The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science
Excerpt: The study you have before you is an examination of the use and abuse of statistics in the sciences. Its natural audience is members of the scientific community who use statistics in their professional research. We hope, however, to reach a broader audience of intelligent readers who recognize the importance to our society of maintaining integrity in the sciences. (...) An older ideal of disinterested pursuit of truth was giving way to views that there was no such thing. All academic inquiry, according to this new view, served someone’s political interests, and “truth”
itself had to be counted as a questionable concept.The new, alternative view, was that college and universities should be places where fresh ideas untrammeled by hidden connections to the established structures of power in American society should have the chance to develop themselves. In practice this meant a hearty welcome to neoMarxism, radical feminism, historicism, post-colonialism, deconstructionism, post-modernism, liberation theology, and a host of other ideologies. The common feature of these ideologies was their comprehensive hostility to the core traditions of the academy. Some of these doctrines have now faded from the scene, but the basic message—out with disinterested inquiry, in with leftist political nostrums—took hold and has become higher education’s new orthodoxy. To some extent the natural sciences held themselves exempt from the epistemological and social revolution that was tearing the humanities (and the social sciences) apart. Most academic scientists believed that their disciplines were immune from the idea that facts are “socially constructed.” Physicists were disinclined to credit the claim that there could be a feminist, black, or gay physics. Astronomers were not enthusiastic about the concept that observation is inevitably a reflex of the power of the socially privileged. (...) This report deals with an epistemic problem, which is most visible in the large numbers of articles in reputable peer-reviewed journals in the sciences that have turned out to be invalid or highly questionable. Findings from experimental work or observational studies turn out, time and again, to be irreproducible. The high rates of irreproducibility are an ongoing scandal that rightly has upset a large portion of the scientific community. Estimates of what percentage of published articles present irreproducible results vary by discipline. Randall and Welser cite various studies, some of them truly alarming. A 2012 study, for example, aimed at reproducing the results of 53 landmark studies in hematology and oncology, but succeeded in replicating only six (11 percent) of those studies. Irreproducibility can stem from several causes, chief among them fraud and incompetence. (...) Perhaps that is what happened in the recent notorious case of postdoc Oona Lönnstedt at Uppsala University. She and her supervisor, Peter Eklöv, published a paper in Science in June 2016, warning of the dangers of microplastic particles in the ocean. The microplastics, they reported, endangered fish. It turns out that Lönnstedt never performed the research that she and Eklöv reported. (...) In December 2017 the Board announced its findings: Lönnstedt had intentionally fabricated her data and Eklöv had failed to check that she had actually carried out her research as described. (OMG! NPR ran a segment I heard last Friday, 23 Jun 2018, on “Science Friday with Ira Flatto” that mentioned this study, clearly treating it as a proven fact in their broadcast. If scientific objectivity and truth are of any importance to you at all, I strongly urge you to read at least the preface beginning on page 5 and the executive summary that ends on page 17. The whole thing runs 72 pages, if you’re that interested. Ron P.)
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