shirgall Posted October 14, 2015 Posted October 14, 2015 http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-10-12/economic-research-too-good-to-be-replicated But what happens when science isn’t politicized? Part of the answer may be: the epidemic of replication failures we now seem to be seeing. A recent paper from the Fed argues that economics has problems similar to those recently found in psychology: A lot of research results are getting published, and a lot of the interesting findings can’t be replicated, often because key data or instructions aren’t available.
Will Torbald Posted October 14, 2015 Posted October 14, 2015 http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-10-12/economic-research-too-good-to-be-replicated Swap science for math, and the article sounds ridiculous. Trying to blame bad calculations on math itself instead of the slob who didn't add properly. It could all just be a bunch of propaganda for all this article's worth, but poorly made science is not a jab at science itself.
Darknecrosforte Posted October 14, 2015 Posted October 14, 2015 A professor in an intro behavioral neuroscience course I took told us about the decades of publishing self-censorship in biological science. It was completely normal to scrap all evidence of your experiment if your results were not what you wanted. Ever since the moderate increase in "research ethics" awareness, we have wasted a significant amount of resources on mistakes made that would likely have been avoided with the deleted data. Corporate research seems to be better until it works with government to establish monopolies on their industries in the name of "safety". It's hard for me to take many of my colleagues seriously when they habitually rely on the findings of papers with unrepeatable results. I can only imagine the effect on the non-science population.
Mister Mister Posted October 14, 2015 Posted October 14, 2015 The biggest problem with economics is constant interference from government, and a lack of core principles. Most economics has to do with trying to calculate how best to manage people, which would be like if psychology were concerned with how to make good slaves.
things make sense Posted October 15, 2015 Posted October 15, 2015 If "the authors did not provide enough data to replicate their work", then by definition, that is not good science. So the title of the article "Research that's just too good to be tested" doesn't really make sense. “Aren’t scientists supposed to be competitive? Why aren’t these guys trying to destroy each other?" I'd say no because science is mostly collaborative a process and are driven not by profit but rather, the excitement of uncovering new knowledge. It's a win-win situation if both parties come out with a better understanding of a certain phenomena.
shirgall Posted October 15, 2015 Author Posted October 15, 2015 There is of course the potential for self-correction without government, but some people like watchdogs... http://www.nature.com/news/how-scientists-fool-themselves-and-how-they-can-stop-1.18517 This is the big problem in science that no one is talking about: even an honest person is a master of self-deception. Our brains evolved long ago on the African savannah, where jumping to plausible conclusions about the location of ripe fruit or the presence of a predator was a matter of survival. But a smart strategy for evading lions does not necessarily translate well to a modern laboratory, where tenure may be riding on the analysis of terabytes of multidimensional data. In today's environment, our talent for jumping to conclusions makes it all too easy to find false patterns in randomness, to ignore alternative explanations for a result or to accept 'reasonable' outcomes without question — that is, to ceaselessly lead ourselves astray without realizing it. Failure to understand our own biases has helped to create a crisis of confidence about the reproducibility of published results, says statistician John Ioannidis, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The issue goes well beyond cases of fraud. Earlier this year, a large project that attempted to replicate 100 psychology studies managed to reproduce only slightly more than one-third2. In 2012, researchers at biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, reported that they could replicate only 6 out of 53 landmark studies in oncology and haematology3. And in 2009, Ioannidis and his colleagues described how they had been able to fully reproduce only 2 out of 18 microarray-based gene-expression studies4. 1
things make sense Posted October 17, 2015 Posted October 17, 2015 There is of course the potential for self-correction without government, but some people like watchdogs... http://www.nature.com/news/how-scientists-fool-themselves-and-how-they-can-stop-1.18517 Wait a minute.... How do we know that the people who attempted to replicate these studies are not biased themselves? This is one of those self-detonating arguments.
shirgall Posted October 17, 2015 Author Posted October 17, 2015 Wait a minute.... How do we know that the people who attempted to replicate these studies are not biased themselves? This is one of those self-detonating arguments. They could be, but the benefit is that anyone could choose to replicate anything they want, so long as they have adequate access to methodology and results. This openness is required for the system to work.
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