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Lawrence Hrubes

Cancer Studies Are Fatally Flawed. Meet the Young Billionaire Who's Exposing the Truth ... - 0 views

  • Like a number of up-and-coming researchers in his generation, Nosek was troubled by mounting evidence that science itself—through its systems of publication, funding, and advancement—had become biased toward generating a certain kind of finding: novel, attention grabbing, but ultimately unreliable. The incentives to produce positive results were so great, Nosek and others worried, that some scientists were simply locking their inconvenient data away. Related Stories Nick Stockton Science Gets Better at Being Wrong Katie M. Palmer Science Has Its Problems, But the Web Could Be the Fix Katie M. Palmer Psychology Is in Crisis Over Whether It’s in Crisis The problem even had a name: the file drawer effect.
Lawrence Hrubes

What to Call a Doubter of Climate Change? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • People who reject the findings of climate science are dismissed as “deniers” and “disinformers.” Those who accept the science are attacked as “alarmists” or “warmistas. ” The latter term, evoking the Sandinista revolutionaries of Nicaragua, is perhaps meant to suggest that the science is part of some socialist plot.
  • The petition asks the news media to abandon the most frequently used term for people who question climate science, “skeptic,” and call them “climate deniers” instead. By Degrees A column by Justin Gillis about our changing climate. 3.6 Degrees of Uncertainty DEC 15 A Tricky Transition From Fossil Fuel NOV 10 Shining Star Power on a Crucial Subject SEP 22 In the Ocean, Clues to Change AUG 11 Picking Lesser of Two Climate Evils JUL 7 See More » Climate scientists are among the most vocal critics of using the term “climate skeptic” to describe people who flatly reject their findings. They point out that skepticism is the very foundation of the scientific method. The modern consensus about the risks of climate change, they say, is based on evidence that has piled up over the course of decades and has been subjected to critical scrutiny every step of the way.
  • In other words, the climate scientists see themselves as the true skeptics, having arrived at a durable consensus about emissions simply because the evidence of risk has become overwhelming. And in this view, people who reject the evidence are phony skeptics, arguing their case by cherry-picking studies, manipulating data, and refusing to weigh the evidence as a whole.The petition asking the media to drop the “climate skeptic” label began with Mark B. Boslough, a physicist in New Mexico who grew increasingly annoyed by the term over several years. The phrase is wrong, he said, because “these people do not embrace the scientific method.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Science and Its Skeptics : The New Yorker - 0 views

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    "At the same time, it is facile to dismiss science itself. The most careful scientists, and the best science journalists, realize that all science is provisional. There will always be things that we haven't figured out yet, and even some that we get wrong. But science is not just about conclusions, which are occasionally incorrect. It's about a methodology for investigation, which includes, at its core, a relentless drive towards questioning that which came before."
markfrankel18

Science Isn't Broken | FiveThirtyEight - 0 views

  • If we’re going to rely on science as a means for reaching the truth — and it’s still the best tool we have — it’s important that we understand and respect just how difficult it is to get a rigorous result
  • Scientists’ overreliance on p-values has led at least one journal to decide it has had enough of them. In February, Basic and Applied Social Psychology announced that it will no longer publish p-values.
  • P-hacking and similar types of manipulations often arise from human biases. “You can do it in unconscious ways — I’ve done it in unconscious ways,” Simonsohn said. “You really believe your hypothesis and you get the data and there’s ambiguity about how to analyze it.” When the first analysis you try doesn’t spit out the result you want, you keep trying until you find one that does.
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  • Science isn’t broken, nor is it untrustworthy. It’s just more difficult than most of us realize. We can apply more scrutiny to study designs and require more careful statistics and analytic methods, but that’s only a partial solution. To make science more reliable, we need to adjust our expectations of it.
  • From 2001 to 2009, the number of retractions issued in the scientific literature rose tenfold. It remains a matter of debate whether that’s because misconduct is increasing or is just easier to root out.
  • Science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, “science operates as a procedure of uncertainty reduction,” said Nosek, of the Center for Open Science. “The goal is to get less wrong over time.”
  • Some of these biases are helpful, at least to a point. Take, for instance, naive realism — the idea that whatever belief you hold, you believe it because it’s true. This mindset is almost essential for doing science, quantum mechanics researcher Seth Lloyd of MIT told me. “You have to believe that whatever you’re working on right now is the solution to give you the energy and passion you need to work.” But hypotheses are usually incorrect, and when results overturn a beloved idea, a researcher must learn from the experience and keep, as Lloyd described it, “the hopeful notion that, ‘OK, maybe that idea wasn’t right, but this next one will be.’”
Lawrence Hrubes

Can Brain Science Be Dangerous? - NYTimes.com - 2 views

  • The idea that poverty can change the brain has gotten significant attention recently, and not just from those lay readers (a minority, according to recent research) who spend a lot of time thinking about neuroscience. Policy makers and others have begun to apply neuroscientific principles to their thinking about poverty — and some say this could end up harming poor people rather than helping. At The Conversation, the sociologist Susan Sered takes issue with “news reports with headlines like this one: ‘Can Brain Science Help Lift People Out Of Poverty?’” She’s referring to a June story by Rachel Zimmerman at WBUR, about a nonprofit called Crittenton Women’s Union that aims to use neuroscience to help get people out of poverty. Elisabeth Babcock, Crittenton’s chief executive, tells Ms. Zimmerman: “What the new brain science says is that the stresses created by living in poverty often work against us, make it harder for our brains to find the best solutions to our problems. This is a part of the reason why poverty is so ‘sticky.’”
  • “The new neuroscience offers wonderful possibilities regarding Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, brain injuries and much more,” writes Dr. Sered. “But scientific knowledge always develops and is utilized within social contexts.” She and others fear that, used incorrectly, neuroscience might spread the view that poor people are lesser than others, that they are irrevocably debilitated by their experiences with poverty — or, conversely, that if they fail to respond to programs that science says will help them, it must be their own fault.
  • Ms. Williams writes that many of today’s child-development ideas are very similar to those of the psychiatrist John Bowlby’s work on attachment theory. But, she notes, he developed his ideas through psychological observation, not brain scans. And she quotes Sebastian Kraemer, a psychiatrist: “If John Bowlby were alive today, he would say, this [neuroscience] does not add anything. People are just more persuaded by it, by the facts and the pictures.” People do seem to find neuroscience extremely persuasive, even when it’s wrong. And this may be part of what critics fear — that images and facts about the brain are so powerful, they can make us believe things we really shouldn’t.
markfrankel18

Science Is Not Religion | Jeff Schweitzer - 3 views

  • Author Christine Ma-Kellams recently told HuffPost Science that, "In many ways, science seems like a 21st Century religion. It's a belief system that many wholeheartedly defend and evolve their lives around, sometimes as much as the devoutest of religious folk." Nothing could be further from the truth. Science is not a "belief system" but a process and methodology for seeking an objective reality. Of course because scientific exploration is a human endeavor it comes with all the flaws of humanity: ego, short-sightedness, corruption and greed. But unlike a "belief system" such as religion untethered to an objective truth, science is over time self-policing; competing scientists have a strong incentive to corroborate and build on the findings of others; but equally, to prove other scientists wrong by means that can be duplicated by others.
Lawrence Hrubes

A Dig Through Old Files Reminds Me Why I'm So Critical of Science | Cross-Check, Scient... - 1 views

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    "Arguably the biggest meta-story in science over the last few years-and one that caught me by surprise-is that much of the peer-reviewed scientific literature is rotten. A pioneer in exposing this vast problem is the Stanford statistician John Ioannidis, whose blockbuster 2005 paper in PLOS Medicine presented evidence that "most current published research findings are false." Discussing his findings in Scientific American two years ago, Ioannidis writes: "False positives and exaggerated results in peer-reviewed scientific studies have reached epidemic proportions in recent years. The problem is rampant in economics, the social sciences and even the natural sciences, but it is particularly egregious in biomedicine.""
markfrankel18

Let's Abolish Social Science | The Smart Set - 2 views

  • Social science was — it is best to speak in the past tense — a mistake. The dream of a comprehensive science of society, which would elucidate “laws of history” or “social laws” comparable to the physical determinants or “laws” of nature, was one of the great delusions of the 19th century.
  • Economics, for example, grew ever more pseudoscientific in the course of the 20th century.
  • The very term “political science” betrays an ambition to create a study of politics and government and world politics that will be a genuine science like physics, chemistry or biology.
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  • The difference between the natural sciences and the humanities is the difference between motion and motive. Laws of motion can explain the trajectories of asteroids and atoms. The trajectories of human beings, like those of any animals with some degree of sentience, are explained by motives. Asteroids and atoms go where they have to go. Human beings go where they want to go.
  • All human studies are fundamentally branches of psychology.
Lawrence Hrubes

How a Gay-Marriage Study Went Wrong - The New Yorker - 1 views

  • ast December, Science published a provocative paper about political persuasion. Persuasion is famously difficult: study after study—not to mention much of world history—has shown that, when it comes to controversial subjects, people rarely change their minds, especially if those subjects are important to them. You may think that you’ve made a convincing argument about gun control, but your crabby uncle isn’t likely to switch sides in the debate. Beliefs are sticky, and hardly any approach, no matter how logical it may be, can change that. The Science study, “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality,” seemed to offer a method that could work.
  • In the document, “Irregularities in LaCour (2014),” Broockman, along with a fellow graduate student, Joshua Kalla, and a professor at Yale, Peter Aronow, argued that the survey data in the study showed multiple statistical irregularities and was likely “not collected as described.”
  • If, in the end, the data do turn out to be fraudulent, does that say anything about social science as a whole? On some level, the case would be a statistical fluke. Despite what news headlines would have you believe, outright fraud is incredibly rare; almost no one commits it, and almost no one experiences it firsthand. As a result, innocence is presumed, and the mindset is one of trust.
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  • There’s another issue at play: the nature of belief. As I’ve written before, we are far quicker to believe things that mesh with our view of how life should be. Green is a firm supporter of gay marriage, and that may have made him especially pleased about the study. (Did it have a similar effect on liberally minded reviewers at Science? We know that studies confirming liberal thinking sometimes get a pass where ones challenging those ideas might get killed in review; the same effect may have made journalists more excited about covering the results.)
  • In short, confirmation bias—which is especially powerful when we think about social issues—may have made the study’s shakiness easier to overlook.
markfrankel18

Many scientific "truths" are, in fact, false - Quartz - 0 views

  • Each scientific field must adopt its own methods of ensuring accuracy. But ultimately, this self-reflection is a key part of the scientific process. As Bishop notes, “Science has proved itself to be an incredibly powerful method.” And yet there’s always room for further advancement. “There’s never an end point,” says Bishop. “We’re always groping towards the next thing. Sometimes science does disappear down the wrong path for a bit before it corrects itself.” For Nosek, who led the re-testing of 100 psychology papers, the current focus on reproducibility is simply part of the scientific process. “Science isn’t about truth and falsity, it’s about reducing uncertainty,” he says. “Really this whole project is science on science: Researchers doing what science is supposed to do, which is be skeptical of our own process, procedure, methods, and look for ways to improve.”
Andrea Barlien

The Two Faces of Science - 0 views

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    "Science is unabashedly radical, willing to toss aside established wisdom and ideas to embrace mind-warping new concepts (if the data backs them up). Science is relentlessly conservative, deeply suspicious of new claims and determined to hold firm to cherished truths that have stood the test of time. As strange as it may seem, both these contradictory statements have held true throughout the 450-year history of "modern" science. In fact, they are what have given science the stability and creativity that root its cultural power."
Lawrence Hrubes

Teaching Doubt - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • “Non-overlapping magisteria” has a nice ring to it. The problem is that there are many religious claims that not only “overlap” with empirical data but are incompatible with it. As a scientist who also spends a fair amount of time in the public arena, if I am asked if our understanding of the Big Bang conflicts with the idea of a six-thousand-year-old universe, I face a choice: I can betray my scientific values, or encourage that person to doubt his or her own beliefs. More often than you might think, teaching science is inseparable from teaching doubt.
  • Doubt about one’s most cherished beliefs is, of course, central to science: the physicist Richard Feynman stressed that the easiest person to fool is oneself. But doubt is also important to non-scientists. It’s good to be skeptical, especially about ideas you learn from perceived authority figures. Recent studies even suggest that being taught to doubt at a young age could make people better lifelong learners. That, in turn, means that doubters—people who base their views on evidence, rather than faith—are likely to be better citizens.
  • Science class isn’t the only place where students can learn to be skeptical. A provocative novel that presents a completely foreign world view, or a history lesson exploring the vastly different mores of the past, can push you to skeptically reassess your inherited view of the universe. But science is a place where such confrontation is explicit and accessible. It didn’t take more than a simple experiment for Galileo to overturn the wisdom of Aristotle. Informed doubt is the very essence of science.
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  • Some teachers shy away from confronting religious beliefs because they worry that planting the seeds of doubt will cause some students to question or abandon their own faith or the faith of their parents. But is that really such a bad thing? It offers some young people the chance to escape the guilt imposed upon them simply for questioning what they’re told. Last year, I received an e-mail from a twenty-seven-year-old man who is now studying in the United States after growing up in Saudi Arabia. His father was executed by family members after converting to Christianity. He says that it’s learning about science that has finally liberated him from the spectre of religious fundamentalism.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Six Most Interesting Psychology Papers of 2015 - The New Yorker - 1 views

  • “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science,” from Science This paper isn’t really a study; it’s the outcome of an important movement in the field of psychology. In an effort called the Reproducibility Project, researchers at dozens of universities collaborated to replicate a hundred psychology studies that were initially conducted in 2008. They ended up replicating between a third and half of the studies. Is that result bad or good? It’s inevitable that studies won’t always be replicable—if every study could be replicated, then every researcher would be right the first time; even legitimate findings can prove fragile when you try to repeat them. All the same, the paper concludes that there is “room for improvement” in psychology, especially when it comes to “cultural practices in scientific communication.” Specifically, the authors propose that “low-power research designs combined with publication bias favoring positive results together produce a literature with upwardly biased effect sizes.” In other words, the desire for novelty drives researchers to overestimate the conclusiveness of their own work. It’s a fascinating and valuable effort to make sure that psychology moves forward in the best way possible.
Lawrence Hrubes

There's a good reason Americans are horrible at science - Quartz - 0 views

  • There are a number of problems with teaching science as a collection of facts. First, facts change. Before oxygen was discovered, the theoretical existence of phlogiston made sense. For a brief, heady moment in 1989, it looked like cold fusion (paywall) was going to change the world. In the field of medical science, “facts” are even more wobbly. For example, it has been estimated that fewer than 10% of published high profile cancer studies are reproducible (the word “reproducible” here is a euphemism for “not total poppycock”).
  • It’s not possible for everyone—or anyone—to be sufficiently well trained in science to analyze data from multiple fields and come up with sound, independent interpretations. I spent decades in medical research, but I will never understand particle physics, and I’ve forgotten almost everything I ever learned about inorganic chemistry. It is possible, however, to learn enough about the powers and limitations of the scientific method to intelligently determine which claims made by scientists are likely to be true and which deserve skepticism. As a starting point, we could teach our children that the theories and technologies that have been tested the most times, by the largest number of independent observers, over the greatest number of years, are the most likely to be reliable.
markfrankel18

In Science, It's Never 'Just a Theory' - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Peter Godfrey-Smith, the author of “Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science,” has been thinking about how people can avoid the misunderstanding embedded in the phrase, “It’s only a theory.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story It’s helpful, he argues, to think about theories as being like maps.“To say something is a map is not to say it’s a hunch,” said Dr. Godfrey-Smith, a professor at the City University of New York and the University of Sydney. “It’s an attempt to represent some territory.”A theory, likewise, represents a territory of science. Instead of rivers, hills, and towns, the pieces of the territory are facts.“To call something a map is not to say anything about how good it is,” Dr. Godfrey-Smith added. “There are fantastically good maps where there’s not a shred of doubt about their accuracy. And there are maps that are speculative.”To judge a map’s quality, we can see how well it guides us through its territory. In a similar way, scientists test out new theories against evidence. Just as many maps have proven to be unreliable, many theories have been cast aside.But other theories have become the foundation of modern science, such as the theory of evolution, the general theory of relativity, the theory of plate tectonics, the theory that the sun is at the center of the solar system, and the germ theory of disease.“To the best of our ability, we’ve tested them, and they’ve held up,” said Dr. Miller. “And that’s why we’ve held on to these things.”
markfrankel18

Big Ideas in Social Science: An Interview With Steven Pinker on Violence and Human Nature - 1 views

  • I think most philosophers of science would say that all scientific generalizations are probabilistic rather than logically certain, more so for the social sciences because the systems you are studying are more complex than, say, molecules, and because there are fewer opportunities to intervene experimentally and to control every variable. But the exis­tence of the social sciences, including psychology, to the extent that they have discovered anything, shows that, despite the uncontrollability of human behavior, you can make some progress: you can do your best to control the nuisance variables that are not literally in your control; you can have analogues in a laboratory that simulate what you’re interested in and impose an experimental manipulation. You can be clever about squeezing the last drop of causal information out of a correlational data set, and you can use converging evi­dence, the qualitative narratives of traditional history in combination with quantitative data sets and regression analyses that try to find patterns in them. But I also go to traditional historical narratives, partly as a sanity check. If you’re just manipulating numbers, you never know whether you’ve wan­dered into some preposterous conclusion by taking numbers too seriously that couldn’t possibly reflect reality. Also, it’s the narrative history that provides hypotheses that can then be tested. Very often a historian comes up with some plausible causal story, and that gives the social scientists something to do in squeezing a story out of the numbers.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - The Forum, A Leap of Faith: Finding common ground between Science a... - 1 views

  • The Forum @ CERN: A Leap of Faith: Finding Common Ground Between Science and Theology. Promoting a dialogue between science and religion has long been a challenging task- the two communities of thought often seem far apart. The Forum explores the challenge in a discussion recorded at CERN in Switzerland and asks not only why this dialogue is important but how it is working and where it might lead. CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research where physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universeWith Bridget Kendall to discuss common ground between science and religion are:Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer, a German particle physicist and the Director General of the European Organization of Nuclear Research, or CERN, since 2009.Marcelo Gleiser, Professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College who specialises in cosmology, nonlinear physics and astrobiology. Dr. Kusum Jain, a renowned Indian scholar of Jain Philosophy and Director of the Centre of Advanced Study in Philosophy at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur. She has published extensively on such topics as human rights, the roots of terrorism, and bio-ethics.Monsignor Tomasz Trafny, Head of Science and Faith, Vatican City State.And there is poetry, especially written for the programme, by British poet Murray Lachlan Young.
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    This is a 41-minute broadcast from 8 Dec 2015.
markfrankel18

Biology's Holy Grail: The Species And Its Controversial Recent History | IFLScience - 1 views

  • And, the basic unit of taxonomy – ‘the species’ – remains an elusive and controversial concept despite its fundamental importance to science. Yet, few people outside of biology and philosophy realise that ‘the species’ has been at the centre of a major controversy in science for much of the last 50 years.
  • Taxonomy is a fundamental or ‘enabling’ science that underpins all of biology and its many related fields including medical research.
  • • How does the species category compare with other scientific groups or types of things like say the chemical elements? • Does it play the same kind of role in science – conveying the same sorts of information and allowing us to make predictions about nature? • What’s the best, most objective, way to recognise a species?
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  • So, it turns out we’ve all been cheated by the textbooks we read in high school or university. Short-changed by our science teachers and biology lecturers.
Lawrence Hrubes

Daniel Dennett's Science of the Soul - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • In “Consciousness Explained,” a 1991 best-seller, he described consciousness as something like the product of multiple, layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain. Many readers felt that he had shown how the brain creates the soul. Others thought that he’d missed the point entirely. To them, the book was like a treatise on music that focussed exclusively on the physics of musical instruments. It left untouched the question of how a three-pound lump of neurons could come to possess a point of view, interiority, selfhood, consciousness—qualities that the rest of the material world lacks. These skeptics derided the book as “Consciousness Explained Away.”
  • The physicalists believe, with Dennett, that science can explain consciousness in purely material terms. The dualists believe that science can uncover only half of the picture: it can’t explain what Nabokov called “the marvel of consciousness
Lawrence Hrubes

The New Science of Mind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    This new science of mind is based on the principle that our mind and our brain are inseparable. The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions. It is responsible not only for relatively simple motor behaviors like running and eating, but also for complex acts that we consider quintessentially human, like thinking, speaking and creating works of art. Looked at from this perspective, our mind is a set of operations carried out by our brain. The same principle of unity applies to mental disorders.
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