Science needs a lesson on communication. Science
is such a perfectionist -- it is so afraid of being wrong or irrelevant -- that
it stifles its own progress.
Science's Fears of being wrong and of being
irrelevant directly oppose one another. As acknowledged by Jared Horvath, scientists fear that "funding will diminish each time a researcher
fails to deliver on grandiose (and ultimately unjustified) claims of efficacy
and translatability." Science
is afraid of being wrong, but Science is sometimes even more afraid of being
lost in the huge crowd of scientists. The result is that false science is
published.
That's why sites like PubPeer are VITAL. Science
is under huge pressure. But, as stated in an interview with the anonymous developers or PubPeer:
The most
important metric is publication in top journals, which determines jobs, grants,
everything. This distorts the scientific process toward mostly illusory
"breakthroughs" and "high-impact research" at the expense
of careful work…
PubPeer is
helping scientists retake control of their lives, work, and careers by
providing a collective judgment that is independent of and ultimately more
important than acceptance by the top journals. That judgment is the expert
opinion of your peers.
Now this false science isn't always maliciously
published. Unfortunately, statistical error is an intricate part of
science. Jeremy Burg points out
that, based on a few assumptions, 36% of positive data is actually false.
However, scientists frequently get so caught up in the excitement of a novel
discovery that they overlook important controls or fail to perform the correct
analyses of their data.
Another result of Science's Fears, though, is
that negative data is never published. You know what that leads to? That leads
to a huge number of scientists stumbling down the same, wrong path, wasting
time and resources -- and all because no one wants to admit that their big idea
failed.
Listen Science, we are all friends here. I know
that there are a good number of very shifty and selfish scientists out there
that have hurt you in the past, but the only way that we can phase out those
people is to stand together in support and collaboration of each other, through
the good times and the bad, in sickness and in health.
If you try something and fail, publish it! I
would love to see what you did. Maybe I have insight into a certain aspect of
your research that needs to be changed to get positive results. Are you really
going to throw in the towel because you were too prideful to ask for help?
Maybe I was contemplating pursuing the research that you never published for my
PhD dissertation. Are you really going to let me waste 3 years in grad school
fumbling around with a project that you already know is doomed? I'm don't think
you're a failure because your idea failed. I'm think that you are a productive
member of Science if you start a conversation about your concept -- and
conversations are about truths, not successes.
And the irony is that based on the same Bayesian
statistics that showed that 36% of positive data is false, publishing negative
data is more accurate, as explained by The Economist.
We should work on removing the stigma that
you're a failure of PhD if you're not a professor. We could train PhDs
specifically to facilitate the statistical accuracy of experiments before and
after they are performed. We could benefit from more consultants and
specialists of various techniques. We could use science writers who are good at
accurately portraying results. Let's diversify our people and their skills and
stop looking down at people from "other" disciplines and with
"alternative" routes.
The irony of this post, though, is that I
gathered these data from the articles provided to me by my statistics
professor. I did not look at the original studies, and I did not verify that
their published results were accurately controlled or analyzed, like the true
Millennial that I am. Read "Identifying and Avoiding Bias in Research"
to find out how many issues that can cause.
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