Big Problems Facing Science
vox.com
vox.com
Not in the "hard" sciences: my background is physics, and there are lots of papers on "failed studies", which serve to constrain the domain of applicability of some theory or other. Or, better yet, indicate new science to be found.
The authors note the bias in the survey: "Our survey was not a scientific poll. For one, the respondents disproportionately hailed from the biomedical and social sciences and English-speaking communities."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science#Criticis...
Now the word "science" somehow means "legitimate and respectable research". What's worse, it's not the reality of these fields but a distortion of reality through verbal association, and the word "science" is slowly being dragged into mud due to non-reproducible or downright wrong published results thanks to many such fields of "science".
I should also add that mere "data fitting and data extrapolation" with no basic theory of fundamental understanding isn't science either.
If you're curious about the details, Feynman has defined the issue very well at some point
So no science as a field should remain well defined in scope and meaning, in the same way crafting shouldn't be blurred with engineering.
Oh, so when science is defined in the way Popper defines it, it is "arbitrary confines", but when it is defined in a way to legitimize cargo cult science, it is "well defined".
> Well-defined science is frankly an insult to science.
Spoken like a true pseudoscientist.
Yes, it should be an insult, right? How dare they can expect a scientist to use scientific method for all their results? I mean, it sounds totally crazy, insulting! And more importantly, how are we gonna publish papers or get grants then?
Just answer me this: Do you believe that the science is purely limited to the scientific method?
Just riddle me that and I'll be content. Just keep in mind that you'll be outing yourself as scientifically illiterate.
To call a discipline a science, it needs to use the scientific method, not just sometimes, but always. It needs testable hypotheses. Psychology sometimes has this, but often it does not. There is certainly reason for non-science fields to use scientific methods at times, but that doesn't necessarily mean those fields should be called sciences.
An illustrative example is the difference between "medicine" and "medical science". Your doctor has studied medicine. He or she, in addition to studying some medical science, has learned interview techniques, psychology, and various other aspects of a craft that are, in no way, scientific. If you talk to a doctor in a non-medical setting (many are specifically trained not to reveal ignorance to patients in order to maintain patient confidence), you'll find they're remarkably ignorant about the how's or why's of the human body, except when it comes to something they've been trained to spot and fix. A huge portion of their training centers on knowing when to do nothing at all, because medical intervention almost always carries it's own risks. In his or her daily job, your doctor does not employ the scientific method. At least, you should probably hope you are not being experimented on by your family physician! Some doctors do research in the field of "medical science", but this really is an entirely different job from being a family physician, surgeon, etc.. Medicine is a highly skilled craft that sometimes uses science, but it is not itself a science.
Also, your assertion that to call a discipline a science, it needs to use the scientific method, is well... demonstrably false, simply by virtue of the fact that we are having this debate.
The scientific method produces very reliable knowledge, but it is not the only way to produce knowledge that is reliable. There is also knowledge that we rely on that is not as rock solid as knowledge obtained from the scientific method, but which is still valuable and still falls under the realm of science, because it is still part of the systematic pursuit of progressively more reliable knowledge.
Yeah, as evidenced by
http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-f...
Indeed! Just look at the puny and half-wrong progress made in physics and compare it to the enormous progress made in astrology and psychology which transformed our lives and understanding of everything!
I mean, they've been at it for hundreds of years, and they still haven't realized that "it is not the only way to produce knowledge that is reliable" (never mind what "reliable" means, who cares about such details anyway). Wish they were also blessed with magic ball.
And hey! They've been sucking our tax money like vampires for so many years!
According to a 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists, 70% of them failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments (50% failed to reproduce their own experiment). These numbers differ among disciplines:
chemistry: 90% (60%), biology: 80% (60%), physics and engineering: 70% (50%), medicine: 70% (60%), Earth and environment science: 60% (40%).
But it's just the social sciences right? Thank god we have the scientific method! Otherwise we'd be lost! Heaven forbid
And I'm pretty sure those 1500 scientists represent the scientist all over the world from all countries and fields, and those studies must be from the shady physics journals such as Nature and Phys Rev series and not crap journals no real physicist even read. If only they could be like the major psychology journals http://www.nature.com/news/replication-studies-bad-copy-1.10...
You were funny when you tried to justify how scientific psychology was, by using+not using scientific method at will. You sound downright idiotic the moment you tried to imply that physics is a sham (which used to be the de facto science long before any of your "sciences" even appeared).
Anyway, go play with yourself. I've got better things to do. Like actual science. Rumble all you want. I'm done with you.
And no, it's not just that majority of psychology results are "not easily reproducible".
Furthermore, again, science isn't just data fitting and extrapolation. A real theory gives you a lot more than what you put into it, including novel phenomena. Social "sciences" have been playing science for a long time, and still they don't have any universal laws or any deep understanding of what they're studying. I'm not saying data collection, interpolation and extrapolation (or as Rutherford put it, "stamp collecting") isn't a bad or useless thing. It just isn't science.
The key point here is that science is not limited to the scientific method. The scientific method just produces more reliable knowledge, but is not the be all end all of science, it's just a limited subset, just like the "hard" sciences are a limited subset of science
This sound a lot like trolling, but I'll bite for this once.
You can't have less/more reliable knowledge. Science can't be half-wrong and half-right. You're either right or you're wrong. Your theory can't be vague and non-falsifiable. And you have to get a lot more than what you put into your theory. Regardless of how much you want to call it science, that is just pseudoscience.
I personally really don't want to be associated with such "scientists". Which is why I think twice using the word science/scientist and tend to use the word physics/physicists. All thanks to scientists who are able to think out-of-the-box, unlike the narrow-minded stupid physicists who don't know anything but scientific method!
I wasn't trolling, but I think you might be?
Of course science can be more/less reliable or half-wrong/half-right. The truth isn't binary, it's closer to fuzzy logic sets.
And as much as you would like to call the "soft" sciences pseudosceince, you are doing yourself a disservice. In reality, your attitude suggests that you are closer to a pseudoscientist than the "soft" scientists you are so eager to dismiss. Narrow-mindedness like you are epsousing is the reason why science is in the dumps.
To take a very simple example, let's take "intelligence." Almost immediately we can start arguing about what intelligence is, how to measure it, and so on. Notably, all the participants won't come to any meaningful conclusion because it's a poorly created human construct.
In contrast, the "hard" sciences like physics often deal with something much more clear cut: can you predict the future? If the starting conditions are X, what are the conditions at some time Y?
Can this be applied to the social sciences? We don't remotely know enough about things like the mind to be able to do this. Hell, even in biology the systems are so complex that we are still at the point of mostly guessing.
It's just not the same. Not by any fault of the people trying to study these extremely complex systems of course. Still, at the end of the day we should be honest with ourselves and recognize the differences.
Should a physicist be making approximations? Probably not, but a biomedical researcher probably should.
No, you're either confident enough the theory holds - at least in some circumstances, confident enough the theory doesn't hold, or you can be not confident enough to say, but you can't ever say your theory is "right". See for example Newton's universal gravitation; it is "mostly right" for most use cases, but it is wrong when general relativity kicks in. And even general relativity is "wrong" when you go into particle physics. It's not as simple as "right or wrong".
Just like Newton's laws eh? Newton's laws of motion are Right. They are also inaccurate compared to Einstein's theories of relativity, which must mean Newton's rules are Wrong and Einstein is Right. But wait! There's quantum mechanics which proves that Einstein's work can only be Wrong because there's no way his science could be Right while contradicting quantum mechanics, which is Right.
You have asserted that science (now inexplicably a noun) cannot be Half-Right or Less Reliable so are Newton's laws Right or Wrong? Is Relativility Right or Wrong?
Or perhaps Newton was merely "less precise" - maybe another way of putting it is "less reliable"? - then Einstein.
I think you may be firmly in the "wrong" camp, since you insist so in binary classifications.
But what do you mean "used"?
In politics, the term "science" is extremely potent. Claiming that science is on your side is commonly done to dramatic effect in order to sway opinions. This effect is very useful in those cases where science tells us something irrefutably important, such as the future of the temperature of Earth's atmosphere or the effectiveness of medical interventions. But it's also very abusable when the standard of proof is relaxed, since it becomes easy to use defeasible reasoning to produce "science" which supports someone's ideology with the borrowed charisma of the physics department.
And now, my favorite example:
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/06/are_certain_behaviors...
But it turns out that it's worth applying the scientific method to these fields, so what you're left with are tough choices. To deal with these problems the way we would in a physics experiment would be prohibitively expensive, in the literal sense of prohibitive. You have to come to terms with the fact that you can only afford to get enough data that there's a non-negligible possibility of being misled. It's worth doing science here, and we can, but it's just plain hard. I didn't appreciate that before I started having to deal with it. Don't blame the subject for some practitioners' failings.
It's like using vast amount of information to create a self driving car vs. actually letting the car run on real roads. The first can only tell if it approximates reasonable driving, the second can tell if it avoids getting into dangerous situations. You can collect a lot of information on the US economy, but in the real world the FED is actively trying to manage things and you can remove that factor from the data.
Physicists's for example can't change the age of the universe they are operating in. It's a rather large unknown, but not exactly an unknown unkown.
At the other end, people trust surveys of eating habits. I don't care if you send out a billion of those things it's still bad data in systematic and changing ways.
In between, most animal studies in mice are looking at disease analog X, in a population of fat, minimally stimulated, etc.
http://www.nature.com/news/computer-gleans-chemical-insight-...
The root problem is cost. We have to make science cheaper. We have to put it back in the hands of the curious and adventurous. Science should be possible by anyone - even teenagers. If science can't be done by the young, the poor, the autodidacts, what's the point?
Currently, everyone is on the 'teach everyone programming' kick. U.S. states are now starting to require that everyone learns programming. But, what about science? Let's create the 'github' of science - where anyone with a hypothesis can create a notebook, gather up like-minded people to collaborate, gather data, analyze it, 'fork' others' research into new areas. That's how we will make it cheaper and accessible.
There are still a handful of areas where amateurs could in theory do proper research without spending a few million dollars on lab equipment - ecology for example. But then we get to the problem of necessary knowledge: it take a few years of hard study until you even know the right questions to ask, which ones have already been asked, and how to interpret the results that you get.
In short: there is no short cut to modern science.
It gives me hope that we have started talking about these things - at least in academia (as numerous think-pieces in Nature et al. testify). We need to continue this discussion, make the public aware of it, and then start taking steps to solve it. No, science is not doomed, but boy do we still have a lot of work to do to get it to where it should be...
I guess solving the funding problem is an opportunity, but it seems to be beyond us.
And got one, just not the one I expected.
There are multiple crises in science these days, whether of communication or recruitment or replication or of fraud or of anti-intellectualism fueled in part by the most egregious examples of these problems.
Fixing these problems, addressing these seven, would do much to restore the lustre and respect and authority science well done and scientists working well deserve.
For one, the government is becoming increasingly weak while corporations are becoming increasingly powerful.
Unlike the government, corporations in general (and their investment strategies) are focused on short term results - That's how executive pay/bonuses are structured - CEOs don't want to invest in something that will only bear fruit in 10 years so that some future CEO will get all the credit for it. Humans are terrible at allocating credit/praise because we like to pretend that the universe is simple and that all actions have simple, predictable effects without unexpected side-effects.
Science research cannot exist in a corporate environment. Science can only rely on government or philanthropy.
And speaking of open science, making research public as it's happening (not even results, just what you're studying) can help prevent redundant concurrent studies in multiple labs and facilitate collaboration, also making the most of the limited funding scientists have.
Pachyderm (disclaimer: my company) is building infrastructure tools to help data scientists reproduce results by offering "Git for Data."
What about legislation requiring that any unclassified government funded science be available outside a paywall? Last I saw a figure for it, the combined budgets of all of the US military bands was ~$270 million a year. I bet a lot of science publication could be "nationalized" for that amount.
2. Poor design. Competence issue.
3. Replication. Incentive issue.
4. Peer review. Bad old analog system.
5. Paywalls. Capitalism.
6. Poor communication. Competence issue.
7. Stress. Personal issue.
Nothing gets in the way of science except ourselves.
Psychology and Climate change are in different categories. The crisis of reproducibility in soft sciences has nothing to do with the overwhelming scientific consensus on the reality of global warming.
Many mentioned issues are real in hard science too but it just an example that you can lie with the truth. Perverse incentives, publication bias, imperfection of peer review, etc can't invalidate established results e.g., Newtonian physics continues to work in the domain it is applicable for.
It is infuriating that the planet (planetary habitability) is destroyed for the benefit of the very few.
I think you really missed the point of the article. Of course the problems the author talks about don't invalidate already established results, the big deal is that they potentially prevent new results from being soundly established (or discarded if necessary)!
"Climate change" is "fossil fuel"-friendly alternative to avoid saying "Global warming" for what is happening. It is disingenuous to suggests that "Global warming" is unrelated to the article.
The article equates the certainty with which we know results in Psychology and Climate change (the terms are separated by commas as you've noticed). Psychology has a very flimsy foundation: even major results can be debunked (e.g., ego depletion). On the other hand there is no doubt that the climate change (global warming) is happening.
The article can be used as a tool by climate change deniers. They could say: "science have many major issues and therefore climate change is a figment of these communist eggheads imagination."
I did not say anything to that effect in my previous comment. In fact, your question is so mindbogglingly groundless I am not even going to bother answering it.
> The article can be used as a tool by climate change deniers. They could say: "science have many major issues and therefore climate change is a figment of these communist eggheads imagination."
Of course it can, and nothing is going to stop them. But does that mean we shouldn't be talking about the problems we are facing in science? You aren't going to fix anything if you refuse to talk about it.
This article isn't about climate change any more than it is about climate change deniers. That's another discussion for another time. This article is about our problems in the way we do science. So stick to the point, please.