"Fraud and Misconduct Threatening Scientific Research

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"False Positives: Fraud and Misconduct are Threatening Scientific Research."
"High-profile cases and modern technology are putting scientific deceit under the microscope."
by Alok Jha
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/ ... d-practice


Edit. Also see Richard Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement address, "Cargo Cult Science"
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/30 ... goCult.pdf

Last edited by Logan5 on 23 Sep 2012, 2:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

Seeing the IPCC accept total fabrications and complete nonsense and publish it as if it were fact doesn't make me at all confident in the direction that some science is taking.

In due course, following the protocols of duplication of experiment, corroboration by independent observers, errors and fraud will be winnowed out. It is not instantaneous but it will happen eventually.

The history of science is littered with busted theories and disproved observations. Some were fraud and some were just plain old error.

That is why we don't accept caloric, phlogiston or lumeniferous aether anymore.

ruveyn

So it turns out most psychology is bunk.

I could have told you that.

I mean I once heard of a study that "concluded" spoilers aren't disappointing? Oh really? ever have anything spoiled for you before?

Along with sociology, philosophy, theology and good part of economics and all of political (ha ha) "science". They are all nonsense and balderdash. Science is basically sound (errors and all) and science consists of physics and its relative along with geology and other rock collecting.

ruveyn

Science is largely bullocks.

Read "The Science Delusion" by Rupert Sheldrake.
Scientists are not impartial. They have their dogmas, and they stick to them. Almost every scientific "fact" you know has been proven to be wrong.

Solids, Liquids, Gasses, Charges, Forces, have some basis in reality.

The main user is Biology, which lacks motive, has no goals, intent, and trys to see what it can do. Why are Spiders? may sound like a question, but has no answer.

Biology has the same answer as, Why does a dog lick his balls? Because he can.

The view of progressing to higher forms of life is held by creatures than have no natural shelter, food supply, and cast naked into the world would not even be prey, they would die within days just from their own inability to survive. Fraud and Misconduct cover most of their survival skills.

Currently we have more Scientists, doing more Research, at a greater cost, than ever before, with less results, than when it was just a personal vice.

We have University Scientists, Government Scientists, Corporate Scientists, but none opening their own shop in the mall. The big money is made by Actors playing Scientists in Commercials. to the unlearned, it is like the Pope pushing his approved brand of tooth paste.

Were I to pay a $100,000 for a Scientific study of why Global Warming is part of Intelligent Design, Manifest Destiny, that is just what I would get.

Birth Control is the main cause of sex? Scientific Proof, with pages of Mathematics.

Disposable diapers cause Autism, no problem.

Like Politics, Science is the best that money can buy.

This statement was proven by an independant lab.

This surprises you because??? ---- some examples

More than 30 years ago I read about a US Government funded study that found "Large doses of Vitamin C had no curative effect" The problem was that the proponents were saying that the minimum dose for the effect was 1 gram and recommended 3 grams a day. The "Massive" dose used by the government researchers to prove these Vitamin C proponents wrong == 100mg daily. At 1/10th minimum effective dose - of course nothing happened. To this day we have little idea as to the effectiveness of a couple of grams of Vitamin C at fending off illness in part because of worthless studies like this one. I have one word for this study --- FRAUD! -

also 30 years ago...
The only reason we know that a small dose of Aspirin will help people survive heart attack is because the company that set out to prove that their very expensive drug with lots of side effects worked better than aspirin chose to use 1/10 the normal aspirin tablet size of the time to insure that their product would out preform the aspirin. Surprise - Surprise - even at 32mg the aspirin did nearly as well as the drug the company was trying to sell as rates of 500 times the price. Again it is simple easy to spot fraud if one only looks. Today's recommended dose is 40 to 80mg a day.

A couple of years ago I ran a across a glucosamine and chondroitin study that used 1/20th the recommended dose, I guess those paying for this study did not want to chance another aspirin type outcome. I have seen later write-ups about this study - and low and behold no mention of doses used - but lots and lots about how useless the products is. The last handout I saw was printed by an oh so helpful drug company that makes some really expensive alternatives to these compounds.

These are fraudulent studies - where the study was done - but in such a way to taint the outcome.

Yet a few years back there was a news report of a drug that had passed FDA safety test that was killing a large number of those who were taking it. It turns out that one of the drug test firms was run by a doctor that was making up results out of the air. Nearly all the patients he listed in his study had in fact died years before the study was done. Needless to say the drug in question was quickly withdrawn once the news of how willfully fraudulent the tests had been. The truly frightening thing about this was that this man drug test company was a real favorite with the drug companies and he had been involved in dozens of drug trials.

Then lets move to - complete incompetence in running a study -- about 10 years ago a heart doctor had reported a study he had done "proving that the diet he was pushing worked better than other treatments for heart disease". Here is his statement about setting up the study. First he randomly chose a group of patients from his practice - then he carefully chose which patients went into which group in the study - The man seemed completely unaware of the fact that changing the order of the selection process violated the random selection principal - and with this violation in this step his study was worthless.

Or how about the recent report that raved about how Autism is mushrooming out of control we are in a massive epidemic! - In reality the study only checked the autism of those brought in for treatment to a hand full of facilities - there was no effort to actually work from a general population - yet when reporting on this no mention was made about the fact that there was no context relating to the general population. Nor was it mentioned any where in the write ups on this "study" that the rules and definitions defining what constitute "autism spectrum disorder" have changed radically in the last few years thus rendering time based studies - worthless. A classic case of people with personal axes to grind.

This all boils down to "bad science" which is really not science as all. This is all greed, stupidity, and malfeasance trying to pass itself off as science. It has been around sense before science came into existence and I am afraid will remain with us for all time. Unfortunately, one of the jobs of scientist is to ferret out this crap and toss it out of science realm so that they may proceed with true efforts in their field.

While there is science in the fields of psychology, sociology, economics and medicine to name a few of the "social sciences" the problem is - in these fields it is quite easy to pass off faked and sloppy results due to the fact that work in these fields is expensive, results often require a great deal of interpretation, there is great profit in falsifying results, and of course there is always the nut with an ax to grind. So always and I mean always use caution when reading in these fields.

It is this very high degree of uncertainty in the social sciences that leads me to conclude that 1. we do not know just what percentage of the population is Asperger's or even "on the spectrum". 2. Just what constitutes an Asperger's trait and what is caused by outside actions upon us. 3. Find a method for Identifying Asperger's people without the need to depend on some charleton psychiatrist waving his wand and intoning "you are one".

PS. I do not necessary side with any side of the above mentioned studies - My point is that at no time can we make any valid scientific conclusions from the noted studies.

Except for the solid state physics that made your computer and this forum possible.

Except for the aerodynamics and thermodynamics that make jet engines and airplanes possible.

Except for the electronics that make radio and t.v. possible.

Yes. it is large bullocks except for the part that isn't.

ruveyn

If you really want to be absolutely sure about anything in this world, it is mathematics.

In mathematics, theorems and their proofs are scrutinized in great detail and are laid completely open for anyone else who can follow the logic and understands the definitions and other theorems. There is no hiding behind proprietary anything or behind authority.

You can depend on Mathematical Proofs because everything is in full view to anyone who cares to look. It doesn't matter how many honors someone has earned in their lifetime, you don't accept anything as truth in Mathematics merely on their say-so.

On the contrary, there's plenty of bullocks in both of those.

How typical of the scientifically ignorant. You confuse the medium with the message. That is the kind of intellectual incompetence I expect from professors of sociology.

ruveyn

Eh? Just because something works does not follow that the way it is explained makes any sense at all.

Most of the confusion is added in the New Physics, be it Quantum, Strings, where the long working model is being shown to be bullocks, and the new form of bullocks is trying to be a better fit.

Also the new media of threads that produced a multisided non conversation.

The two are very related, in that the language, means of transporting data, which could be information, some fact, a process, or question, disagreement, is illdefined. While claiming some Science Standard of Knowledge, it is delivered in words which are known for being slippery.

Science is the focus on the simple, which misses the larger social use of language. Science can be exact, yet still useless to human life as we know it.

Which came first, the fact or the function. It is all Electrons may have some truth, but I was sending a text message.

When DARPA created the Internet, I am sure they projected it would become half Porn, half Teens, and form the Hybred Facebook. Nope, they had no idea, and the Science already existed.

Now that we function as Neurons in the Globe Brain, we seem less able to continplate the whole.

According to one view Dark Energy and Matter are the driving forces that lead to human posting on this thread. If it is all energy, then Microsoft is tapping the nodes for excess energy, and running their company on our electron donations.

Electric does seem to be what drives our intelligence, and ability to deal over distances. Electric is the life force, so who knows what damage we cause above the material plane. Our machines may be snatching Accended Masters and forcing them through power lines to run washing machines and TVs.

Having all the answers, assures that they are wrong, and stand in the way of even creating better questions.

Strictly speaking that is true. More over for every empirically correct and still un-falsified physical theory there are an infinite number of theories that will make the same (so far correct) set of predictions. So we can NEVER prove a physical theory is true, the way we can prove that a mathematical theorem truly follows logically from the axioms of a mathematical theory. In fact, if the theory is complicated enough to formulate Peano's axioms for arithmetic the consistency of such a theory can never be proved within that theory.

Even so, if you take Popper's falsificationist approach, a theory which explains (i.e. correctly predicts) a large range of phenomena and effects and is yet to be falsified empirically should be provisionally accepted then all is well. Currently quantum physics, relativity theory meets Poppers criterion for being scientific and has a good enough experimental track record to be accepted as the basis of engineer and applied scientific principles.

I am fairly sure that no theory, however good empirically is protected against someday being empirically falsified when a contrary fact is discovered. And even if a positively true scientific theory existed we could never show it was absolutely true because we can never know for sure that a contrary fact will never be found.

If you take the cash value of physical theories to be the sum total of empirical and technological benefits, we can say physical science has paid off and there is no reason whatever to abandon it. Furthermore the protocols of scientific acceptability ( internal consistency, empirical corroboration and lack of falsification despite attempts to falsify) have served us well to get rid of bogus or defective theories.

Go with the cash value of the science and do not be in the thrall of some philosophical theory of perfection.

ruveyn

I do take the cash value, and if I had to really know what I am doing, doing it would be impossible.

I am a skeptic in several directions. First for that Higher Order thing, I may still consider Pluto a planet, but it does not affect computer repair.

I do get by in computers, which with hardware, software, things that only a human can screw up, and some problems that Demonic Possession seems to cover, I still manage to drive them out, and restore the machine.

Mostly I understand what is not working.

Current project, the main switch in my bike headlight, which is a simple brain made of a fiber board, some brass strips, wire clips and solder. It does the job. While it is simple, compared to a motherboard, it is more complex because I have to think of the flowthrough, clean contacts, and the current.

It suffered voltage drop between in and out, which threw everything downstream off. I know I am building Electron paths, what obstructs, but this downward bit, the Electron, is just an old word for I do not know, but it does this.

At the top and bottom, I run into the unknowable, but I am good at making the middle work.

In both old bikes and computers, it is Electron paths, which could be better designed if, Electrons were better defined.

Something of the same when I sought a stronger material, Carbon Fiber, Carbon=Carbon bonds, where the lattice structure is better defined.

There is a middle where us clunky apes fit, which is my center of everything,

In writing I do not start at the beginning, or consider an end. The meat of a story is the peak action which fills the middle, which I work outward in several directions, besides a lead in and a conclusion. The story teaches me what else to add, the same for invention, building out from a core idea.

My demands are a better toolkit and less absolute meaning.

And some sleep.

A related article about the questionable research practices in the pharmaceutical industry:

"The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal"
by Ben Goldacre
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012 ... n-goldacre