Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Much Sorry with Delays
Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
Peach update, with pie
NYC update
Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
Water Shoes
Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
Good news about The Great Courses
Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

Categories


All categories

Quicksearch

Links

Blog Administration

Open login screen

RSS Readers

Add to Google

Subscribe with Bloglines

Sunday, May 17. 2015

Science is often flawed.


Science is often flawed. It's time we embraced that.



 ... it's not unusual to hear statements like those from The Lancet editor Richard Horton that "Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue." He continued: "Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness."


Posted by The Barrister in Fallacies and Logic at 13:43 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments
Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Why we can't publish stuff like this. People might begin to conclude that the science isn't "settled" in a great many areas no matter what Al Gore and others may say.
#1 JorgXMcKie on 2015-05-17 14:08 (Reply)
Nine out of ten international experts agree with this assessment.
Thee tenth one disagreed mainly because he hadn't thought of it first.
#2 Letsgo Lozko (Link) on 2015-05-17 14:31 (Reply)
Oh dear--now you have to go to those "research departments" that came up with homosexuality being a bio based drive rather than a socio/cultural distinction. Couple of those "institutes" REALLY R E A L L Y benefitted financially for those "scientific discoveries"!

OMG! I just thought of something--do you suppose that Dr. Watson was right about the differences in race particularly his "scientific" work about African genetics? Too, too bad those damn liberals never set a standard for moral/ethical guidelines and stick with it!
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30406322
#3 faculty wife on 2015-05-17 18:00 (Reply)
The worst part is that those who publish the statistically faulty studies know they are meaningless and misleading. Sometimes the fault is pure bias where they are trying to prove their own biases to be true. Sometimes it is all about the publish or perish requirements. But when it happens it is never science.
#4 GoneWithTheWind on 2015-05-17 19:30 (Reply)
Many of the subjects you are thinking of are pseudo science. They never had any validity in teh first place.
#5 avraham on 2015-05-18 03:39 (Reply)
I don’t know who said it first, but science is a tool more than a body of knowledge, and that body of knowledge is in constant flux. There were several articles a while back reporting on how many peer reviewed articles have been recanted and/or withdrawn. Between conflicts of interest, grants (regardless of source: public/private), coopted peer review, fiddling with the data(especially anything exculpatory), the CULT of algorithms, I am very skeptical of academia, and not just the soft sciences. Don’t forget that academia is all about getting published. Since all the low hanging fruit, that speaks to any kind of recognizable reality, is long gone, the pressure is on to be more arcane, even bizarre and perverse, aka sexy and faux "avant garde" or hide behind metadata.
Media shares the blame. Have you ever read a scientific paper that didn’t limit its conclusion to a very specific set of parameters? The media doesn’t communicate these qualifying conditions but instead extrapolates wildly to broad generalizations.
#6 Exasperated on 2015-05-18 06:42 (Reply)

Add Comment
(Your e-mail will not show in your comment)

By commenting on this site you agree to the site rules listed here. Email
addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for email notifications.

Quick reference guide: [i] italics [/i], [b] bold [/b], [u] underline [/u],
[url] (web address) [/url]. More tips here.

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

BBCode format allowed
 
 
A Chris Southern Consulting website.