Is Science Self Correcting?

Scientists wish, but it’s not. At least in the short term:

Academic scientists readily acknowledge that they often get things wrong. But they also hold fast to the idea that these errors get corrected over time as other scientists try to take the work further. Evidence that many more dodgy results are published than are subsequently corrected or withdrawn calls that much-vaunted capacity for self-correction into question. There are errors in a lot more of the scientific papers being published, written about and acted on than anyone would normally suppose, or like to think.

Various factors contribute to the problem. Statistical mistakes are widespread. The peer reviewers who evaluate papers before journals commit to publishing them are much worse at spotting mistakes than they or others appreciate. Professional pressure, competition and ambition push scientists to publish more quickly than would be wise. A career structure which lays great stress on publishing copious papers exacerbates all these problems. “There is no cost to getting things wrong,” says Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia who has taken an interest in his discipline’s persistent errors. “The cost is not getting them published.”

Yup. And peer review is not much of a quality control, when it becomes “pal review.”

This partially explains why there’s so much crap science in climate research. Probably for nutrition as well.

Read the whole thing. Undue faith in the current process of evaluating and correcting junk science will be appropriately reduced.

Oh, and then there’s this:

Statisticians have ways to deal with such problems. But most scientists are not statisticians.

Professor Hockey Stick certainly isn’t. Which is why it was so easy for people who do understand statistics to publicly pull his Nobel-winning pants down. And of course, Paul Krugman isn’t, either.

[Update a couple minutes later]

OK, one more excerpt, just to demonstrate why you should RTWT:

The idea that there are a lot of uncorrected flaws in published studies may seem hard to square with the fact that almost all of them will have been through peer-review. This sort of scrutiny by disinterested experts—acting out of a sense of professional obligation, rather than for pay—is often said to make the scientific literature particularly reliable. In practice it is poor at detecting many types of error.

John Bohannon, a biologist at Harvard, recently submitted a pseudonymous paper on the effects of a chemical derived from lichen on cancer cells to 304 journals describing themselves as using peer review. An unusual move; but it was an unusual paper, concocted wholesale and stuffed with clangers in study design, analysis and interpretation of results. Receiving this dog’s dinner from a fictitious researcher at a made up university, 157 of the journals accepted it for publication.

Dr Bohannon’s sting was directed at the lower tier of academic journals. But in a classic 1998 study Fiona Godlee, editor of the prestigious British Medical Journal, sent an article containing eight deliberate mistakes in study design, analysis and interpretation to more than 200 of the BMJ’s regular reviewers. Not one picked out all the mistakes. On average, they reported fewer than two; some did not spot any.

And yet some people think that we should base multi-trillion-dollar policy decisions on this crap.

ObamaCare’s Useful Idiots

A round up.

Sadly, some of them inhabit this comments section.

[Update a while later]

The abysmal, pathetic ObamaCare roll out:

After the search for bin Laden, the Obama administration’s biggest manhunt has turned out to be for someone—anyone—who managed to actually sign up for and enroll in an insurance plan offered by the federal exchange. As The Miami Herald declared in a recent headline, “Obamacare enrollees become urban legend.” So far, you’ve got a better chance of turning up a gerbil escapee scurrying down Richard Gere’s leg than finding a couple dozen satisfied customers of healthcare.gov. During a legendarily awful Daily Show appearance, Sebelius lowered expectations yet further by saying that HHS will release enrollment figures on a monthly basis. Right after all the parades for record-setting grain harvests and successful launches of canine cosmonauts.

The first high-profile case of an Obamacare enrollee was paraded around the mainstream media like a captured U2 pilot in the old Soviet Union. But he turned out to be…well, not so much. On October 4, my colleague Peter Suderman broke the story that Obamacare poster boy Chad Henderson had not actually purchased insurance for either himself or his father. Henderson—a paid activist for Organizing for America, an outgrowth of the president’s re-election committee—eventually admitted to The Washington Post, “I have not purchased a specific plan.”

The broken web site didn’t help.

“Myself”

What is the purpose of that word? I hear people use it, and I’ve never heard a proper grammatic usage that couldn’t be simply replaced by “me.” (Ex. “He gave it to her and myself.”). Used as a subject (“He and myself walked over there) it isn’t even grammatical. I could see it as used for emphasis: “I, myself, don’t agree with that.” But other than that, I think it’s an overused, and really useless word.

Thoughts?

ObamaCare Supporters

…go through the stages of grief.

Somehow, being leftists, I don’t think they’ll ever get to acceptance. Bargaining’s as far as they’ll go, and then only to buy time until they can come up with a new strategy.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The disastrous roll out could spell doom. It certainly deserves it. And the Democrats deserve the accruing political fallout.

How Congress Screwed Up Human Spaceflight

There’s a good piece over at the Washington Times:

Imagine what could be done if resources being thrown into the furnace for the Space Launch System was repurposed for technology incubation, commercial projects, or heaven forbid, actual missions. For the cost of SLS, you could afford close to 170 launches to the ISS, 55 missions to Mars with cargo or for probes, or more than 220 Falcon Heavy launches. There are opportunity costs to funding bad projects, and funding SLS costs mankind nearly 500 opportunities to actually go to space.

But it gets it wrong at the end:

When President Obama came to office, NASA was working on the Constellation Program, its most ambitious project in decades. The plan would have seen the United States return to the moon and establish a permanent base as a first step toward the manned exploration of the solar system. Fiercely lauded in the scientific and space community, it even earned the rare but ringing endorsement of Neil Armstrong. However, this highly ambitious project was clumsily canceled by the Obama administration in the name of cost-cutting in 2010 — only to be replaced with the government monstrosity known as SLS a year later.

No. A reader would imagine that Constellation was just peachy, but it was just as programmatically disastrous as SLS, slipping more than a year per year in schedule with continuously ballooning costs. It (like SLS) needed to be cancelled. The mistake of the administration was not in cancelling it, but in not working with Congress in doing so, or providing a coherent explanation of what the replacement was to be. Constellation may have been “fiercely lauded” by some in the scientific and space community, but it was just as fiercely, and justly, attacked as a barrier, rather than a mean of serious human spaceflight beyond earth orbit. It’s curious that Mr. Jacobs seems to understand the current problem without understanding the actual history that led up to it.

Gwynne Shotwell At ISPCS

Aim of her talk is to embolden those who want to enter the space industry, and encourage those doing it. Lows and highs in the industry, but right now lots of highs.

Company formed in March, 2002, she was seventh employee to bring in business, ended year with fourteen. 2006 Falcon 1 first flight, lot of people never involved in industry before. Couldn’t fly from Vandenberg because of safety concerns, had to go out of Kwajalein. Learned a lot on first failure — SpaceX became a very different company that day. 2006 also year they won COTS agreement, historical public-private partnership. Created Falcon 9 and Dragon, and made US competitive in space launch again.

Moved into new cavernous facility in Hawthorne in 2008 (now running out of space). Also year of first successful Falcon 1 flight. Also won Cargo Resupply Contract. 618 employees at end of that year.

2010, successfully flew Falcon 9 twice, and successfully recovered Dragon capsule. Signed largest commercial contract ever with Iridium (half a billion dollars), ended year with 1200 employees.

Didn’t fly in 2011, because getting Dragon ready to fly. Flew successfully to ISS in 2012, developed new version of Falcon 9, 2000 employees.

Showing Falcon 9R launch video.

What’s next?

Into regular operations. First flight for SES out of the Cape in less than a month, with another commercial launch, and four flights to ISS. Developing suits, seats, life support and escape systems for Dragon to carry people. First flight in about three years, don’t know if it will be NASA or SpaceX astronauts, first flight just to orbit and return.

Falcon Heavy still in work, expecting $1100/lb. 53 metric tons. Grasshopper more in the media than Elon this days, a rock star. Showing latest Grasshopper video. “This is not fake.” 25 people working Grasshopper program, about 3000 who want to. Moving to Spaceport America for Falcon-9R test vehicle. Showing photo of first stage three meters above the ocean fully intact (didn’t survive impact). “Really close to full and rapid reuse of stages.” First time photo has been shown. Not high resolution, but clearly a full vertical stage. First flight in New Mexico hopefully in December.

We want to go to Mars, think it’s the right place to go. Describing similarity of Mars to earth in terms of geographical features — grand canyons, volcanoes, rocks. Showing Mars landscape, with similarity to American southwest.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!