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Peer Review and the Scientific Process
IainB:
Time for me to get back to my re-education classes. Had too much to think today, so I'll probably get detention.
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-Renegade (June 13, 2016, 04:02 PM)
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What?! You still here Renegade? I'd thought I'd ordered my minions to have you carbonised.
IainB:
@Renegade: posted above about "the replication crisis" affecting psychology - psychological research/education. It seems that, in general, a lot (or the majority) of such research suffers from being unable to be replicated to prove the conclusions of the research.
(Falsifiability or refutability is the property of a statement, hypothesis, or theory whereby it could be shown to be false if some conceivable observation were true. In this sense, falsify is synonymous with nullify, meaning not "to commit fraud" but "show to be false". Science must be falsifiable.)
-IainB (June 05, 2016, 06:29 PM)
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There is a damning analysis about this issue that I read today at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, entitled What has happened down here is the winds have changed
It is "Posted by Andrew on 21 September 2016, 9:03 am".
Extract: (Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
...In short, Fiske doesn’t like when people use social media to publish negative comments on published research. She’s implicitly following what I’ve sometimes called the research incumbency rule: that, once an article is published in some approved venue, it should be taken as truth. I’ve written elsewhere on my problems with this attitude—in short, (a) many published papers are clearly in error, which can often be seen just by internal examination of the claims and which becomes even clearer following unsuccessful replication, and (b) publication itself is such a crapshoot that it’s a statistical error to draw a bright line between published and unpublished work. ...
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The author then goes on to draw together the unfolding documented history that progressively warned about this "crisis" - a crisis which has now apparently become painfully self-evident and the hard light of scrutiny is starting to disinfect it. No amount of supportive bad research and/or so-called "peer review" has been able to conceal the sad reality that psychology seems unable to meet the necessary scientific rigours of falsifiability.
Notice that the blog is entitled Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science. I would suggest that if "Social Science" and/or social scientists are unable to meet the necessary scientific rigours of falsifiability in their research, then why bother to hold them to that standard? I mean by that that they are merely demonstrating conclusively for all to see that they are not a "science" in any true sense (QED). If they were, then they would be able to meet the requisite scientific standard of falsifiability (QED) - that would seem to be the acid test to distinguish science from fakery.
acid test
· n. a conclusive test of success or value.
– ORIGIN figuratively, from the original use denoting a test for gold using nitric acid.
Concise Oxford Dictionary (10th Ed.)
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Renegade:
What?! You still here Renegade? I'd thought I'd ordered my minions to have you carbonised.
-IainB (June 14, 2016, 10:20 AM)
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I was. I escaped. The truth set me free. :D
For your last post, I think we both know that science is merely a political tool now. It's been co-opted.
There is hope though.
wraith808:
There is hope though.
-Renegade (November 04, 2016, 11:51 PM)
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...in Politics!
IainB:
@Renegade: Yes, you are probably correct, sad to say. Science seems to have become a paid political tool, as Eisenhower warned was a potential. Science students are not being empowered/enabled to think rationally about truth for themselves - the opposite seems to be the objective.
And it's not just science, by all reports. It's a decline across American education. There's a rather interesting take on it here (about US universities): The Decline and Fall of History
Edit: The speaker in the YouTube video (above) is one Niall Campbell Ferguson. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford.
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