I do a fair amount of peer reviewing. A number of papers are written by those who have an agenda, and try to skew results to show it. They do not follow the scientific method: set up an experiment that deals with this hypothesis only. They know not what a confounder is, nor know when to use meta analysis [1].
They are too credulous. They trust their results overmuch. And they bring fields into disrepute.
For all too often such papers are published.
So now that people understand what the news media is all about, and have a word to express it, it’s obvious that Fake News is here to stay. Which is a great thing; it’s quite accurate after all, even if Fake News gets thrown around to everywhere the enemy tribe says. What I don’t get is why the concept is yet to be extended to other extremely similar cases of content being sold as objective truth when it’s obviously just some story spun for political purposes. I’m talking of course of the scientific establishment. 90% of which is Fake Science. Global Warming? Fake Science. Social psychology? Fake Science. Economics? Fake Science. All of it.
Usually when some media apparatus or somebody on social media came up with some lame scientific paper and used it to justify anything, people who actually knew something about it would caution about Gell-mann amnesia. Which is a great concept to have. But it lacks the punch and ready accessibility of Fake Science. So let me propose that when any scientific article which isn’t about engineering or hasn’t been replicated n times and resulted in an actually workable and useful idea be deemed Fake Science. Just throw it around on Twitter, I think it’ll stick.
The problem we have is not merely one of fraud and fakery. It is that the idea of holding predictions to account and saying if the prediction is wrong, your model is wrong… is broken.
You don’t always get the results you expect. Your control condition is effective. Your experimental condition is no better. You are going down a passage that leads to nowhere. For every breakthrough there are a hundred researchers looking in dead ends, and their work is valuable, because it stops another thousand researchers following them.
Failure is built in, or was, until grants got involved.
Another angle is that the progressive approach to academia parallel’s the Nazi regime’s approach to aryanization of subjects, which even extended to the hard sciences. There was not just a German cultural history of literature and art to celebrate, but also the German way to interpret sciences. With progressivism, all research areas pass through the race, gender or sexuality prism and come out on the other side properly progressive.
There is something darker, though, about what progressives are doing, namely engaging in an explicit rejection of what modern science is based on: mathematics.
Without math, what experiments, comparisons, measurements, and broader conceptual conclusions can be derived? Mathematics and the focus on grounding science in mathematics is what separates modern science from the medieval period and classic studies. Technology did have a hand in this, as Europeans developed the mechanical clock and telescope, which allowed for accurate measurement and standardization between researchers. One could debate the value of the clock itself for the scientific and industrial revolutions that began in Europe.
These inventions allowed for the scientific method’s use by amateurs, provided they adhered to the process and tools with appropriate review. They not only had to use the system of weights and measures in a replicable way, but there had to be checks that the weights and measures were accurate in the first place. Did you run the experiment–forget the result of the experiment for a moment–did you run the experiment, and did it prove or disprove the hypothesis? This is where the Lysenkoism element of progressive academics comes into play because results do not conform to their hypotheses.
The emergence of modern science placed a focus on the experimental because it could be measurable. With the advances of Copernicus, Brahe, and of course Newton, science became less about the debate and reasoning and more about the proof. The models could explain exactly where a body would be or how fast, long, and powerful motion would be. Newton synched the heavens and earth under the same force.
The progressive coalition needs to place its members in academia, which functions as a patronage and jobs machine for the Left–not simply an ideological laboratory. There are only so many seats available in the guild for ethnic, gender, and sexuality studies. To stuff members into other subjects takes time, and the STEM fields are subjects that progressive voting coalition blocs score poorly on with regularity. There is also, of course, problem of pushing the boundaries of STEM to break new ground, yet trying to do so with weaker students. The demand is great, but the supply is weak.
Progressives are now making a strong attempt at infiltrating the sciences, particularly by introducing and intermingling concepts like race, racism, cosmology and the time space continuum. Climate change itself needs to consider the gender differences of interpretation and effects. Gender even affects how one can study the forests and how forest study and research is done. Evidence-based medicine is a problem that gender scholars can address.
That last link is key. The abstract cites the “social nature of science,” which constitutes a rejection of the idea that science is based on mathematics, experimentation, and examining the data that experiments yield. The reason for introducing the concept of the social nature of science is because progressives have run into the problem of science and reality not aligning with their belief system and ideology.
Reality can, in fact, be avoided in research. It can be confined and suppressed, but it is harder to ignore in the hard sciences that have traditionally used experiments, math, and measurements for exploring the fundamental structure of nature.
Peer review won’t work if you can select your peers. Many journals allow this. Other journals just reject papers, as not meeting the editors interests. Some journals are fly by night affairs, run by enthusiasts.
Their fake science will be peer reviewed. They will argue from consensus.
It is the results that break their model that are more interesting, and lead to new paradigms. For new facts do not care about grants or peer process or social science.
Facts are, and need no defence.
And those who argue my epistemology is old fashioned and outdated either do not live by their post modern relativistic approach to gravity, or need the products of a century’s research into psychosis.
[1] There are two reasons for meta analysis. The first is that no one has done a big controlled study with adequate power but there are enough small studies that you can combine them to avoid the expense and cost to society and patients. The second is that there are twenty treatments and it is impractical to do a twenty armed study by the data one has can be combined to estimate which are the preferable options.
The real reason a meta analysis is done is because you need to demonstrate to the ethical committee and the funder that the answer is not available from the data one has already.
Both require that the patient groups are very similar. .All too often they are not, and the meta analysis is comparing not three sets of oranges, but oranges, bananas and a gorilla.