Fake science
What to do with scientific lies
The dark side of all science is the manipulation of results. It sounds terribly prosaic, but the consequences of such frauds can be no less impressive than plans to take over the world.
Not so long ago, at the annual congress of the American Society of Cell Biology, disappointing statistics were published: out of 53 medical studies, 47 had results that were not reproducible. Reproducibility of the results, as you know, is almost the main criterion for the reliability of the work: if you have something turned out, then it should turn out for someone else; if you have an object falling down with an acceleration of 9.8 m/ s 2, then it should fall the same for me. Of course, if the result was not reproduced, this can be explained by some natural reasons, but 6 reliable works out of 53 are, you will agree, no way.
Don't believe a scientist who says that his discovery will change the world. (Photo by M. Deutsch.)
Here, obviously, the "human factor" begins to act. Researchers are also people, with their cherished concepts and theories, they want recognition, respect, self-respect, and money, after all. High-profile stories about falsifications sometimes go beyond the limits of the scientific community, it is enough to recall the "legendary" Korean researcher Woo-Suk Hwang with his mythical cloned stem cells. Or the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel, who was called the "master of data" for his rare luck (this nickname remained with him, but acquired a slightly different coloring). Or a story with a viral causative agent of chronic fatigue syndrome. Information about non-reproducible results and apologies for "misleading" is constantly published in scientific journals, and fraud takes place in all disciplines, from dentistry to neuroscience.
This problem, as you can understand, is socio-psychological, and the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science devoted an entire issue to it in the outgoing year. In it, psychologists are trying to figure out what exactly makes scientists, willingly or unwittingly, falsify the results and what can be done about it. The first advice that researchers give is to try to understand the incentives of scientific work. It often happens that the driving force is the desire to achieve results as soon as possible. There may be many reasons for this: the need to get a grant, win a competition for a position, have time to publish, etc. It is difficult to publish in an elite magazine if all your data is just confirmation of the results of your predecessors, and without such a publication it is difficult to get a grant. It turns out that the modern researcher is "sharpened" for the speed of work, but not for accuracy, and as a result, the logs are covered by a shaft of raw work.
According to psychologists, it is possible to overcome the focus on success if researchers are persuaded to publish articles not only with positive, but also with negative results. Let there be a lot of articles, but let there be among them those that talk about failures, unconfirmed hypotheses, etc. Edison also said that failed experiments helped him invent the light bulb. Alas, modern science simply does not see a negative result or a result that does not lead to an immediate discovery or patent (we mean the institutional sphere of science, its, so to speak, administrative-journal-grant part).
Another thing that modern scientists need to realize is that neither her work in itself proves anything. The result can be arbitrarily revolutionary, but in science, as perhaps nowhere else, the principle of "one in the field is not a warrior." Only in modern science is the scale of the result so dependent on collective efforts. Nevertheless, the vision of the laurel wreath is so seductive that there is no way to resist it. Let's not forget about the love of public opinion – and the press that feeds this very opinion – for sensations.
Purely methodically, the reliability of the result can be enhanced if we use meta-analysis, which implies combining the results of all the work done on some topic. Unfortunately, now researchers prefer to pay attention only to those works whose results confirm their own assumptions, and ignore everything else. The authors of Perspectives on Psychological Science even express the opinion that meta-analysts could become an internal police, like the Department of internal Security of the real police. And, of course, for such a department to function, the scientific community must clearly formulate ethical laws, for violation of which punishment would be imposed.
However, all this is fine, but only a theory that requires concrete, practical, administrative implementation. And here psychologists, sociologists and methodologists of science should be replaced by administrators who would take the trouble to correct scientific mores. This work, as we understand it, will be terribly huge: scientific life and scientific psychology are embedded in society, and when they are "straightened out" we will have to look back at politics, economics, mass culture, the press, the aspirations of the "common people". "Ordinary people", by the way, after reading about voluntary or involuntary scammers from science, may well say something like "come on, this science." And here the "common people" should be reminded: they owe all the material benefits that they have now to this very science, and it is in their own interests to keep science afloat, even if it is not always honest not only with the "people", but also with itself.
Based on the materials of the New Yorker: Cleaning Up Science.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru11.01.2013