Liberals Not So Smart
2017-03-02 15:55:43 UTC
"The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American
Psychiatric Association yielded suddenly and completely to
political pressure when in 1973 it removed homosexuality as a
treatable aberrant condition. A political firestorm had been
created by gay activists within psychiatry, with intense
opposition to normalizing homosexuality coming from a few
outspoken psychiatrists who were demonized and even threatened,
rather than scientifically refuted. Psychiatrys House of
Delegates sidestepped the conflict by putting the matter to a
vote of the membership, marking for the first time in the
history of healthcare that a diagnosis or lack of diagnosis was
decided by popular vote than by scientific evidence "
Keep that in mind. Homosexual faggotry, known for centuries to
be perverted and practiced by the mentally deranged and ill, was
"normalized" by a popular vote forced by political activists.
Sick is still sick, even after popular vote. What does that say
about Barack Obama?
On to the article.
Concerns are mounting that a pillar of modern science is showing
cracks.
A key feature of science is researchers' ability to reproduce
experiments to conduct a reality check on another group's work
by using its materials and following its methods, then comparing
the results.
It's a way to separate results worth building upon from those
that aren't, either because a research team was careless,
overlooked something, misinterpreted data, or at worst,
fabricated results.
During the past several years, however, worries have grown that
many nonreproducible results are working their way into the
scientific literature, lingering undetected and, importantly,
unchallenged. Such results can feed into others' work as they
design their own experiments or pose their own research
questions.
At stake, researchers say, is the credibility of science,
especially when it is invoked to inform public policy on issues
from climate change to new medical treatments. Investment
decisions also hinge on credible, reliable research.
Concerns may grow further with the publication Thursday of what
purports to be the most systematic effort to date to replicate
others' experiments. More than 270 scientists around the world
banded together to replicate 100 social- and cognitive-
psychology experiments whose results appeared in three
prestigious psychology journals.
While 97 percent of the original studies showed statistically
significant results, only 36 percent of the replicated studies
did. Of the successful replications, 83 percent showed a much
smaller effects than the original studies showed, says Brian
Nosek, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia and
executive director of the Center for Open Science in
Charlottesville, Va.
The results come laced with caveats. Results are not necessarily
wrong if they can't be replicated, nor are they necessarily
right if they can be replicated, the researchers note. Numerous
variables can come into play, yielding different results even
when the same general procedures are followed. Moreover, the new
study represents an initial look at a small sample of
experiments in one discipline.
Indeed, it's unclear if these new results themselves could be
reproduced, suggested Dr. Nosek, one of the study's coauthors,
during a briefing this week on the work.
"This should just be seen as a first step, an initial piece of
evidence for establishing what reproducibility in general might
be," he said.
Still, he added, "the results suggest that there is a lot of
room to improve reproducibility."
Several factors can make a study challenging to replicate.
Cutting-edge experiments can be expensive, its tools and
procedures complicated, and it can take years to perform, notes
Kelvin Droegemeier, vice president for research at the
University of Oklahoma.
"Due to that complexity, it's become more difficult to reproduce
results," he says.
Moreover, competition is fierce for grant money, which typically
doesn't reward redoing someone else's work. Instead it goes to
work that looks to generate new results.
Researchers are under pressure to continually produce important
results, which in turn keeps grant money coming in. A strong
list of published results represents valuable currency for
getting a faculty position at a university or tenure once on the
faculty. These factors can combine in subtle and not-so-subtle
ways to influence how some researchers design and execute
studies and interpret their results.
For the new study, researchers worked closely with the original
scientists to ensure that efforts to replicate the studies
tracked the original procedures.
One member of the team, Wake Forest University social
psychologist E. J. Masicampo, was replicating someone else's
study even as another member tried to replicate one of his
studies.
His effort at replicating his assigned study found the
original's effect as well. His own study fared less well, he
said at the briefing.
It focused on the energy required to make difficult decisions
when tired. He reasoned that giving someone a boost of energy
when fatigued, in this case a sugary beverage, would provide the
spark for a more thoughtful, "effortful" decision when asked to
choose between an apartment close to or far from campus.
Why didn't his experiment replicate? A change in location, he
says. His study took place among undergraduates at Florida State
University. The attempt to replicate the results occurred at the
University of Virginia, where the choice, he said, "was a no-
brainer" to students.
In his case, one might argue no harm in a result that might be
right in its initial context but not generalizable. That insight
could lead research into more-productive directions itself
part of the scientific process.
But concerns about the persistence of unreproducible results
lurking in the pages of science journals have prompted several
efforts to deal with the issue. Among the examples:
More than 500 research journals have signed on to a Center for
Open Science effort to increase the availability of the data
behind the studies they publish, as well as the computer code
and methods used in the studies.
Working with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), some 80
journals publishing biomedical studies agreed to guidelines that
include a provision that raises the prospect that the journals
would open their pages to studies that refute already-published
work.
The National Science Foundation, seeking to increase confidence
in research it funds, has developed guidelines for transparent,
reliable research that include looking for ways to encourage the
publication of studies that replicate previous work or show
negative results.
Efforts to boost research transparency and more strongly
encourage researchers to take the time to replicate others' work
can go a long way toward weeding out fraud, in addition to more
quickly sorting out solid results from the dubious, researchers
note.
Especially where research is high profile, an inability to
reproduce results can be an effective corrective. For instance,
last year the inability of other researchers to replicate
results helped uncover research misconduct, including falsified
data, in a potentially groundbreaking development in stem-cell
research.
Like other careers, science is a human endeavor where to some
extent incidents of fraud will always crop up, Oklahoma's Dr.
Droegemeier says.
One way to deal with that is to make sure that when fraud is
established, the hammer falls not only on the lead author of a
the study, but on the paper's senior author as well, argues Mina
Bissell, a cancer researcher and distinguished scientist at the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
The senior author typically is a professor or head of a lab, and
it's their responsibility to ensure the integrity of the work
done in their lab, she argues.
These young people come into the lab and "they don't know," she
says. "They come into a big lab. Everybody's competing. The
professor expects them to publish in Nature and Science. So they
go an produce something that looks like Nature and Science."
And when someone challenges the results of a study based on an
inability to replicate its results, it's critical for the two
researchers or groups to work together to try to understand if
and where the initial study or the replication ran off the
rails, Dr. Bissell says.
Still, Droegemeier says, "you want to be very careful because
you can really destroy someone's career even with an accusation"
if at first blush a study doesn't jibe with efforts to replicate
it.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0828/An-emerging-challenge-
to-science-s-credibility
Psychiatric Association yielded suddenly and completely to
political pressure when in 1973 it removed homosexuality as a
treatable aberrant condition. A political firestorm had been
created by gay activists within psychiatry, with intense
opposition to normalizing homosexuality coming from a few
outspoken psychiatrists who were demonized and even threatened,
rather than scientifically refuted. Psychiatrys House of
Delegates sidestepped the conflict by putting the matter to a
vote of the membership, marking for the first time in the
history of healthcare that a diagnosis or lack of diagnosis was
decided by popular vote than by scientific evidence "
Keep that in mind. Homosexual faggotry, known for centuries to
be perverted and practiced by the mentally deranged and ill, was
"normalized" by a popular vote forced by political activists.
Sick is still sick, even after popular vote. What does that say
about Barack Obama?
On to the article.
Concerns are mounting that a pillar of modern science is showing
cracks.
A key feature of science is researchers' ability to reproduce
experiments to conduct a reality check on another group's work
by using its materials and following its methods, then comparing
the results.
It's a way to separate results worth building upon from those
that aren't, either because a research team was careless,
overlooked something, misinterpreted data, or at worst,
fabricated results.
During the past several years, however, worries have grown that
many nonreproducible results are working their way into the
scientific literature, lingering undetected and, importantly,
unchallenged. Such results can feed into others' work as they
design their own experiments or pose their own research
questions.
At stake, researchers say, is the credibility of science,
especially when it is invoked to inform public policy on issues
from climate change to new medical treatments. Investment
decisions also hinge on credible, reliable research.
Concerns may grow further with the publication Thursday of what
purports to be the most systematic effort to date to replicate
others' experiments. More than 270 scientists around the world
banded together to replicate 100 social- and cognitive-
psychology experiments whose results appeared in three
prestigious psychology journals.
While 97 percent of the original studies showed statistically
significant results, only 36 percent of the replicated studies
did. Of the successful replications, 83 percent showed a much
smaller effects than the original studies showed, says Brian
Nosek, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia and
executive director of the Center for Open Science in
Charlottesville, Va.
The results come laced with caveats. Results are not necessarily
wrong if they can't be replicated, nor are they necessarily
right if they can be replicated, the researchers note. Numerous
variables can come into play, yielding different results even
when the same general procedures are followed. Moreover, the new
study represents an initial look at a small sample of
experiments in one discipline.
Indeed, it's unclear if these new results themselves could be
reproduced, suggested Dr. Nosek, one of the study's coauthors,
during a briefing this week on the work.
"This should just be seen as a first step, an initial piece of
evidence for establishing what reproducibility in general might
be," he said.
Still, he added, "the results suggest that there is a lot of
room to improve reproducibility."
Several factors can make a study challenging to replicate.
Cutting-edge experiments can be expensive, its tools and
procedures complicated, and it can take years to perform, notes
Kelvin Droegemeier, vice president for research at the
University of Oklahoma.
"Due to that complexity, it's become more difficult to reproduce
results," he says.
Moreover, competition is fierce for grant money, which typically
doesn't reward redoing someone else's work. Instead it goes to
work that looks to generate new results.
Researchers are under pressure to continually produce important
results, which in turn keeps grant money coming in. A strong
list of published results represents valuable currency for
getting a faculty position at a university or tenure once on the
faculty. These factors can combine in subtle and not-so-subtle
ways to influence how some researchers design and execute
studies and interpret their results.
For the new study, researchers worked closely with the original
scientists to ensure that efforts to replicate the studies
tracked the original procedures.
One member of the team, Wake Forest University social
psychologist E. J. Masicampo, was replicating someone else's
study even as another member tried to replicate one of his
studies.
His effort at replicating his assigned study found the
original's effect as well. His own study fared less well, he
said at the briefing.
It focused on the energy required to make difficult decisions
when tired. He reasoned that giving someone a boost of energy
when fatigued, in this case a sugary beverage, would provide the
spark for a more thoughtful, "effortful" decision when asked to
choose between an apartment close to or far from campus.
Why didn't his experiment replicate? A change in location, he
says. His study took place among undergraduates at Florida State
University. The attempt to replicate the results occurred at the
University of Virginia, where the choice, he said, "was a no-
brainer" to students.
In his case, one might argue no harm in a result that might be
right in its initial context but not generalizable. That insight
could lead research into more-productive directions itself
part of the scientific process.
But concerns about the persistence of unreproducible results
lurking in the pages of science journals have prompted several
efforts to deal with the issue. Among the examples:
More than 500 research journals have signed on to a Center for
Open Science effort to increase the availability of the data
behind the studies they publish, as well as the computer code
and methods used in the studies.
Working with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), some 80
journals publishing biomedical studies agreed to guidelines that
include a provision that raises the prospect that the journals
would open their pages to studies that refute already-published
work.
The National Science Foundation, seeking to increase confidence
in research it funds, has developed guidelines for transparent,
reliable research that include looking for ways to encourage the
publication of studies that replicate previous work or show
negative results.
Efforts to boost research transparency and more strongly
encourage researchers to take the time to replicate others' work
can go a long way toward weeding out fraud, in addition to more
quickly sorting out solid results from the dubious, researchers
note.
Especially where research is high profile, an inability to
reproduce results can be an effective corrective. For instance,
last year the inability of other researchers to replicate
results helped uncover research misconduct, including falsified
data, in a potentially groundbreaking development in stem-cell
research.
Like other careers, science is a human endeavor where to some
extent incidents of fraud will always crop up, Oklahoma's Dr.
Droegemeier says.
One way to deal with that is to make sure that when fraud is
established, the hammer falls not only on the lead author of a
the study, but on the paper's senior author as well, argues Mina
Bissell, a cancer researcher and distinguished scientist at the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
The senior author typically is a professor or head of a lab, and
it's their responsibility to ensure the integrity of the work
done in their lab, she argues.
These young people come into the lab and "they don't know," she
says. "They come into a big lab. Everybody's competing. The
professor expects them to publish in Nature and Science. So they
go an produce something that looks like Nature and Science."
And when someone challenges the results of a study based on an
inability to replicate its results, it's critical for the two
researchers or groups to work together to try to understand if
and where the initial study or the replication ran off the
rails, Dr. Bissell says.
Still, Droegemeier says, "you want to be very careful because
you can really destroy someone's career even with an accusation"
if at first blush a study doesn't jibe with efforts to replicate
it.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0828/An-emerging-challenge-
to-science-s-credibility