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Información de la obraScience Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth por Stuart Ritchie
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. The title summarizes the book's topic well. Chapter 2 recounts some egregious cases of fraud, like Stapel and Macchiarini, who made up data and lied about patients dying and suffering, respectively. But perhaps more worrying is the likely more widespread low-level p-hacking, selective reporting of findings and various small adjustments of the analysis and data to obtain publishable results that he turns to next. I know from personal experience that these are big issues in social science, but learnt here that they exist also in the harder sciences. The unfortunate result is that we cannot trust the scientific literature. I believe Ritchie is spot on when he identifies the perverse incentives faced by researchers as a major factor in these problems. Good publications are the key to tenure, promotions, salary increases, funding, prestige and the competition to obtain these publications have tempted many to tweak their analysis, underplay uncertainty and oversell their findings. What can be done? There is room for more honest behavior from individuals, but it is too much to hope for that that will be all that is needed. In the final chapter, Fixing science, Ritchie highlights a 2016 meta-analysis on antidepressant drug trials that illustrates many of the preceding problems and details how publication bias, p-hacking/outcome switching, spin, and citation bias may distort the scientific literature [The cumulative effect of reporting and citation biases on the apparent efficacy of treatments: the case of depression by de Vries and others.]. Instead of focusing on a specific solution, Ritchie lists a number of possible improvements. Some of these are ok, though not attacking the more structural problems or seem to labor intensive to do so, like naming and shaming, independent investigation of misconduct, algorithms to detect fake data/images/etc., hiring on merit rather than bean counting and a review service for pre-prints. Suggestions that seem to me to have more potential are journals being more acceptive of replications and null results (but needs to be accompanied by credit given by others), more comprehensive analysis like multiverse approaches and pre-registration, ideally combined with reviews in a registered report format. However, the problems with the trustworthiness of the scientific literature are so large that we should try multiple approaches. Highly recommended. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
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"Science is how we understand the world. Yet critical flaws in peer review, statistical methods, and publication procedures have rendered a shocking number of scientific studies useless-or worse, badly misleading. Drawing on surprising new data from "meta-science" (the science of how science works), Science Fictions documents the errors that have distorted our knowledge on issues as varied as cancer biology, nutrition, genetics, immigration, education, and extraterrestrial life. Stuart Ritchie's own work challenging an infamous psychology experiment helped spark what's now widely known as the "replication crisis," the realization that many supposed scientific truths cannot be relied upon. Now, he reveals the very human biases, mistakes, and deceptions that undermine the scientific endeavor: from contamination in science labs to the secret vaults of failed studies that nobody gets to see; from outright cheating with fake data to the more common but still ruinous temptation to exaggerate mediocre results for a shot at scientific fame. Yet Science Fictions is far from a counsel of despair. Rather, it's a defense of the scientific method against the pressures and perverse incentives that lead scientists to bend the rules. By illustrating the ways that science goes wrong, Ritchie gives us the knowledge we need to spot dubious research, and points the way to reforms that might save science from itself"-- No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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He spends a lot of time on the reproducibility crises, p-hacking and other statistical cheating, and many other issues that one hears about when science problems get in the news.
This book has been well reviewed in general publications, but I was curious how science journals would review it. The only review I found in a professional science periodical (in the ultra-prestigious Nature) was basically positive with a few criticisms.
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