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| Science & Technology |
| Most scientists 'can't replicate studies by their peers' |
| 2017-02-25 |
| h/t Instapundit ...From his lab at the University of Virginia's Centre for Open Science, immunologist Dr Tim Errington runs The Reproducibility Project, which attempted to repeat the findings reported in five landmark cancer studies. "The idea here is to take a bunch of experiments and to try and do the exact same thing to see if we can get the same results." You could be forgiven for thinking that should be easy. Experiments are supposed to be replicable. The authors should have done it themselves before publication, and all you have to do is read the methods section in the paper and follow the instructions. Sadly nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth. After meticulous research involving painstaking attention to detail over several years (the project was launched in 2011), the team was able to confirm only two of the original studies' findings. Long live collegiality and affirmative action! |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #8 AlanC, Cold Fusion is probably not a good example. F&P found a real phenomena, replicated dozens of times since. Their error was to attribute it to 'fusion' and not realize impurities in their Platinum was crucial to the experiment working. Which was why initial attempts at replication failed. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2017-02-25 19:58 |
| #7 Think there may be a cross-field issue. People might not be expert in all of the sub-sets of the project space and misinterpret what they're seeing. I'm old enough to remember Cold Fusion. Turned out that the Chemists who did the original project didn't fully understand all the nuances of the particle physics that were involved. In that case science worked properly and all data and methods were made available to others to replicate the results.......... |
| Posted by: AlanC 2017-02-25 14:42 |
| #6 I suspect the main problem is medical doctors doing research who don't understand how to run a proper double blind experiment, and a few other things like confirmation bias. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2017-02-25 14:17 |
| #5 You mean there is now Fake Science? |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2017-02-25 13:14 |
| #4 I suspect the replicability problem arises from drawing conclusions from small data variations and believing they are meaningful even though the variations are less than the level of uncertainty. We think we know more than we know. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2017-02-25 13:04 |
| #3 Experiments are supposed to be replicable. You don't get grant money for replicating experiments. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2017-02-25 12:10 |
| #2 More proof that the so called "Science" peddled by the left is just garbage. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2017-02-25 10:44 |
| #1 Experiments are supposed to be replicable. Oh, come on, that was in the racist homophobe white patriarchy Western Civilization model. In the era of the modern |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2017-02-25 08:21 |