Error Detection Week — Friday

The Ruiners Are Coming

I’m fried. Been writing all week. Good for the soul, less good for the schedule.

Thankfully, today’s is short, because the story starts a few months ago:

I just didn’t know the ruiners would be so quick.

First up, we have the National Association of Scholars, which sounds impressive but isn’t. It’s a non-member organisation funded primarily through a private foundation.

They published a report called “The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science”. It mentions Wansink in text more than 40 times in text. It cites Nick, Tim, Jordan, John Ioannidis, Andrew Gelman, et al.

A summary grab is here:

Incompetence and fraud together create a borderland of confusion in the sciences. Articles in prestigious journals appear to speak with authority on matters that only a small number of readers can assess critically. Non-specialists generally are left to trust that what purports to be a contribution to human knowledge has been scrutinized by capable people and found trustworthy. Only we now know that a very significant percentage of such reports are not to be trusted. What passes as “knowledge” is in fact fiction. And the existence of so many fictions in the guise of science gives further fuel to those who seek to politicize the sciences. The Lönnstedt and Muller cases exemplify not just scientific fraud, but also efforts to advance political agendas. All of the forms of intellectual decline in the sciences thus tend to converge. The politicization of science lowers standards, and lower standards invite further politicization.

So, to coarsely cut a very long story short, how can we trust that climate change is real?

Following this, Scott Pruitt (the one man ethical shitstorm in charge of the EPA) decried non-reproducibility “The era of secret science at EPA is coming to an end”. And then an order was issued for the EPA only to take science seriously if it met ‘full reproducibility standards’ or some such, preferably with open data.

Basically, both of the efforts above appear to be attempts to co-opt open science and replicability concerns into political positions because they are presently convenient.

And that brings us to right now.

These topics were always going to be brought up when convenient.

And it makes their concerns MORE, not LESS, urgent.

Because the irritating part is: both of these messages, written by snakes as they may be, have good points in them. They are partly reasonable, in fact, they have a general thrust that most progressive scientists would agree with. They then use that content to say things which are vaguely horrifying and highly self-motivated.

Basically, the ruiners are here.

So it would be expedient to fix things faster.

However, reform in science is a lot slower than a press release or a white paper. We have a lot of work to do.

A LOT.

And don’t be fooled by the chat right now, if you’re in the ‘Reform Science’ bubble. While I’m here — a bubble is a dumb name for a mutually-reinforced opinion. Bubbles are clear, hilarious, and fragile. But people who agree with each other are occasionally opaque, as serious as emphysema, and as self-reinforcing as a box girder bridge. That bubble is tungsten. And we have to get out of ours and into everyone else’s.