Bishop Hill An interesting medical paper
Mar 12, 2010 I chanced upon this abstract, which somehow seems very pertinent to the discussions we've been having on this site. If anyone can lay their hands on the full paper I'd be interested.
In the last 20 years there has been a progressive decline in the honesty of scientific communications. In science truth should be the primary value, and truthfulness the core evaluation. Everyone should be honest at all times and about everything, but especially scientists. On the contrary, the activity stops being science and becomes something else: Zombie science, a science that is dead but it is artificially kept moving by a continuous infusion of funding. Many are the causes of dishonesty in science, for example scientists may be subjected to such pressure that they are forced to be dishonest. The corruption of science has been amplified by the replacement of "peer usage" with "peer review" as the major mechanism of scientific evaluation, thus creating space into which dishonesty has expanded. The hope is in an ethical revolution capable of re-establishing the primary purpose of science: the pursuit of truth.
Medical Hypotheses 2009;73:633-5
Reader Comments (40)
There's a copy online here.
Or Here
http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/10/truthfulness-in-science-should-be-iron.html
Honesty in dietary advice.
Saturated fats have been denigrated for years, but in the same way that "The Hockey Stick Illusion" exposes a scandal, "Trick & Treat" by Barry Groves demonstrates the ways vested interests have promoted low fat foods, to the detriment of western societies. It's a good book, for the open-minded.
http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/trick-and-treat.html
To diagnose whether a scientific field has been corrupted I propose the following test: does it generate a regular series of scare stories in the mass media? If so it has probably passed the point of no return.
Very good find Bishop, thanks Jonathan.
There are no doubt many examples of what Charlton memorably calls 'zombie science' but it falls to the AGW madness to be the one that could either lead to world disaster or an unequivocal exposure of such corruption. It's kinda all or nothing. Once AGW has been exposed - completely and mercilessly - we need to go back to what Eisenhower said in 1960 (thanks again Richard Lindzen) and rethink much about big science and government funding for it.
Step at a time. But great article. Great use of the Great Awakening theme. Well done Professor Charlton.
Funding for scientific research should be voluntary, through charities, rather than coerced through the tax system. People won't voluntarily pay for shoddy science.
I see that Charlton posted this on his own blog last year.
To diagnose whether a scientific field has been corrupted I propose the following test: does it generate a regular series of scare stories in the mass media? If so it has probably passed the point of no return.
The huge expansion of the educational machine at University level may be the cause of some of this.
More students needing more staff and more resources.
Where to get all this money from?
Even when I started at university in 1979, my Lecturers were complaining about the lack of mathematical skills of their chemistry students and it's a lot easier to produce a nice, waffly dissertation on how badly society treats (insert name of grouping) than a cogent scientific project.
http://go2.wordpress.com/?id=725X1342&site=noconsensus.wordpress.com&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fscienceandtechnology%2F5345963%2FThe-scientific-fraudster-who-dazzled-the-world-of-physics.html
This was a classic example of an academic producing work which "proved" what his peers had been seeking for years, thus getting him the rewards he sought.
Produce something that someone in Government likes and the gravy train will flow. Produce something which they don't and unless someone with a big wallet can fund it and it doesn't upset the person at the top, then research will get done on "something more important".
Excellent piece. If any good at all can come from the climate alarmism fiasco, it is that we may gain insight enough to reduce the chances of something like it happening again.
There are many areas of enquiry here: people's propensity to be scared easily, the skill of political spin, the infiltration of mass media by zealots, the readiness of politicians to jump on bandwagons, the role of UNEP, and not least, the corruption of science.
Another example is the cholesterol and statins studies which I have followed for a number of years. Again it looks like money has skewered the science.
I just re-read the whole of Feynman's piece on Cargo Cult science, in "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman". I can't find an online copy, but it's extraordinarily applicable to AGW.
We should all go back to trusting ourselves and being the experts on our own bodies rather than handing that responsibility to 'so called experts' and adopting their cookie cutter mentality as funded by big business and big government.
An excellent find. Quite a powerful and well argued thesis (polemic?)
Basically, modern science is in a moribund state, it is a vast self sustaining bureaucratic complex.
This part struck as very important:
To my mind meaning that peer-review is more often the mechanism for the elevation of opinion and bureaucracy over any real quest for the practical worth of any idea.
Well impressed by Professor Charltons work here, I'm surprised this hasn't been picked up earlier, great find.
http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/publicity/dofe/charlton.html
Re Peter Ridson (and Feynman's cargo cult science):
"Google is your friend!"
Try Google, Feynman cargo cultscience and this is the first item (even beats Wiki):
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.pdf
You guys are aware that the editor of this journal is about to be fired right over the fracas about the human immunodeficiency virus and AIDS?
"Publishing powerhouse Elsevier this week told Editor-in-Chief Bruce Charlton that it won't renew his contract, which expires at the end of 2010, and it asked that Charlton resign immediately or implement a series of changes in his editorial policy, including putting a system of peer review in place. Charlton, who teaches evolutionary psychology at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, says he will do neither, and some on the editorial advisory board say they may resign in protest if he is fired"
from:
DOI: 10.1126/science.327.5971.1316
The whole story is shamefully similar to the Balinaus and Soon paper.
Slightly OT, but while we are talking about Corruption:
SWMBO teaches in further education, and is coming under pressure from students and fellow lecturers to tell students what questions will be coming up in assessments and exactly how to answer them.
It seems like the lecturers who do this APPEAR to be good teachers as even thick students are managing to attain (must be good teaching, couldn't possibly be cheating...),
the students love this as they don't actually have to do anything difficult, like interrupt their social lives to do background reading and revision.
The institution seems to like this, as students are retained and "achieve"
SWMBO is therefore a danger to all, by insisting her students actually do some work.
Has anyone else seen this happening?
@Anand
Interesting, I missed all that in my brief search for Prof Charlton
It looks like he has already put his money where his mouth is and is embroiled in a battle over the uniqueness of his publication. It does seem at face that allowing a publication like his to continue is worth the freedom to explore ideas that it allows. After all you can't complain that his approved articles have the status of being "peer-reviewed" and therefore influential.
http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/57190/
The MSM may be the toughest nuts to crack - after all, they make a career out of being disingenuous.
Take today's Independent, where BP's estimate of oil reserves is challenged by the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (in the neutral corner, of course, just look at the name). The Indy,of course, is firmly against BP (what would they know?) in the face of impeccable science from ODAC.
Colin Campbell, the head of the depletion centre, said: "It's quite a simple theory and one that any beer drinker understands. The glass starts full and ends empty and the faster you drink it the quicker it's gone."
Cue a lot of meaningless speculation and scaremongering, until the Indy manages to drag in global warming, courtesy of one Jeremy Leggett.
""It reminds me of the way no one would listen for years to scientists warning about global warming"; he says. "We were predicting things pretty much exactly as they have played out. Then as now we were wondering what it would take to get people to listen."
That's easy: less arrogant elitism, less scare-mongering, less vilification, more transparency, more honesty.
It might work with scientists, but MSM journalists? Some hope.
Perhaps, like so many other endeavors, when things were tough in science, people looked after the basics more carefully.
Now we have big science joining big government and big finance, all dominated by group think and self absorption.
The comment about the number of scare mongering headlines being inversely proportional to the credible of the science is a very very good point.
I worked as a technical librarian in research labs for over 20 years, and one of my chores was to generate reports of how many citations each of our scientists' published papers had received in Science Citation Index. We had empirical results to guide us in estimating the "half life" of a publication--the time until a paper had garnered half of all the citations it would likely ever receive--and the administration of the lab would use these results to weight publications in a measure of the productivity of our scientists. One of the things that "shocked" me about the way Mann's 1998 paper was so quickly incorporated into the IPCC canon was that it was done long before it was possible to estimate a citation half life for it, or to get a sense of how well received, as measured by "peer usage", it was.
Nothing new here at all, Bishop, just the "reality cycle" at work. It is as old as time. The question is what drives the speed of that cycle. It all depends on the nature of the science being perverted, but it will happen sooner or later. I can think of a number of cases, but by far my favorite is Lysenko. What we are seeing now is just another repeat of that sad ideological perversion of the scientific method.
In my own case, I had completed my Ph. D. in 1972 and as a physiological psychologist with a very strong background in biochemistry and pharmacology, I was "recruited" by a very large pharmaceutical company in the US to test their psychotropic drugs. They wined me and dined me and made all sorts of happy promises.
Fortunately for me, I had dinner with one of the scientists already working on screening drugs. He informed me that I was expected to “get results” and that I would be effectively reviewed by the marketing department. Talk about corruptive “peer review”!
This a mere 10 years after the thalidomide disaster. I raise that point and he smiled and replied “But that was 10 years ago.”
I had also been made an offer to go into the then new field of minicomputers, which I chose. Now 40 years later, I look back and I am happy in my choice – I didn’t have to fudge data, I could be honest with myself and in my work. I could get up in the morning, look at myself in the mirror and smile.
Computers really don’t care about “statistical” tests. Either you got it right or not. However, with most of science, the period of time between when a hypothesis is made and tested by the reality cycle is months to years to decades. In the case of computers, it is usually mere milliseconds. In the case of drugs, it is usually years before the problems are apparent. In the case of global climate change it is a very long term indeed. The longer the period of the real-world reality check, the more likely there will be some fudging of the data.
“Who’s to know?” they ask as they fit their data to the hypothesis and not the other way around.
In time, however, the "reality cycle" catches up to you if you cheat. We just happen to be watching it catch up to the IPCC and the AGW.
I guess it would have been controversial, but that paper would have had a lot more bite if Charlton had felt able to give some specific examples - of which I suspect there are many.
Pete Risdon: I just re-read the whole of Feynman's piece on Cargo Cult science, in "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman". I can't find an online copy, but it's extraordinarily applicable to AGW.
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.pdf
Feynman is my hero. I can't help thinking that, had he still been around, the AGW religion would never have left the ground.
Leaving aside issues of "HIV denial" for the moment, Carleton's editorial should serve as a reminder that the validation process in science is supposed to have two components. The peer review process is only the first step; this review process is not intended to insure that a paper is correct, only that it contains no obvious errors and that it offers persuasive evidence when it's conclusions disagree with previously published research. The most frequently raised issue in the review process is that a newly submitted paper doesn't address how the author's findings fit with another piece of previously published research. The second and more important step in the validation process comes after publication, when other researchers attempt to replicate or build on the newly published findings. Citations of most papers tend to peak somewhere between 18 months and 3 years after a paper appears ( and it turns out that in most cases if we count the total number of citations a paper has garnered up to this peak it will turn out to be about half of all the citations the paper will ever receive). "Usually" once a paper reaches it's "citation half life" we can tell from the published response whether or not it's "good science"; new citations taper off when all of the objections that can be raised from current knowledge and research have been raised and answered.
It's well know among all students of bibliometrics (all 500 of us; I took graduate courses in scholarly communication at Drexel with Kate McCain) that over 90% of published papers are never cited in any subsequent research, if we eliminate self-citation (where an author cites his own earlier work). So what I've said above only applies to the research we actually "use".
As a Technical Expert, Third Class, in Bern (Switzerland) put it at about age 23, "If you were riding a light beam and looked back, what would you see?" The answer is Special Relativity, an extraordinarily subtle concept mechanically explicable in terms of high school algebra.
"Big Science" equates to piling conventional Ossa upon Pelion as pre-conceived hypotheses require. From Copernicus to Galileo, Darwin, Planck and Einstein, latterly John Bell, comfortable scholastic thinking has shuddered at abrupt transitions, when immemorial dogma is irrefutably displaced. Genius asks, "Does a falling body feel its own weight?" and after a generation of ossified Professors Emeritus dies off General Relativity's reply is, "Time will tell."
In this sense, "science" is a magnificent game-- a philosophy of the natural world, an empirical method, in practice via peer review a supremely social enterprise. But ever and always, Science is about Ideas: "If what's Past is fixed, immutable, does the Present have a Future?" And the answer is... Being exists in essence as Potential. Where material/physical ("real") Existence corresponds to complex/virtual ("imaginary") Reality, does not Young's double-slit experiment address Two Worlds?
Quite possibly, some sub-teen heir of James Clerk Maxwell is formulating a hyper-geometric answer even now. Converting not matter but space-time to energy will explode the solar system like a stick of dynamite in a rotten apple. Hoo-rah!
Its mentioned in here among a lot of similar refs on ethical issues:
http://ese-bookshelf.blogspot.com/search/label/ETHICAL%20ISSUES
The editorial was created 9 October 2009 BC (Before Climategate).
I suppose that if it were to be updated and re-issued today the only words which would need to be altered would be those in the headline which would now read "Gotcha!"
Thanks Rick Bradford for highlighting the Independent quoting Jeremy Leggett:
Excuse me? You mean you predicted in 1990 the flatlining of temperatures from 1995? That polar bear populations would increase? That hurricanes would reduce in frequency after a significant disaster like Katrina? That glaciers would do not as the IPCC said in 2007 but something else entirely? That the Sahel would experience amazing greening due to increased rainfall? Did you even get the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere right? Pray do tell us one thing - in detail, with numbers - that you predicted 'pretty much exactly' as it has played out and when you did so. That would indeed be fascinating.
It's the fact that a so-called Independent journalist doesn't challenge such an obviously ridiculous statement that allows a chump like Leggett - a openly self-interested chump - to been viewed as an expert, not a worldwide laughing stock. But just give it time.
MH is not a scientific journal. It's a club for cranks.
Mr Eagar, are you saying that every one of the more than a hundred and fifty people who wrote to support the current editors last month is a crank? I'd never heard of MH or of Charlton until this week. But reading that appreciation suggests it may have had a useful function. If it's published some hypotheses that turn out to be mistaken, including on HIV, that doesn't seem the end of the world if other more valuable ones went on to gain attention they might not otherwise have done.
This interests me partly because I've come to support much greater openness in climate science, including open preprints - like arXiv.org - and open review. I admit that I don't have enough experience of fields where the anonymity of peer review is prized. Is the old way better still, in the age of the Internet? The value or otherwise of MH, though not decisive, might shed light.
Bish,
Thanks for the post and thanks to all who've commented with links and suggestions for reading. Don Pablo, thanks for keeping mentioning comrade lysenko, I've actually gone and read up on him now. There really is a frightening parallel there.
Thanks
Keith
It's funny Keith that I was just thinking before reading that of Lysenko and Eugenics as the two most striking examples of junk science in the 20th century. But this angle: how did individuals and societies trapped in those deceptions come out of them? And the answers seem to be quite different: in the case of Lysenko it was gradual, with a famous milestone many years later in 1964, when Sakharov spoke out in the Russian Academy of Sciences, in which Lysenko had been promoted to his highest rank by Stalin in 1940. But eugenics died instantly with the discovery of the German concentration camps, particularly the experiments of Mengele in Auschwitz.
It must be important that Lysenkoism was protected by a totalitarian regime which was not defeated in war. Other examples of junk science have not done as much damage, presumably because freedom of speech in the West has given their critics a voice. But the process whereby defiled, corrupted science is overthrown seems important, worth learning from to help with our own case.
Oh, I'd say psychoanalysis is a more striking example of 20th c. junk science than Lysenkoism, which was, after all, limited to one country.
That political know-nothings sponsored Lysenko is not in any scientific respect different from Mbeki's pronouncements on the cause of AIDS in S. Africa or the flimflam that the solar researchers pulled on DeGaulle to get the Pic du Midi observatory built (and I could multiply examples), other than the fact that Lysenko's opponents were sent to the camps. But that was not a scientific thing; everybody was liable to be sent to the camps.
As for your other question, Richard, yes, lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.
Start with "Sorry, Wrong Number" and move on to "The Epidemiologists", both by John Brignell at www.numberwatch.co.uk
I hate to sound like a know-it-all, but it is funny to read stories like this, with all of the follow-up commentary, and never see anyone show that they understand what has happened in Western culture. Folks, what you have here is called 'Post Moderism'. Western culture has been descending into this abyss going all the way back to Thomas Aquinas. Point is, this slippery-slope isn't 20 years old, it's about 500 years old and has it's roots in the Renaissance and the new trends of thought which base things on man's reason alone. When that eventually failed (this is history) philosophy jumped from the foundation of reason to the new 'foundation' of non-reason. This began in the 19th century. That is why modern art is what it is, etc., etc. Point is, we are at the point where 'all truth is relative' (science obviously will have a big problem if people think that), therefore is it a surprise if people choose which papers to publish, consistent with the 'truth' that they''ve chosen ahead-of-time? Again, read your history books. We are simply experiencing the natural outcome of centuries of philosophical decay.
@ Perry Honesty in dietary advice. Saturated fats have been denigrated for years, but in the same way that "The Hockey Stick Illusion" exposes a scandal, "Trick & Treat" by Barry Groves demonstrates the ways vested interests have promoted low fat foods, to the detriment of western societies. It's a good book, for the open-minded."
And you have no idea how true that is.
Same goes for cholesterol. There is very little evidence that total serum cholesterol levels above 200 ug are detrimental to our health. Even the authors of the original study admitted that there could be other factors, but they blamed cholesterol anyway. If you read a bottle of Lipitor or Crestor, it says, "has NOT been shown to prevent heart disease or heart attacks." Okay, so why take them then?
There was a study that came out a year or so ago that linked survival of the Spanish flu in 1917-1918 to adverse cardiovascular events in the 50's and 60's, especially in men.
Sorry to threadjack, but there you are. :)
Peer usage can be abused too, but it is at least not potentially a free pass or an anonymous blackballing. University profs count citations like gunslingers notching their six-shooters.
About Campbell and the beer analogy of oil reserves - it is more like a person drinking draft beer where you guess at the size of the keg from the change in time it takes to fill glasses and the amount of the head. To hint that estimating oil reserves is as easy as looking at the level in a glass is ingenuine. However, his organization does some interesting work.
Richard, The appalling thing is, that the compulsory state sterilisation side of eugenics didn't die with the discovery of the death camps. It continued for another 30 to 40 years under the regimes which were politically almost identical to the NSDAP; the Scandanavian Social Democrats, and with funding donations from the US Government. The US birth control activist, Margaret Sanger, is reckoned to have addressed a Klan meeting in the 1960s, and investigative journalist James O'Keefe, found US Panned Parenthood willing to receive donations earmarked for use in aborting the ?foeti of black women, despite the clearly stated racist intentions of the donor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiFOFUGIhFE unfortunately that particular pseudo science monster still seems to be twitching.
Harry, I'd be inclined to extend that to most of the mental health field. An engineer friend who has had far too much contact with the Psychiatric profession for her own good, describes them as "a cross between a traffic warden and a witch doctor", another friend spent a year working in a psychiatric hospital in the early 1970s, while trying to get back into medical school. He spoke of patients who displeased the staff, being routinely sent for electro convulsive therapy, until they either learned to do what was expected of them, or died in the process. Friend never went near medicine again, and had a very successful career in physics. He died about 10 years ago. I suspect if he was still alive, he would have made a very good witness in the crimminal trialls which are richly deserved by the "professionals" involved.
The decline in scientific honesty could be linked to the takeover of the various universities by the post-modernists who don't seem to understand the intrinsic difference between truth and falsehood, apart from the specious argument that one man's poison is another's life, etc.
I always wondered whether I would live long enough to actually experience a civilisational dark age; seems I have.