'Scientific Research is flawed-- and it's time we embrace it'

[Stoked]

But the climax was rather disappointing.

Reminds me of that Jeff Dunham "Walter' joke.

His wife calls him the "hurricane". Walter thinks for a second and then says something along the lines of "I get it, starts hot and heavy and ends in disaster".

 

[babe]

You mean as opposed to the snob obnoxious believer who thinks that he/she, out of all the people who have ever lived, really, truly knows the mind and will of the supreme creator of the universe?

I'd guess it's about sixes whether the supposed unbeliever believes, out of all the people who have ever lived, he, alone, really, truly knows everything and no longer needs a place-holder symbol for things greater than man.

 

[LogGrad98]

But the climax was rather disappointing.

Wow then you'd think they were married.

 

[Deleted member 848]

HEY Dal, if this article helped you, then that's great. I'm not saying it lacks value. There's wayyy ****tier things out there, and if something can help push people away from idealistic views of science, then cool.

Not trying to deuce on your JFC swag in this thread. In fact, it looks like I'm the only guy who really took it on.

Don't even know what this is supposed to mean.


Aside-- this thread sure became a dumpster-fire.

 

[babe]

Don't even know what this is supposed to mean.


Aside-- this thread sure became a dumpster-fire.

ignore the stupids, Dal. Or else up the ante and actually understand what someone is saying. NAOS is worth the effort. His remark might be the best sort of real apology you could expect from anyone who cares to mend his ways and treat you better.

I thought Log's last remark made it all worthwhile. . . . but then I guess you've just never been married, so you don't care to get it.

I appreciate your attempt to develop some good discussion among the actually educated and caring people in here about the social scene we call "Science". Some really good points there, and it gives me greater respect for science today just knowing there are people who are thinking about these problems in the way we are.

 

[babe]

HEY Dal, if this article helped you, then that's great. I'm not saying it lacks value. There's wayyy ****tier things out there, and if something can help push people away from idealistic views of science, then cool.

Not trying to deuce on your JFC swag in this thread. In fact, it looks like I'm the only guy who really took it on.

It was a long read, and does require some background to appreciate it, but I also "took it on".

The way I read your comments, I'd gather you more or less have understood there are issues about the way people think or believe stuff, especially when they take themselves more seriously than their thinking really merits, for a long time. So this is not exactly a trendy sort of great new issue, and it's pretty clear to you that even these folks who are making it their trendy little intellectual niche, have not cleared earth orbit in the sense of really rising above the issue as they are still somewhat mired in the same mud.

OK.

 

[babe]

So here's one paragraph from Dal's OP link:

So why aren't these problems caught prior to publication of a study? Consider peer review, in which scientists send their papers to other experts for vetting prior to publication. The idea is that those peers will detect flaws and help improve papers before they are published as journal articles. Peer review won't guarantee that an article is perfect or even accurate, but it's supposed to act as an initial quality-control step.

Yet there are flaws in this traditional "pre-publication" review model: it relies on the goodwill of scientists who are increasingly pressed and may not spend the time required to properly critique a work, it's subject to the biases of a select few, and it's slow – so it's no surprise that peer review sometimes fails. These factors raise the odds that even in the highest-quality journals, mistakes, flaws, and even fraudulent work will make it through. ("Fake peer review" reports are also now a thing.)

I was a nobody working for a Nobel-class Dean who had over the twelve years I worked for him, from thirty to fifty people doing research under his name. He was president of the American Chemical Society, and on the "peer review" roundtable of five to seven prestigious journals. He did stuff his satchel full of papers and hike home with them, and read them. But he was simply too busy to do any elementary testing like trying to reproduce a result, and it would have been too much work to really edit stuff out of those papers or comment in such a way as to insist something be checked. He would pencil questions and observations into the margins, and return them, and anything short of outrageous ignorance was "passed".

On one occasion, another Dean of another department had co-authored an article related to anesthetic structure and efficacy. My boss had presided over the development of "facts" relating to the structure or more specifically the conformation of the anesthetics, and the article had been published several years when the other Dean "co-author" asked for those results to be checked, as something was not making sense. I was tasked with doing the work, or more specifically, re-doing the work that had earned someone their Ph.D..

It was routine spectroscopy generating a spectra of the anesthetics that relates to physical conformation around certain types of structural components, we had the first instrument that could do it. At first I was just doing the work as routine, but after a while I began to look at the results, and realized something was not making sense. I realized there was a serious problem, and began to go all-out to trouble-shooting our materials and procedures. I had wasted a lot of time already, and I was beginning to feel the pressure to just be done with it already.

But I annoyed the hell outta my boss and just kept working, re-doing everything. I couldn't actually tell him I was just incompetent, and that I knew nothing, and hand him the results as they were with a shrug. I had to figure out what the problem was.

When the aha moment finally dawned, I had proved the Ph.D. thesis totally wrong. I had to go tell both Deans what I had found. Neither one said thanks, and they just let the issue drop. No more money was spent on my work, and I found another job. My results were never published. The Deans could not let the fact get into print, so they instead just stopped talking about the original theory. There might be some researchers out there today looking at what they did publish, and designing some new experiment to resolve some nagging questions they have about those results. If they start to verify the old results, it is highly probable that they will make the same mistake, and no one will actually a priori think it is possible that the results are not valid when done that way. If they get something like what I did, and send their paper in for review, I'll bet it sits in committee for a couple of years, or something like that.

The way science works, it takes a generation or two to clear out the dead wood, however renown and respected, and make it possible to get things going again on the right footing. Never underestimate the power of inertia in science.

After all, in doing spectroscopy of soluble chemicals in suitable solvents, you have to expect that what you see in the spectra relates to the properties of the molecule in the solvent, right? And why would that damn molecule just form a layer on the glass optical cell wall anyway?

But a lipid that adheres to cell membranes and exerts its effect by so adhering, and fitting itself to that surface. . . . .well, hell. How stupid can Nobel Laureates be, anyway? I even felt stupid for not doing baseline spectras of the empty glass optical cells after the first experiment, or in the first place.

 

[NAOS]

babe ftw

 

[jimmy eat jazz]

I'd guess it's about sixes whether the supposed unbeliever believes, out of all the people who have ever lived, he, alone, really, truly knows everything and no longer needs a place-holder symbol for things greater than man.

WTF??

Unlike the believer who claims, alone or among a select few, to understand the mind and will of the creator of the universe, Science is an open and transparent system that has built in self-correcting mechanisms that is ALWAYS advancing, sometimes in leaps and sometimes in small incremental steps, toward greater understanding of 'truth.' Science may temporarily go astray, but it eventually self corrects and continues its long-term inevitable advance toward greater truth and understanding.

Meanwhile, 'truth' among religious dogmatists was handed down by superstitious, misogynist, backward Iron Age tribes and has no self-correcting mechanism, which is why unfactual and harmful dogma can go literally centuries without any correction.

Just out of curiosity, can you cite a single case in which religious dogma has overturned scientific knowledge?

The converse has happened time and time and time and time again.

Again, I also ask, if you want to de-emphasize science as a means to understand our world, what process do you propose to replace it, and who gets to decide what this process is and how it is implemented?

 

[fishonjazz]

wtf just happened here?

should I have just given a talk on tenure issues without understanding why? would that have helped everybody's feelings??

Imo you should have just answered the question without having to understand why the question was asked.

I know that when people ask me questions usually I just answer them. I don't usually think there is, or needs to be, a motive behind the question.

 

[NAOS]

Imo you should have just answered the question without having to understand why the question was asked.

I know that when people ask me questions usually I just answer them. I don't usually think there is, or needs to be, a motive behind the question.

Thanks for a taking a week to ponder your response. Hmmmm, thoughtful.

But we're talking about Hantlers here... so you think he doesn't already have an opinion about tenure? You think there's any chance I could change his mind?

Not answering leading/loaded questions is the most responsible thing one can do on a day-to-day basis.

 

[fishonjazz]

Thanks for a taking a week to ponder your response. Hmmmm, thoughtful.

But we're talking about Hantlers here... so you think he doesn't already have an opinion about tenure? You think there's any chance I could change his mind?

Not answering leading/loaded questions is the most responsible thing one can do on a day-to-day basis.

I think he just wanted to know what you thought and you overreacted. Which seems to be your mo

 

[franklin]

In my line of work, the current collective scientific research from various angles gives us all about a 2000% chance of definitively developing cancer and dying by age 25. Science is cool and all but we've gotten to the point where it's being used to scare the hell out of us, and that's working very well.

 

[franklin]

WTF??

Unlike the believer who claims, alone or among a select few, to understand the mind and will of the creator of the universe, Science is an open and transparent system that has built in self-correcting mechanisms that is ALWAYS advancing, sometimes in leaps and sometimes in small incremental steps, toward greater understanding of 'truth.' Science may temporarily go astray, but it eventually self corrects and continues its long-term inevitable advance toward greater truth and understanding.

Meanwhile, 'truth' among religious dogmatists was handed down by superstitious, misogynist, backward Iron Age tribes and has no self-correcting mechanism, which is why unfactual and harmful dogma can go literally centuries without any correction.

Just out of curiosity, can you cite a single case in which religious dogma has overturned scientific knowledge?

The converse has happened time and time and time and time again.

Again, I also ask, if you want to de-emphasize science as a means to understand our world, what process do you propose to replace it, and who gets to decide what this process is and how it is implemented?

Shouldn't we care about the short-ish term damages that science gone astray causes? 30-40 years of ruined lives is a long damn time to apologize for. Humanity did some ****ed up **** in the 1930's-1970's in the name of science. Take the anti-Mo's on this board bitching about the BYU gay experiments for example. Or what the Japanese did in WWII. "[Science] self corrects" is not an excuse for allowing it to create dumb ****.


Haven't read the thread and have a feeling I've missed the mark, but felt like Babeing it up a bit.

 

[franklin]

Imo you should have just answered the question without having to understand why the question was asked.

I know that when people ask me questions usually I just answer them. I don't usually think there is, or needs to be, a motive behind the question.

When NAOS (or GVC) makes a response you assume he's trying to be an *******.

 

[franklin]

I was a nobody working for a Nobel-class Dean who had over the twelve years I worked for him, from thirty to fifty people doing research under his name. He was president of the American Chemical Society, and on the "peer review" roundtable of five to seven prestigious journals. He did stuff his satchel full of papers and hike home with them, and read them. But he was simply too busy to do any elementary testing like trying to reproduce a result, and it would have been too much work to really edit stuff out of those papers or comment in such a way as to insist something be checked. He would pencil questions and observations into the margins, and return them, and anything short of outrageous ignorance was "passed".

Are you older than a daemon? You've worked for everybody and everything, at one point or another. I'd be impressed if you could remember your resume at this point

 

[fishonjazz]

When NAOS (or GVC) makes a response you assume he's trying to be an *******.

He didn't really respond though. That was the point.
And he usually is being an *******. Not always, but must of the time.

 

[Deleted member 848]

In my line of work, the current collective scientific research from various angles gives us all about a 2000% chance of definitively developing cancer and dying by age 25. Science is cool and all but we've gotten to the point where it's being used to scare the hell out of us, and that's working very well.

Cancer rates are exploding, dude. What's your course of action to address that very obvious fact? Ignoring research regarding its causes and potential treatments?

 

[Carbon13]

Scientific journals vary in quality. I think if you read PNAS, Nature, or Science, you'll generally get good information.

 

[franklin]

He didn't really respond though. That was the point.
And he usually is being an *******. Not always, but must of the time.

Sorry, I shouldn't have written that. It was a bit over the top trollish, and not aimed at you in particular. Long day, reading in reverse and shooting from the hip.