Michael Shermer/Stuart Ritchie-How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth
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- Опубликовано: 1 окт 2024
- Listen to the Science Salon Podcast # 131 (audio-only):
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Science is how we understand the world. Yet failures in peer review and mistakes in statistics have rendered a shocking number of scientific studies useless - or, worse, badly misleading. Such errors have distorted our knowledge in fields as wide-ranging as medicine, physics, nutrition, education, genetics, economics, and the search for extraterrestrial life. As Science Fictions makes clear, the current system of research funding and publication not only fails to safeguard us from blunders but actively encourages bad science - with sometimes deadly consequences. Yet Science Fictions is far from a counsel of despair. Rather, it’s a defense of the scientific method against the pressures and perverse incentives that lead scientists to bend the rules. By illustrating the many ways that scientists go wrong, Ritchie gives us the knowledge we need to spot dubious research and points the way to reforms that could make science trustworthy once again. Shermer and Ritchie also discuss:
• why we need to get science right because science deniers will pounce on such fraud, bias, negligence, and hype in science,
• Daryl Bem’s ESP research and what was wrong with it,
• “psychological priming” and the problem of replication,
• sleep research and the problems in Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep,
• Amy Cuddy and the problem with “Power Posture” research,
• Andrew Wakefield and the biggest fraud in the history of science linking vaccines & autism,
• diet and nutrition research and the complication of linking saturated fats, unsaturated fats, cholesterol, and heart disease,
• Phil Zimbardo‘s Stanford Prison Experiment,
• Samuel Morton’s skulls showing racial differences in head size, Steve Gould’s critique, the critique of Gould, and the critique of the critics of Gould,
• self-plagiarism,
• p values / p hacking
• the Schizophrenia/amaloid cascade hypothesis and why it has been hard to prove,
• the file-drawer problem,
• how to detect fraud, and
• Terror Management Theory and why it is almost certainly wrong.
Stuart Ritchie is a lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London. His main research focus is human intelligence: how it relates to the brain, how much it’s affected by genetics, and how much it can be improved by factors such as education. He is a noted supporter of the Open Science movement, and has worked on tools to reform scientific practice and help scientists become more transparent when reporting their results.
This dialogue was recorded on July 7, 2020 as part of the Science Salon Podcast series hosted by Michael Shermer and presented by The Skeptics Society, in California.
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Every time I watch one of these I find another audio book to get. My library is getting out of control.
Because of this podcast, My Amazon wish-list is getting crazy too. Enough books to last me for years lol
I also feel your pain. I imagine many watchers of this channel probably suffer from "book hoarding" aka Tsundoku. Haha
Same here! I have a stack of books about 3 to 3 and a half feet high, all from this podcast, ha ha!
Great interview.The media loves a single variable that explains the outcome. e.g. the wage gap between men and women, or now racial disparities. It's a bit like religions...let's simplify this for the masses (sic). In any case, the move towards open access publication is long overdue, primarily because the U-systems can't afford the journals, and most of us don't like the idea of signing away our work for exclusive publication. My greatest shock in dealing with journals was the sham of "peer-review"...for many reasons, including the fact that some of the bigger names will steal, of have their students steal, the work. The real problem is this kind of shit works...
I don't get your point re: Milgram and the Stanford prison: are you saying that there's nothing to see here, just because the internal rationalizations of the participants about their behavior are not known?
There's also the real world to take into account, though, isn't there? Ie we see that these behaviors of compliance and self-rationalization for immoral or harmful actions actually happen (and if we self-reflect little, we know that we engage in them ourselves on various scales). Are you saying that just because we don't know what goes on in participants' heads, then making these experiments and trying to interpret them is pointless and gives us nothing to learn?
Fascinating guy. Thank you both. D.A., NYC
The studies on meat are not just correlational. There are studies showing the very physiological mechanisms by which meat causes inflammation. The large correlations between meat consumption and bad health outcomes were not found through dredging. For example, Colin Campbell, one of the researchers of the China study, set out to test exactly that, after he found a causal link between cancer and whey protein in rats. Meat consumption correlates with bad health outcomes in pretty much every cohort and every sample, even though the behavioral associations are often positive. You can increase people's blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar levels and inflammatory markers by putting them on a high-meat diet; similarly, you can eliminate the risk markers by removing meat from people's diets.
Nina Teicholz is full of shit. Her knowledge of nutrition is pretty much non-existent. And she got it all wrong: it's the meat and dairy industries who are constantly corrupting the science. Instead of telling stories, she could look at the meta-scientific evidence. Sure the food pyramid is flawed, but the pyramid Teicholz suggests is much worse. The right food pyramid would be something like this: vegetables on top, then fruits, then beans and whole grains, nuts and seeds, and perhaps a couple of servings of meat per week or so. There is a stretch between the fact that grains are not the most nutritious food and suddenly replacing them for butter.
There is nothing in nutrition more evident than this fact: vegetables are good for health; animal products are not, and industrial foods are worst. When you test mechanisms, the pro-meat warriors say mechanisms are not good evidence. When you do randomized trials, they say the markers are irrelevant; when you study large cohorts prospectively and longitudinally, they say correlations are not causations. Unless people start dropping death right after eating meat, there will always be a "skeptic" out there to questions the findings. It's not like there are a few studies, there are thousands upon thousands, and the vast majority show that vegetables promote health and animal products promote disease.
it's worth pointing out that there is a difference between hard sciences and soft sciences like psychology and sociology. While physics and chemistry are not immune from the problems discussed, they are a lot more robust, and mistakes tend to self heal (like when somebody tries to build on the conclusions). Your mobile phone does not stop working if the theory of molecular bonding is found to be faulty. The scientific method is the same for all science, but our current toolset for hard sciences is just a lot more reliable (and useful i guess).
Shouldn’t one be concerned if a psychology experiment (Prison) at Stanford. Students attending Stanford are considered highly intelligent. What did theses students learn in school and life before going to college. If they may have done it for the month new what does that teach about intellectual higher education? Aren’t most journal articles on research come from one company that reviews and print . Data is far from reviewed before publications. Bias Theory to get recognition their thoughts are correct. Research Scooping
mahalo for promoting this book and offering this writer a platform for summarizing his work. i appreciate how michael shermer demonstrates a commitment to the public's understanding of science and the development of critical thinking skills. i'll add this book to my docket.
Thank you Michael. I knew the earth was young. The emperor has no clothes.
Don't worry, we already knew you guys had bias. The question is, will everyone be open to admitting their bias.
This is why we need super intelligent AI -- to figure out all these causal links (joke).
I love this direction. I've seen this "picture" of science myself. And at times it seems that there are groups of scientists who "circle the wagons" around their research to keep others from damaging their work. As a result I've spent time thinking of how to solve this problem using AI methods. It's a hard problem. Or it seems to be. My proposal is to start something, have others join in and learn what not to do as quickly as we are able. The effort should, hopefully, produce what needs to be done to allow for the assholes, the arrogant, the frauds, the protectionists, etc. .etc . In the end we'd be able to see actual science rather than schlock science.
Oh hell yes!
Shame that the first comment was by a bot/spam-laborer rather than someone who liked the video. Granted with such a long video it takes time to hear and hence actually like/respond-to.
That's why we should take the time to report the bots and trolls rather that scrolling past or flaming them (which ends up priming the algorithm to up-rate them). Thanks for pointing this one out **hat tip**
As an Artist, I respect postmodern art - it is a deconstruction and kind of thumbing your nose at the art before. It is done with respect to that which came earlier ( on the shoulders of those that figured out, what I now - do not have to; in order to push ahead, which is how art progresses). We are doing something different, without centralized movements and more on an individualist view. And while Art is not dead, it just learned to walk; it did have to develop to be in a position to move in the multiple directions it is going.
Whereas, post modernism in science seems like a thumbing the nose at nature/ god / mathematics and the scientific method. Very different in the core of respectfully disagreeing with other men versus disagreeing with the underlying truth of science and the universe. A person saying because I thought about it philosophically then it must be true with as much weight as science because it is my subjective idea of my own personal science.
The keto diet or a plant based diet?
Contratz Michael, it seems you were deplatformed on Joe Rogans Spotify show.
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They forgot about mail in voting.
mail on voting is not science