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Comment by kartan | Hacker News Reader

> The act would disallow any scientific papers whose data cannot be "reproduced," which basically includes all studies of toxic cleanup and contamination. We can't reproduce those events, and, therefore, any data about them would be disallowed by the HONEST Act. Essentially, the EPA would no longer be able to use any scientific studies that explore environmental disasters.

Is the Republican government Dr. Evil in an Austin Powers' movie plot? Their only priority is to move money from the USA citizens - probably all the world - to the hands of a few individuals with total disregard for the environment, or the lives of human beings.

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HONEST Act

I wonder who comes up with these clever doublespeak backronyms... the other one that immediately comes to mind is the "PATRIOT Act".

People who actually truly believe what they are doing is good. Yes, what is happening is bad, but the people doing aren't doing it out of malice.

Clever (mis)use of the word "reproduced" in this context. I'm sure a lawyer is patting himself on the back right now.

>> We can't reproduce those events,

But they can be reproduced, it's just that nobody wants to reproduce toxic contamination or something similar. In any case, whenever a new contamination event happens, it should be possible to reproduce all the methods applied in the paper, so long as the situations are sufficiently similar.

How will a scientist reproduce a study when the original study is not public?

I thought the argument was that the research could not be reproduced because the studies were about one-time events that could not be repeated, not because they were simply not publicly available.

If the latter case is true, then I support disallowing these studies for policy decisions, since how can you use something for support if others can't even look at it to verify that it says what you say it does?

You cant look at it because "its not repeatable" and therefore not publically available so cannot be repeated indefinitely. Seems like a political levee to hold back the sea of environmental data.

I don't like that Ars is cherry picking edge cases to oppose the action when everyone knows that there are huge problems with reproducing scientific data of any sort these days.

It's not 'these days' it's the intrinsic nature of false hypotheses outnumbering true hypotheses by an enormous ratio. Even if everything were working perfectly you'd expect false results to outnumber true results. It's like the common example of disease screening, where even if you only get a false positive 1% of the time, but there are only 1% of true positives in your sample population, you're going get many more inaccurate results than accurate results. This video walks through an example calculation and what kinds of steps are being taken to improve on things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42QuXLucH3Q&t=218s

Without further qualifications, this statement is flat out wrong.

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