Tag: Scientific Process

Scientific Method in Decline?

Jonah Leher in The New Yorker about the slipperiness of the scientific method:

“The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong With The Scientific Method?”

The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.

The piece, dressed up in a bit of mysticism, is essentially a description of some well known (but too rarely acknowledged) biases in science: Unconscious selection of favorable data; the tendency to publish only positive results, and the effects of randomness. Continue reading “Scientific Method in Decline?”

Krugman on the Santa Fe Institute

He captures my feelings nicely (except for that bit about being excited 20 years ago – 10 in my case):

Oh, and about Roger Doyne Farmer (sorry, Roger!) and Santa Fe and complexity and all that: I was one of the people who got all excited about the possibility of getting somewhere with very detailed agent-based models — but that was 20 years ago. And after all this time, it’s all still manifestos and promises of great things one of these days.

Science is not baseball

I like Nicholas Wade, and think that his latest NY Times piece on basic research is worth reading. However, I take issue with his overly simplistic characterization of how research works:

Basic research, the attempt to understand the fundamental principles of science, is so risky, in fact, that only the federal government is willing to keep pouring money into it. It is a venture that produces far fewer hits than misses….

If basic research is fraught with such a high failure rate, why then does it yield such rich economic returns? The answer is that such government financing agencies as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are like the managers of a stock index fund: they buy everything in the market, and the few spectacular winners make up for all the disasters.

This is not right.* Continue reading “Science is not baseball”

Why CNVs Explain My Kid’s Grades

‘Copy Number Variants’ (CNVs) are hot. A CNV is a sizeable chunk of DNA that’s either missing from your genome or present in extra copies. Chunks of DNA get copied or deleted on a surprisingly frequent basis. We’ve all got CNVs, most cases they are probably benign, but CNVs are becoming an increasingly appreciated as a significant source of medically important genetic variation. ‘Recently appreciated’ because we now have the technology to detect CVNVs reliably.

A recent paper in The Lancet links CNVs with attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder, and find that genetic variants in ADHD occur in the same genes linked with autism and schizophrenia. What this suggests is that CNVs are the reason my ADHD child unfailingly neglects to turn in her completed homework. Continue reading “Why CNVs Explain My Kid’s Grades”

Dear Pew Research Forum. . .

Dear Pew Research Forum,

Your US Religious Knowledge Survey has made a big splash in the news media – especially with the conclusion that atheists/agnostics know more about religion than theists and folks who just don’t care. Thank you for pushing many people I know to the level of completely unbearable from their previous position of mildly bearable when I’m drunk. Continue reading “Dear Pew Research Forum. . .”