Posted on 08/30/2005 10:29:44 AM PDT by LibWhacker
Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis. Assuming that the new paper is itself correct, problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true.
John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, says that small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false. But even large, well-designed studies are not always right, meaning that scientists and the public have to be wary of reported findings.
"We should accept that most research findings will be refuted. Some will be replicated and validated. The replication process is more important than the first discovery," Ioannidis says.
In the paper, Ioannidis does not show that any particular findings are false. Instead, he shows statistically how the many obstacles to getting research findings right combine to make most published research wrong.
Massaged conclusions
Traditionally a study is said to be "statistically significant" if the odds are only 1 in 20 that the result could be pure chance. But in a complicated field where there are many potential hypotheses to sift through - such as whether a particular gene influences a particular disease - it is easy to reach false conclusions using this standard. If you test 20 false hypotheses, one of them is likely to show up as true, on average.
Odds get even worse for studies that are too small, studies that find small effects (for example, a drug that works for only 10% of patients), or studies where the protocol and endpoints are poorly defined, allowing researchers to massage their conclusions after the fact.
Surprisingly, Ioannidis says another predictor of false findings is if a field is "hot", with many teams feeling pressure to beat the others to statistically significant findings.
But Solomon Snyder, senior editor at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, US, says most working scientists understand the limitations of published research.
"When I read the literature, I'm not reading it to find proof like a textbook. I'm reading to get ideas. So even if something is wrong with the paper, if they have the kernel of a novel idea, that's something to think about," he says.
BUMP!
Maybe that is how evolution works. Some come from monkeys and scum and some were created very good like the Bible says.
INTREP
Why? Because evolution is a premise, a worldview, and defining characteristic of the egos of its adherents, and nothing which even rises to the level of a credible scientific hypothesis at all.
It's adherents -- most notably the liberal-Leftist academics, and a few of the phony pretenders to conservatism we see often enough on the "crevo" threads -- pursue what they falsely call "science" as a tool for advancement of their larded assumptions, mostly devoid of credible fact, as this scientific mainstream published article discusses. Some peddle the evo-pap to a gullible, fawning, and uncritical MSM, only to be fashionably parroted by their unthinking acolytes and secondary education establishment, all for purposes of their own aggrandizement and self-promotion, if not for purposes of just basic gov't grant welfare queening.
It is also why so many of the aforementioned liberals and "pretenders" on FRs threads readily admit about themselves and their "evo-community" that what "science" they do do is divorced from an inherent search for truth. Are we surprised that such an ego-polluted philosophical approach to science leads to selective reporting of data, and other blatant falsehoods masquerading as science?
True conservatism promotes the search for truth. Liberalism, by contrast willfully obscures the truth.
A short history lesson is in order. Our Founders recognized the Creator of the universe and the inalienable rights America enjoys, which proceed from Him. By contrast the Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, and today's abortionists put into practice their own versions of the social Darwinist's application of "survival of the fittest," and selection of what the likes of Margaret Sanger, Darwin himself and his philosophical compatriot, Huxley, termed, The "Favored" Races. Sadly, we reflect upon the exterminations and genocides of the "unfavored," all accomplished under the color of evolutionary "science."
Oh sure, the libs and pretenders to conservatism recoil in horror, and seethe with indignation at any direct correlation drawn to the inevitable outworking of their evolutionary worldview and with horrors embodied in examples of the greatest humanly-devised tragedies the world has ever seen. Such tragedies are just an example of what happens in the moral void left by the corruption of scientific thought by those who no longer pursue science in the search for truth.
History reports. You decide. I'll leave it to the reader to determine who holds the true conservative and moral high ground in the Creation-Evolution debates.
A small reminder to all you liberals and pretenders to conservatism out there: Intelligent Design is ascendant. To the orthodox evolutionist it may be blasphemy, but the intellectually honest in the scientific community are leading the Reformation and a renewal of scientific inquiry founded in the pursuit of truth, even as more "peer reviewed" fraud, scientific groupthink, and scientific carelessness is exposed for what it is and always has been. Materialists might want to get on board, before you all look more ridiculous than your materialist's position already does. And as Rush Limbaugh so aptly puts it in terms of true conservatism: "We are winning!"
BUMP!
They also get all the publicity and even when other studies can't replicate there is never any huge Drudge siren.
Good essay. (Mind your apostrophes!)
May one safely assume that, during the run-up to the recent arrival of the Physicist progeny (and, for that matter, thereafter), both Physicist and the Physicist spousal unit steadfastly refused the aid of medical devices and pharmaceuticals the safety and efficacy of which had not been *established* according to the stricter standards of the physicist's metier rather than the more lax rules-of-thumb typically applied by the benighted bureaucrats of the Food and Drug Administration?
GAACK! Don't start that again. There was no recent progeny. Somebody just bumped a 4-year-old thread.
Okay, recent in the bigger scheme of things then.... :-)
I don't believe there should be a Food and Drug Administration. They are as likely to reject a good practice or drug or device as to accept a bad one, thanks in part to weak scientific publication standards. But the greatest failures of public policy caused by weak research happen not in the administrative branch of government, but in the judicial: witness the recent Vioxx judgment.
Surprisingly???
Guess? Ok, 100%. Standard deviation zero. Will consider reevaluation on reproducible experimental demonstration.
read later
Not only do many (if not most) scientists not understand statistics, many statiticians don't either.
The problem has been around for at least 40 years in my direct experience. Of course, Fisher claimed that Mendel faked data (and Dalton was similarly accused.)
Our friends the regulators are a product of the infinitely malleable Commerce Clause, it seems.
They are as likely to reject a good practice or drug or device as to accept a bad one, thanks in part to weak scientific publication standards.
Neither rules nor the Agency's statutory mandate requires FDA reviewers to place any particular weight on published, as opposed to unpublished, data. But reviewers can (read *must*) be swayed by investigators' reputations or by their personal acquaintance with them.
But the greatest failures of public policy caused by weak research happen not in the administrative branch of government, but in the judicial: witness the recent Vioxx judgment.
I tend to agree.
Nonetheless, you missed the point of my joke. ;-)
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