Can Science be Trusted? A Scientist's Perspective on Peer Review, Bias, Consensus, & Reproducibility

I'm a practicing scientist and engineer at Virginia Tech with a PhD from Caltech. I share my views on the replication crisis in science and peer review, in a lecture during COVID (hence the mask).
Scientific triumphalism: More and more we hear science touted as the only way to truth (a view called 'scientism'). Scientists themselves are lauded as heroes and science is upheld as the only legitimate basis for policy-making. Many common-sense notions are overthrown based on supposed “scholarly consensus". This is the latest club with which to bludgeon and bully the opposition into silence--the unenlightened and untutored masses.
There are several problems:
➡️ Consensus is irrelevant, & largely driven by bias. There is a strong connection with failure of peer-review, which, if it’s good at anything, it appears to be: keeping unpopular ideas from being published (not wrong, just unpopular)
➡️ Science is recognizing it has a reproducibility crisis -- that most published scientific research findings are false
➡️ Consensus science?
Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, and critic of the scientific establishment, speaking at Caltech in 2003 (while I was there) on the importance of reproducible results in science, and the irrelevance of consensus: “I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. *The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.*”
➡️ Douglas Futuyama in Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution, the most widely used college evolutionary textbook says: “Science emphasizes evidence and logical deduction, and is forever uncertain. It deals not with irrefutable facts engraved on stone tablets, but with hypotheses that may be refuted by tomorrow's experiments and concepts formulated by fallible human minds. The best scientific education encourages skepticism, questioning, independent thought, and the use of reason.”
To claim the “irrefutable fact” of settled science when it serves political ends is intellectually dishonest or worse; totalitarian
➡️ Reproducibility crisis
1. Ability to reproduce results under the same conditions is considered the hallmark of the scientific method (water boils at 100 degrees C)
2. A group of psychologists, led by Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia, was interested in knowing what proportion of results in his field are reliable. eg, does the color red make people angry? The ‘Reproducibility Project’ repeated 100 published psychological experiments from 3 top psychology journals. Only in 30% of the studies was the reported finding reproducible.
3. The problem isn’t just with psychology. In the pharmaceutical industry, an unspoken rule is the half of all academic biomedical research will prove false, and in 2011 a group of researchers at Bayer decided to test it. Looking at 67 drug discovery projects based on cancer biology research, they found that in more than 75% of cases the published data did not match up with their in-house attempts to replicate. The Bayer researchers were drowning in bad studies, and it was to this, in part, that they attributed the mysteriously declining yields of drug pipelines. Many of the new drugs fail to have an effect because the basic research on which their development was based isn’t valid.
4. A study of cancer research found only 11% of cancer research could be reproduced.
5. Even in physics, lauded as the most reliable of all sciences, two of the most vaunted physics results of the past few years-the announced discovery of both cosmic inflation & gravitational waves at the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica, & the supposed discovery of superluminal neutrinos at the Swiss-Italian border-have been retracted, with far less fanfare than when they were first published.
6. Isaac Newton said, as a statement of humility, that if he could see so far, it was because he “stood on the shoulders of giants”, but now the scientific establishment may be standing on a house of cards.
► Shane Ross, ‪@ProfessorRoss‬
/ rossdynamicslab
shaneross.com
#ScientificMethod #PeerReview #Reproducibility #Bias #Replication #Scientism #consensus

[@JackR936]

What fantastic insight into this modern problem of ours. The atmosphere of modern sciences seems to me to have produced cults, most of which fall under institution worship or institution rejection, all driven by the mutual distrust this kind of consensus bullying creates. Worse yet, it seeps into modern politics, already itself pervasive with mistrust, and exacerbates the problems of the information era, that is, that we are drowning in information, with increasingly lessened ideas of who or what can be trusted.

[@hansbleuer3346]

Science is over.
Faith is in.

[@byrongibby]

Great content, but the audio quality could be better. Maybe just the result of the face mask?