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Truth My Teacher Told Me
By Avery | September 17, 2007
One of the things I remember most clearly about my freshman year in high school was that my biology teacher, Mr. Richardson, warned us about the dangers of popular science. Not Popular Science the magazine, but popular science, as in scientific findings that are reported to news organizations for dissemination to the general public. He told us that the more popular the topic, the more likely it was that the researchers would be in more of a hurry to get the results out, and therefore more likely to turn up some specious results. Well, almost 20 years later, an article in the Wall Street Journal (jacked from Evangelical Outpost) is backing him up.
Here’s the money quote:
These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. “There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims,” Dr. Ioannidis said. “A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true.”The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined.
Take the discovery that the risk of disease may vary between men and women, depending on their genes. Studies have prominently reported such sex differences for hypertension, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis, as well as lung cancer and heart attacks. In research published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Ioannidis and his colleagues analyzed 432 published research claims concerning gender and genes.
Upon closer scrutiny, almost none of them held up. Only one was replicated.
The article is careful to point out that this trend is not necessarily indicative of any malevolence; sometimes it’s just messing with the variables to make the work say something significant or different. Even when the error on the scientist’s part is not necessarily malicious, this jack rabbit reporting gets into the hands of people who will use it with a definite agenda, despite the fact that the data doesn’t really what they say it does.
Think about this next time somebody comes at you about anthropomorphic global warming with religious fervency.
Topics: Everwhatever |
September 17th, 2007 at 6:59 am
Sounds like all one has to do is wait a while to see if any significant backlash science come out?
September 17th, 2007 at 9:44 am
There’s another issue that plays into this as well.
In the scientific community, journals don’t want to publish “negative results” so if your experimental results disprove your hypothesis, those results ended up mouldering away on someone’s computer rather than getting published, even if those results may end up being important.
September 17th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
I guess it’s the peer-reviewed stuff, stuff that’s been corroborated/duplicated by others that should inspire the most confidence. But then does pop news tend to distinguish between peer reviewed and “independently” published reports?
September 17th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
My daughter came to me about global warming and after the spiel, I asked her how the baseline range of “normal temperatures” were determined. Of course she didn’t know. I then told her to ask the teacher(s) saying things about global warming. I then said if they give you an answer, ask them since the ice ages happened, how do they know what’s happening is outside of the norm.
The next time I talked to her about it, I didn’t get a straight answer, but I knew that the teacher(s) tried to snow her with the answer and she realized they didn’t know a damn thing.
September 17th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
my ’stumping’ question is this: if the global temperature on mars has been increasing at the same time that earth’s temperature has been increasing, whose fault is it then? the martians?
September 17th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Have either of you guys seen
fatso’sGore’s movie? If so, what did you think?September 17th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
p.s. it kinda sounds like you guys are emphasizing the fault aspect of things. whether or not it’s man’s fault is kinda political, no? the main issue is if GW is occuring or not (and i don’t think there’s much debate about that anymore) and if so what should be done about it. we know the consequences down the road if it continues unabated.
i mean if a giant life-snuffing meteor is headed directly at earth, we shouldn’t waste time arguing whether it’s part of a “natural” cycle or if it’s man-induced, should we?
September 18th, 2007 at 4:35 am
if it’s part of a natural cycle, who says we can stop it? like i said to a friend of mine, man can destroy each other, but we can’t destroy the earth. even with thermonuclear warfare, all we’re really doing is making the earth uninhabitable for us. the earth (and roaches) will still be here.
which is not to say that i think recycling is a waste of time or whatever. i think we should take care of the earth, but to fudge scientific findings in order to paint a worst-case scenario, which is what’s being done, is plain-ole irresponsible. kinda like the scientists who are predicting more intense hurricanes b/c of AGW. and i like to point out the difference because if we look at it as a natural phenomenon, then it can’t be a political issue. which is where the limitations of the science come in. if we know that GW has many more variables than AGW, then it is scientifically irresponsible to act as if GW and AGW are one and the same. yet, as far as most people in the public think or know, there is no distinction between the two.
and yeah, i saw ‘an inconvenient truth.’ it was a convenient nap. member in the boondocks when they said young’n had the personality of a stalagtite? they weren’t lyin.
September 18th, 2007 at 7:43 am
well, who proved that we can’t do anything about it? i mean, it sure as heck ain’t natcherl for man to fly but we doin it anyway. to immediately flop out and say we’s sposedta die off one day anyway is one kind of response to the (surely, by now) undeniable threat. i suspeck at this point there’s still other approaches we might wanna try.
even if there are more factors to consider if we include the non-anthropomorphic (and, btw, there’s no question that man contributes, even if you want to argue to what degree), so what? not all them factors be equal, nahmeen. i’m bettin the ole 80-20 thing would apply here as well; figure out the worst offenders and go from there.
if it turns out we should kill 30% of the earth’s flatulence producing cows and sheep, then so be it. the rest is just political.
seems the thrust of conservative argumentation is shifting from “studies show” GW isn’t happening to “studies show” it’s not us (man). it’d be funny if it weren’t so…so…well, i can’t find the right word.
i’m beginning to think that at heart this is all about the conservative’s knee-jerk instinct to reject out of hand anything dropping out of a bleeding heart’s mouth. sure, sometimes them bleedin hearts is about some teenhood emotional scarring or t’other clothed in vengeful hyper concern for “humanity” and/or the environment, but a lotta the time i think there’s a big fat honking seed of truth in all the blather. it’s on you to separate hard truth from its dressings, weaves and extensions.