that this ugly incident can soon be put behind us so that we can all get back to what we enjoy doing: writing and talking about interesting topics for an intelligent and informed audience.

As Freedman put it in The Atlantic: “80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials.” Ioannidis himself was quoted uttering some sobering words for the medical community (and the public at large): “Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor. I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.”

Julia and I actually addressed this topic during a Rationally Speaking podcast, featuring as guest our friend Steve Novella, of Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe and Science-Based Medicine fame. But while Steve did quibble with the tone of the Atlantic article, he agreed that Ioannidis’ results are well known and accepted by the medical research community. Steve did point out that it should not be surprising that results get better and better as one moves toward more stringent protocols like large randomized trials, but it seems to me that one should be surprised (actually, appalled) by the fact that even there the percentage of flawed studies is high — not to mention the fact that most studies are in fact neither large nor properly randomized.

The second big recent blow to public perception of the reliability of scientific results is an article published in The New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer, entitled “The truth wears off.” Lehrer also mentions Ioannidis, but the bulk of his essay is about findings in psychiatry, psychology and evolutionary biology (and even in research on the paranormal!).

In these disciplines there are now several documented cases of results that were initially spectacularly positive — for instance the effects of second generation antipsychotic drugs, or the hypothesized relationship between a male’s body symmetry and the quality of his genes — that turned out to be increasingly difficult to replicate over time, with the original effect sizes being cut down dramatically, or even disappearing altogether.

As Lehrer concludes at the end of his article: “Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling.”

None of this should actually be particularly surprising to any practicing scientist. If you have spent a significant time of your life in labs and reading the technical literature, you will appreciate the difficulties posed by empirical research, not to mention a number of issues such as the fact that few scientists ever actually bother to replicate someone else’s results, for the simple reason that there is no Nobel (or even funded grant, or tenured position) waiting for the guy who arrived second.

n the midst of this I was directed by a tweet by my colleague Neil deGrasse Tyson (who has also appeared on the RS podcast, though in a different context) to a recent ABC News article penned by John Allen Paulos, which meant to explain the decline effect in science.

Paulos’ article is indeed concise and on the mark (though several of the explanations he proposes were already brought up in both the Atlantic and New Yorker essays), but it doesn’t really make things much better.

Paulos suggests that one explanation for the decline effect is the well known statistical phenomenon of the regression toward the mean. This phenomenon is responsible, among other things, for a fair number of superstitions: you’ve probably heard of some athletes’ and other celebrities’ fear of being featured on the cover of a magazine after a particularly impressive series of accomplishments, because this brings “bad luck,” meaning that the following year one will not be able to repeat the performance at the same level. This is actually true, not because of magical reasons, but simply as a result of the regression to the mean: extraordinary performances are the result of a large number of factors that have to line up just right for the spectacular result to be achieved. The statistical chances of such an alignment to repeat itself are low, so inevitably next year’s performance will likely be below par. Paulos correctly argues that this also explains some of the decline effect of scientific results: the first discovery might have been the result of a number of factors that are unlikely to repeat themselves in exactly the same way, thus reducing the effect size when the study is replicated.

nother major determinant of the unreliability of scientific results mentioned by Paulos is the well know problem of publication bias: crudely put, science journals (particularly the high-profile ones, like Nature and Science) are interested only in positive, spectacular, “sexy” results. Which creates a powerful filter against negative, or marginally significant results. What you see in science journals, in other words, isn’t a statistically representative sample of scientific results, but a highly biased one, in favor of positive outcomes. No wonder that when people try to repeat the feat they often come up empty handed.

A third cause for the problem, not mentioned by Paulos but addressed in the New Yorker article, is the selective reporting of results by scientists themselves. This is essentially the same phenomenon as the publication bias, except that this time it is scientists themselves, not editors and reviewers, who don’t bother to submit for publication results that are either negative or not strongly conclusive. Again, the outcome is that what we see in the literature isn’t all the science that we ought to see. And it’s no good to argue that it is the “best” science, because the quality of scientific research is measured by the appropriateness of the experimental protocols (including the use of large samples) and of the data analyses — not by whether the results happen to confirm the scientist’s favorite theory.

The conclusion of all this is not, of course, that we should throw the baby (science) out with the bath water (bad or unreliable results). But scientists should also be under no illusion that these are rare anomalies that do not affect scientific research at large. Too much emphasis is being put on the “publish or perish” culture of modern academia, with the result that graduate students are explicitly instructed to go for the SPU’s — Smallest Publishable Units — when they have to decide how much of their work to submit to a journal. That way they maximize the number of their publications, which maximizes the chances of landing a postdoc position, and then a tenure track one, and then of getting grants funded, and finally of getting tenure. The result is that, according to statistics published by Nature, it turns out that about ⅓ of published studies is never cited (not to mention replicated!).

“Scientists these days tend to keep up the 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. ... We speak piously of taking measurements and making small studies that will ‘add another brick to the temple of science.’ Most such bricks lie around the brickyard.”

Most damning of all, however, is the potential effect that all of this may have on science’s already dubious reputation with the general public (think evolution-creation, vaccine-autism, or climate change)

“If we don’t tell the public about these problems, then we’re no better than non-scientists who falsely claim they can heal. If the drugs don’t work and we’re not sure how to treat something, why should we claim differently? Some fear that there may be less funding because we stop claiming we can prove we have miraculous treatments. But if we can’t really provide those miracles, how long will we be able to fool the public anyway? The scientific enterprise is probably the most fantastic achievement in human history, but that doesn’t mean we have a right to overstate what we’re accomplishing.”

Joseph T. Lapp said... But is any of this new for science? Perhaps science has operated this way all along, full of fits and starts, mostly duds. How do we know that this isn't the optimal way for science to operate?My issues are with the understanding of science that high school graduates have, and with the reporting of science.

What seems to have emerged in recent decades is a change in the institutional setting that got science advancing spectacularly since the establishment of the Royal Society. Flaws in the system such as corporate funded research, pal-review instead of peer-review, publication bias, science entangled with policy advocacy, and suchlike, may be distorting the environment, making it less suitable for the production of good science, especially in some fields.

Remedies should exist, but they should evolve rather than being imposed on a reluctant sociological-economic science establishment driven by powerful motives such as professional advance or funding. After all, who or what would have the authority to impose those rules, other than the scientific establishment itself?

there seems to me the potential danger of confusing various categories of moral discourse. For instance, are the “folks” studied in these cases actually relativist, or perhaps adherents to one of several versions of moral anti-realism? The two are definitely not the same, but I doubt that the subjects in question could tell the difference (and I wouldn’t expect them to, after all they are not philosophers).

why do we expect philosophers to learn from “folk morality” when we do not expect, say, physicists to learn from folk physics (which tends to be Aristotelian in nature), or statisticians from people’s understanding of probability theory (which is generally remarkably poor, as casino owners know very well)? Or even, while I’m at it, why not ask literary critics to discuss Shakespeare in light of what common folks think about the bard (making sure, perhaps, that they have at least read his works, and not just watched the movies)?

Hence, my other examples of stat (i.e., math) and literary criticism. I conceive of philosophy in general, and moral philosophy in particular, as more akin to a (science-informed, to be sure) mix between logic and criticism. Some moral philosophy consists in engaging an “if ... then” sort of scenario, akin to logical-mathematical thinking, where one begins with certain axioms and attempts to derive the consequences of such axioms. In other respects, moral philosophers exercise reflective criticism concerning those consequences as they might be relevant to practical problems.

For instance, we may write philosophically about abortion, and begin our discussion from a comparison of different conceptions of “person.” We might conclude that “if” one adopts conception X of what a person is, “then” abortion is justifiable under such and such conditions; while “if” one adopts conception Y of a person, “then” abortion is justifiable under a different set of conditions, or not justifiable at all. We could, of course, back up even further and engage in a discussion of what “personhood” is, thus moving from moral philosophy to metaphysics.

Nowhere in the above are we going to ask “folks” what they think a person is, or how they think their implicit conception of personhood informs their views on abortion. Of course people’s actual views on abortion are crucial — especially for public policy — and they are intrinsically interesting to social scientists. But they don’t seem to me to make much more contact with philosophy than the above mentioned popular opinions on Shakespeare make contact with serious literary criticism. And please, let’s not play the cheap card of “elitism,” unless we are willing to apply the label to just about any intellectual endeavor, in any discipline.

There is one area in which experimental philosophy can potentially contribute to philosophy proper (as opposed to social science). Once we have a more empirically grounded understanding of what people’s moral reasoning actually is, then we can analyze the likely consequences of that reasoning for a variety of societal issues. But now we would be doing something more akin to political than moral philosophy.

Value-free science? Many scientists think that science is about objectivity and “just the facts, ma’am.” Not so fast, philosophers, historians and sociologists of science have argued now for a number of decades. While I certainly have no sympathy for the extreme postmodernist position exemplified by the so-called “strong programme” in sociology of science — that science is entirely the result of social construction — there are several interesting and delicate facets of the problem to explore.

there are values embedded in the practice of science itself: testability, accuracy, generality, simplicity, and the like. Needless to say, few if any of these can be justified within science itself — there is no experiment confirming Occam’s razor, for instance.

Then there are the many moral dimensions of science practice, both in terms of ethical issues internal to science (fraud) and of the much broader ones affecting society at large (societal consequences of research and technological advances).

There is also the issue of diversity in science. Until very recently, and in many fields still today, science has largely been an affair conducted by white males. And this has historically resulted in a large amount of nonsense — say about gender differences, or ethnic differences — put forth as objective knowledge and accepted by the public because it has the imprimatur of science. But, you might say, that was the past, now we have corrected the errors and moved on. Except that such an argument ignores the fact that there is little reason to think that only we have gotten it just right, that the current generation is somehow immune from an otherwise uninterrupted history of science-based blunders.

Regarding Occam's Razor, there is a justification for it based on probability theory, see:http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/01/12/occams-razor-bayes-theorem/http://telescoper.wordpress.com/2011/02/19/bayes-razor/http://www.stat.duke.edu/~berger/papers/ockham.html

another interesting dimension of the relationship between values and science concerns which scientific questions we should pursue (and, often, fund with public money). Scientists often act as they ought to be the only arbiters here, and talk as if some questions were “obviously” intrinsically important. But when your research is costly and paid for by the public, perhaps society deserves a bit more of an explanation concerning why millions of dollars ought to be spent on obscure problems that apparently interest only a handful of university professors concentrated in one or a few countries.

The people with this attitude aren't just fringe fundamentalists who are fearful of messing with God's Plan. Many of them are prestigious professors and authors whose arguments make no mention of religion. One of the most prominent examples is political theorist Francis Fukuyama, author of End of History, who published a book in 2003 called “Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution.” In it he argues that we will lose our “essential” humanity by enhancing ourselves, and that the result will be a loss of respect for “human dignity” and a collapse of morality.

Fukuyama's reasoning represents a prominent strain of thought about human enhancement, and one that I find doubly fallacious. (Fukuyama is aware of the following criticisms, but neither I nor other reviewers were impressed by his attempt to defend himself against them.) The idea that the status quo represents some “essential” quality of humanity collapses when you zoom out and look at the steady change in the human condition over previous millennia. Our ancestors were less knowledgable, more tribalistic, less healthy, shorter-lived; would Fukuyama have argued for the preservation of all those qualities on the grounds that, in their respective time, they constituted an “essential human nature”? And even if there were such a thing as a persistent “human nature,” why is it necessarily worth preserving? In other words, I would argue that Fukuyama is committing both the fallacy of essentialism (there exists a distinct thing that is “human nature”) and the appeal to nature (the way things naturally are is how they ought to be).

Writer Bill McKibben, who was called “probably the nation's leading environmentalist” by the Boston Globe this year, and “the world's best green journalist” by Time magazine, published a book in 2003 called “Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age.” In it he writes, “That is the choice... one that no human should have to make... To be launched into a future without bounds, where meaning may evaporate.” McKibben concludes that it is likely that “meaning and pain, meaning and transience are inextricably intertwined.” Or as one blogger tartly paraphrased: “If we all live long healthy happy lives, Bill’s favorite poetry will become obsolete.”

President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics, which advised him from 2001-2009, was steeped in it. Harvard professor of political philosophy Michael J. Sandel served on the Council from 2002-2005 and penned an article in the Atlantic Monthly called “The Case Against Perfection,” in which he objected to genetic engineering on the grounds that, basically, it’s uppity. He argues that genetic engineering is “the ultimate expression of our resolve to see ourselves astride the world, the masters of our nature.” Better we should be bowing in submission than standing in mastery, Sandel feels. Mastery “threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a gift,” he warns, and submitting to forces outside our control “restrains our tendency toward hubris.”

If you like Sandel's “It's uppity” argument against human enhancement, you'll love his fellow Councilmember Dr. William Hurlbut's argument against life extension: “It's unmanly.” Hurlbut's exact words, delivered in a 2007 debate with Aubrey de Grey: “I actually find a preoccupation with anti-aging technologies to be, I think, somewhat spiritually immature and unmanly... I’m inclined to think that there’s something profound about aging and death.”

And Council chairman Dr. Leon Kass, a professor of bioethics from the University of Chicago who served from 2001-2005, was arguably the worst of all. Like McKibben, Kass has frequently argued against radical life extension on the grounds that life's transience is central to its meaningfulness. “Could the beauty of flowers depend on the fact that they will soon wither?” he once asked. “How deeply could one deathless ‘human’ being love another?”

Kass has also argued against human enhancements on the same grounds as Fukuyama, that we shouldn't deviate from our proper nature as human beings. “To turn a man into a cockroach— as we don’t need Kafka to show us —would be dehumanizing. To try to turn a man into more than a man might be so as well,” he said. And Kass completes the anti-transhumanist triad (it robs life of meaning; it's dehumanizing; it's hubris) by echoing Sandel's call for humility and gratitude, urging, “We need a particular regard and respect for the special gift that is our own given nature.”

By now you may have noticed a familiar ring to a lot of this language. The idea that it's virtuous to suffer, and to humbly surrender control of your own fate, is a cornerstone of Christian morality.

it's fairly representative of standard Christian tropes: surrendering to God, submitting to God, trusting that God has good reasons for your suffering.

I suppose I can understand that if you believe in an all-powerful entity who will become irate if he thinks you are ungrateful for anything, then this kind of groveling might seem like a smart strategic move. But what I can't understand is adopting these same attitudes in the absence of any religious context. When secular people chastise each other for the “hubris” of trying to improve the “gift” of life they've received, I want to ask them: just who, exactly, are you groveling to? Who, exactly, are you afraid of affronting if you dare to reach for better things?

This is why transhumanism is most needed, from my perspective – to counter the astoundingly widespread attitude that suffering and 80-year-lifespans are good things that are worth preserving. That attitude may make sense conditional on certain peculiarly masochistic theologies, but the rest of us have no need to defer to it. It also may have been a comforting thing to tell ourselves back when we had no hope of remedying our situation, but that's not necessarily the case anymore.

I think there is a seperation of Transhumanism and what Massimo is referring to. Things like robotic arms and the like come from trying to deal with a specific defect and thus seperate it from Transhumanism. I would define transhumanism the same way you would (the achievement of a better human), but I would exclude the inventions of many life altering devices as transhumanism. If we could invent a device that just made you smarter, then ideed that would be transhumanism, but if we invented a device that could make someone that was metally challenged to be able to be normal, I would define this as modern medicine. I just want to make sure we seperate advances in modern medicine from transhumanism. Modern medicine being the one that advances to deal with specific medical issues to improve quality of life (usually to restore it to normal conditions) and transhumanism being the one that can advance every single human (perhaps equally?).

I agree with all your points about why the arguments against transhumanism and for suffering are ridiculous. That being said, when I first heard about the ideas of Transhumanism, after the initial excitement wore off (since I'm a big tech nerd), my reaction was more of less the same as Massimo's. I don't particularly see the need for a philosophical movement for this.

if people believe that suffering is something God ordained for us, you're not going to convince them otherwise with philosophical arguments any more than you'll convince them there's no God at all. If the technologies do develop, acceptance of them will come as their use becomes more prevalent, not with arguments.