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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.""
Lawrence Hrubes

Unreliable research: Trouble at the lab | The Economist - 0 views

  • Academic scientists readily acknowledge that they often get things wrong. But they also hold fast to the idea that these errors get corrected over time as other scientists try to take the work further.
  • Evidence that many more dodgy results are published than are subsequently corrected or withdrawn calls that much-vaunted capacity for self-correction into question. There are errors in a lot more of the scientific papers being published, written about and acted on than anyone would normally suppose, or like to think.
  • Various factors contribute to the problem. Statistical mistakes are widespread. The peer reviewers who evaluate papers before journals commit to publishing them are much worse at spotting mistakes than they or others appreciate. Professional pressure, competition and ambition push scientists to publish more quickly than would be wise. A career structure which lays great stress on publishing copious papers exacerbates all these problems.
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  • The idea that the same experiments always get the same results, no matter who performs them, is one of the cornerstones of science’s claim to objective truth. If a systematic campaign of replication does not lead to the same results, then either the original research is flawed (as the replicators claim) or the replications are (as many of the original researchers on priming contend). Either way, something is awry.
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    "Academic scientists readily acknowledge that they often get things wrong. But they also hold fast to the idea that these errors get corrected over time as other scientists try to take the work further. Evidence that many more dodgy results are published than are subsequently corrected or withdrawn calls that much-vaunted capacity for self-correction into question. There are errors in a lot more of the scientific papers being published, written about and acted on than anyone would normally suppose, or like to think."
Lawrence Hrubes

The Brain That Couldn't Remember - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In that pantheon of illuminatingly broken men and women, Henry stands apart. It is difficult to exaggerate the impact he has had on our understanding of ourselves. Before Brenda Milner collaborated on that first paper about Henry, the prevailing theory of memory held that its functions could not be localized to a single cortical area, that learning was distributed across the brain as a whole. By that theory — built upon the experimental lesioning of the brains of rats — a person’s memory would be affected only in proportion to the amount of brain tissue removed, regardless of which brain structures the tissue was removed from. Milner’s first paper about Henry, along with her previous work, upended this view.
  • Five years after Milner’s first paper about Henry, she published a second that was almost as revelatory. That paper documented Henry’s gradual improvement over a three-day period on a difficult hand-eye coordination task. His improvement came despite his inability to ever remember his previous attempts at the task, indicating that there are at least two different memory systems in the brain — one responsible for our conscious, episodic memories, the second responsible for task-or-skill related “procedural” memories — and that these two systems seem to rely on entirely distinct parts of the brain. This was another fundamental step forward in our understanding of how memory works. Together, Milner’s two Henry-­related revelations can be viewed as the cornerstones of modern memory science.
  • Corkin: Yeah, but it’s not peer-­reviewed, for one thing. That’s important. The stuff that’s published is good stuff. Peer-­reviewed. You can believe it. Things that, you know, experiments that might not have been good experiments, there might have been inadequate control groups. ... There are all sorts of things that can go wrong with experiments. Not every experiment is publishable.
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  • Me: But they can still be interpreted by other people. ... Maybe as we continue to understand how the brain works, and how memory works, some of this existing data of H.M.’s could be reilluminated by new theories, by new ideas, by new — it just seems a shame to destroy it. And it also seems — and this would be the darker interpretation of it — it locks in stone your own telling of H.M.’s story.
markfrankel18

Is Economics More Like History Than Physics? | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Net... - 3 views

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    "Is economics like physics, or more like history? Steven Pinker says, "No sane thinker would try to explain World War I in the language of physics." Yet some economists aim close to such craziness. Pinker says the "mindset of science" eliminates errors by "open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods," and especially, experimentation. But experiments require repetition and control over all relevant variables. We can experiment on individual behavior, but not with history or macroeconomics."
Lawrence Hrubes

When Philosophy Lost Its Way - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Having adopted the same structural form as the sciences, it’s no wonder philosophy fell prey to physics envy and feelings of inadequacy. Philosophy adopted the scientific modus operandi of knowledge production, but failed to match the sciences in terms of making progress in describing the world. Much has been made of this inability of philosophy to match the cognitive success of the sciences. But what has passed unnoticed is philosophy’s all-too-successful aping of the institutional form of the sciences. We, too, produce research articles. We, too, are judged by the same coin of the realm: peer-reviewed products. We, too, develop sub-specializations far from the comprehension of the person on the street. In all of these ways we are so very “scientific.”
Lawrence Hrubes

The Lifespan of a Lie - Trust Issues - Medium - 0 views

  • Zimbardo’s standard narrative of the Stanford prison experiment offers the prisoners’ emotional responses as proof of how powerfully affected they were by the guards’ mistreatment. The shock of real imprisonment provides a simpler and far less groundbreaking explanation. It may also have had legal implications, should prisoners have thought to pursue them. Korpi told me that the greatest regret of his life was failing to sue Zimbardo.
  • Much of the meeting was conducted by David Jaffe, the undergraduate student serving as “Warden,” whose foundational contribution to the experiment Zimbardo has long underplayed. Jaffe and a few fellow students had actually cooked up the idea of a simulated prison themselves three months earlier, in response to an open-ended assignment in an undergraduate class taught by Zimbardo.
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