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We’re told to ‘follow the science’ — yet some of it is just plain wrong
Key paragraphs: [NYPost] Did Ariely ...Professor Dan Ariely, “superstar honesty researcher”... commit fraud — he says no — or was the data set he got from an insurance company faked for some reason? People are looking into that, but in a way the problem is bigger. Whether or not it was Ariely’s fault, a study that influenced policy turns out to have been baseless. And scientific peer review, often defended as the gold standard for research, didn’t spot the problem.But lots of stuff gets past peer review. Back in 2018, several hoaxers slipped works dubious on their face past peer review and into publication. One study, which made it into the journal Sex Roles, employed "thematic analysis of table dialogue" to determine why heterosexual men go to Hooters, a question that would seem to answer itself. Another looked at "Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon." And a third just scattered some modern buzzwords into translated passages from Mein Kampf and was published under the title "Our Struggle Is My Struggle" in a journal of feminist social work. Meanwhile, ...back at the railroad tracks, Little Nell tried to kick her bound feet and scream post the snotty handkerchief Scarface Al had stuff into her mouth... leading names in the field of social psychology turn out to have committed research fraud to an extent that it tainted the entire field. And as The Wall Street Journal reported, "One noted biostatistician has suggested that as many as half of all published findings in biomedicine are false." Research on "implicit bias" drives all sorts of campus and government policies on race and diversity, but the Implicit Association Test underlying it turns out to be highly dubious. In 2012, the firm Amgen set out to reproduce the results in 53 "landmark" studies in hematology and oncology. Only six of them replicated. Indeed the term "replication crisis" is now often used to refer to a situation in which so many major and influential studies don’t produce the same results — or any results — when other researchers set out to test them. And it really is a crisis. At one level, the problem is that billions in research money is wasted. But really, the problem is worse: Bad research guides behavior — whether it’s government policy or drug-development budgets or energy research — in the wrong direction. Posted by: trailing wife 2021-08-28 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=611029 |