Earlier this week fellow tracker Paul Raeburn rightly took apart (previous post) a published argument in Slate that because more US scientists are Democrats than are Republican, and because climate change would favor Democratic-type big government policies to solve it, that climate scientists are therefore consciously or not tilting their data and analyses to favor the Democratic Party’s agenda. Further, the author suggested, it may not quite be fraud but the consensus that greenhouse forcing is one monster of a problem is an instance of politically and ideologically blinkered error. Paul asked, correctly, big talk and where’re the data to show that Democrats do science differently than do Republicans?
Fine. But the general idea of scientific evidence as human construct is getting a lot of play in other forums. No better example, and one much harder to dismiss, is in the Dec. 13 issue of the New Yorker in an article by science writer Jonah Lehrer, a freelancer and contributing editor at Wired. It’s behind a subscription and pay-to-play wall, but get your hands on it if you can. This article is a mind-bender.
The thesis is that most published results in journals are never replicated, or if they are, the original dramatic results that got a conclusion into a big journal tend to fade with time. Most of this examples are drawn from the behavioral, biological, and general health literature. He has so many instances to exhibit that one thinks there is clearly something to this.
Reliable blogger Keith Kloor is also bringing attention to the piece this week, and notes that it resonates strongly with an article in the Atlantic by David H. Freedman on the flimsy statistics used to support many conclusions published in medical journals.
Both these stories are must-read by science writers.
The New Yorker story is full of anecdotes, anguished quotes from scientists worrying about why their initial results are not standing up, and such terms as publication bias, the decline effect, significance chasing, and verbal overshadowing.
I must say I don’t much like the hed. It’ll attract readers but is not backed up by the story: THE TRUTH WEARS OFF / Is there something wrong with the scientific method? ; I don’t believe Lehrer thinks truth itself is pulling fast ones on us, but that people have a hard time seeing it. As for scientific method – you know, keen observation, stout attention to statistical significance, replication of results, a reliance on doubt as a stronger guide to reality than faith, and so on – the story does not suggest there is any better road toward truth. Paraphrasing the NYorker story, what’s wrong is that, given human frailty, the scientific method’s standards are easier to recite than to follow.
As a physical sciences snob, it went down pretty easy with me to read that in the behavior and medical sciences the reliability of published findings is erratic at best. But then I read this from Lehrer, after he had already discussed the diminishing evidence (ie failure of replication) for some data on antipsychotic meds:
“The same holds for any number of phenomena, from the disappearing benefits of second-generation antipsychotics to the weak coupling ratio exhibited by decaying neutrons, which appears to have fallen by more than ten standard deviations between 1969 and 2001. Even the law of gravity hasn’t always been perfect at predicting real world phenomena (in one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.) Despite these findings, second-generation antipsychotics are still widely prescribed, and our model of the neutron hasn’t changed. The law of gravity remains the same.”
Well! Really? By contrast to the extensive detail he provided from the softer sciences, this is all he has on physics and such. One is left wondering what the ten standard deviations in the fine coupling constant mean in absolute numbers, and what physicists say about changes in understanding of neutron decay physics and whether they are distressing. Ditto with boreholes and measurement of gravity. Without more, I can easily assume that that if the data have waggled around it’s just because the measurements are pretty hard to make. Further, gravity and its underlying physics are among the perennial hot items among theorists and experimenters alike. Physicists love to see data change and to refute what’s already in textbooks. So if the numbers in the manuals are changing, that seems like a good thing. Obeisance to an unchanging “law of gravity” doesn’t reflect modern physics, either, as many sorts of alternates are continually blinking in and out, like virtual particles along an event horizon. (for more see update below)
Neither the Atlantic nor New Yorker articles address one likely, obvious cultural impact of such stone-casting at the glass houses of science. Climate change contrarians and skeptics may celebrate them as vindication of the idea that, conscious or not, global warming is a concoction of liberal thinking. That’s sort of possible, sort of. I’d mark a boundary between the overt bias one might find at Greenpeace or the Natural Resources Defense Council – not that it’s inappropriate in such groups – and the subtle-at-most bias found among university-level PhD researchers. Even if, as held in the Slate article that Paul Raeburn took apart in his post, about half of scientists are Democrats any subconscious bias among them surely cannot explain why way more than half of peer reviewed climate change articles accept the consensus that the planet has warmed, is warming, we probably done it, and we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
In a related topic: A bit of ‘Democratic’ climate news?
I am betting that, while I don’t know, the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has more liberals asssociated with it than conservatives. Just guessing. And I’d apply that to its director Tom Yulsman. Just guessing, again. But here’s a post to ponder at its website:
- CEJournal – Tom Yulsman: The heat goes on… ; Yulsman digs up data hinting strongly the globe is about to finish the warmest year in the modern, recorded era, and warmest in millenniums if one goes by proxy data like tree rings and ice cores used to make hockey sticks. Dunno if liberal bias is at work here in skewing the numbers. My guess: no.
*UPDATE: Not sure what “weak coupling ratio for neutron decay ” means, I sent by email to a theoretical physicist prominent in public discussion and who has his eye on large issues, Arizona State U’s Lawrence Krauss, the graf in the New Yorker on that and gravity measurements.
Here is a slightly amended rendition of his reply:
“The physics references are (deposit scatological bovine expletive here) … the neutron data have fallen, reflecting under-estimation of errors, but the lower lifetime doesn’t change anything having to do with the model of the neutron, which is well understood and robust … And as for discrepancies with gravity, the deep borehole stuff is interesting but highly suspect. Moreover, all theories conflict with some experiments, because not all experiments are right.” / LMK
– Charlie Petit
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