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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

A vast amount of "science" is being done at all times. You can likely count the scandals cognitively available to you on one hand; even if it took dozens of hands, you'd still be talking about an infinitesimal sliver of science on the whole. What's actually happening here is an availability bias: you remember scandals, because they're scandalous and thus memorable. You don't know anything about the overwhelming majority of scientific work that is being done, so you have no way of weighting it against the impression those scandals create in your mind.

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Via HN yesterday [1]- an editor of _Anaesthesia_ did a meta study of the papers he handled that conducted RCTs. He had data from 150 of them and concluded:

> ...26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged — either because the authors were incompetent, or because they had faked the data.

This is not a one off.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w

I didn't say it was a one-off. But 150 papers is, to a first approximation, a one-off of all the science done in a given year. We produce millions of journal articles every year.

There's something to be said about a defense of this that doesn't account for random sampling.

Assuming that they did a proper sample of said papers, that implies that for whatever domain they sampled, 26% is likely a decent estimate of actual issues. Increasing the scale doesn't make a proportional estimate any better.

Maybe we shouldn't. What's the point of all of that data if a good portion of it can't be trusted?

Here we're talking about a proportion significantly less than 1%.

No one is shocked by the concept of misconduct occurring, the issue here is that it is no longer surprising when those committing the misconduct end up running the organization. You can pretend that the conversation is about whether scientific misconduct is endemic, but that conversation being had is about the failure of these hierarchies to actually succeed in promoting the best from among their ranks.

Of course misconduct is unavoidable, that doesn't mean you should become president. The politics aren't working.

Are you commenting on the wrong subthread? I do that all the time. This subthread is about whether the foundations of science itself are stable.

You just did it again, trying to steer the conversation to something that not at the heart of the discussion. This is the parent:

It's clear by now this isn't the case of a few bad apples - our scientific institutions are systemically broken in ways that promote spreading fraudulent results as established scientific truth

This is a concern about the corrupted institutions, with the downstream concern that science itself may be under threat. The primary concern is the systemically broken institutions who promote the fraudulent to the top of their hierarchies. Not sure why you insist on straw manning this thing, but clearly you have some person reason for doing so, and I wish you luck in that endeavor.

We disagree about what the implications of a single university president surrendering their post are to the whole of science. You're asked not to write comments imputing personal motives:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you want to argue this further, you should probably snipe the swipes off the end of your comment.

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