The War on Science is Really Rolling Now

[TownieDeac]

The Chair of the House Science Committee:

NY Times on the war on science

Politico on conservatives not finding Pruitt effective enough at dismantling climate legislation

 

[ImTheCaptain]

ITCwife right now dreading the next 4 years

 

[Louis Gossett Jr]

I saw an article today by an arctic scientist who keeps having to find cached links to previously accessible research. Remember when backing up science data and information was laughed at as being too reactionary and alarmist. Yeah......

 

[bym051d]

ITCwife right now dreading the next 4 years

Why? What's her job?

 

[ImTheCaptain]

Why? What's her job?

Professor/scientist in environmental studies in climate related areas

 

[PhDeac]

So Lamar Smith wants to impose regulations on the private businesses that public journals.

 

[pourdeac]

PNAS on the March for Science: Let’s march to stress the value of science for the public good, not to engage in partisan politics

LOL.......that's hillarious. So the left politicizes science, weaponizes it against "the stupid and ignorant and religious", ratchets it up to fever pitch, and NOW they call for it to be non-partisan??????

Where are these people when it's used inappropriately to attack people politically? Where is the accountability when they allowed a completely bogus vaccine/autism paper to get into the biggest medical science journal on the planet, creating the recent anti-vaccination movement. It was all fine and dandy when they want to play into the "man existence is bad" narrative....so these well-trained ethical scientists couldn't resist the fabricated "autism is increasing" story. Then these well meaning well trained scientists linked the increase to vaccines which pointed to the evils of big pharma screwing everyone, another liberal narrative. The link wasn't even statistically significant!!! That means by fiat they weren't well-trained, and neither were the reviewers and editors of the top medical science journal that allowed it into the journal.

But THEN after welcoming all this bad science because it played into popular progressive narratives, they turned around and blamed the stupid and ignorant for believing said SCIENCE.....when the bad science was exposed. REPEAT. That's what most people see today.....a lot of bad science pushed for progressive political reasons to attack half the population, science that THEY help pay for.

I'm glad someone is finally calling for a non-partisan viewpoint. As they allude to, a lot of scientists aren't exactly excited to March for Science when they know it'll just end up looking like the March for Women...and make things worse than they already are.

 

[ImTheCaptain]

nah instead of being glib, i will attempt to address the autism study pour is talking about in Lancet

ignoring for a moment that the lead author, Andrew Wakefield, and the journal itself are both British, and nothing the Americans will do policy-wise will force great journals like BMJ or Lancet to change their editorial policies AND ignoring the fact that Wakefield himself says "In fact, the Lancet paper does not claim to confirm a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Research into that possible connection is still going on." AND ignoring that fraud-based retraction rates are incredibly low and pour is hand-picking the most egregious one perhaps in the history of modern medicine, pour actually has a point

peer review is imperfect

of course the PNAS piece he quotes addresses that point, and the fact that public trust in science is low for some good reasons

 

[birdman]

LOL.......that's hillarious. So the left politicizes science, weaponizes it against "the stupid and ignorant and religious", ratchets it up to fever pitch, and NOW they call for it to be non-partisan??????

Where are these people when it's used inappropriately to attack people politically? Where is the accountability when they allowed a completely bogus vaccine/autism paper to get into the biggest medical science journal on the planet, creating the recent anti-vaccination movement. It was all fine and dandy when they want to play into the "man existence is bad" narrative....so these well-trained ethical scientists couldn't resist the fabricated "autism is increasing" story. Then these well meaning well trained scientists linked the increase to vaccines which pointed to the evils of big pharma screwing everyone, another liberal narrative. The link wasn't even statistically significant!!! That means by fiat they weren't well-trained, and neither were the reviewers and editors of the top medical science journal that allowed it into the journal.

But THEN after welcoming all this bad science because it played into popular progressive narratives, they turned around and blamed the stupid and ignorant for believing said SCIENCE.....when the bad science was exposed. REPEAT. That's what most people see today.....a lot of bad science pushed for progressive political reasons to attack half the population, science that THEY help pay for.

I'm glad someone is finally calling for a non-partisan viewpoint. As they allude to, a lot of scientists aren't exactly excited to March for Science when they know it'll just end up looking like the March for Women...and make things worse than they already are.

You are describing a problem with science journalism, not the scientific method or the peer review process. Also as townie pointed out you've selected one of probably two or three statistical outliers to prove your case.

 

[Louis Gossett Jr]

It's also that in science you aren't proving anything so for non scientists it's beyond easy to find something that reinforces their bias. So you take the Wakefield paper that has been retracted but is still out there and you put it up against the thousands of papers that say the opposite. If you are a crazy mom that needs someone to blame, you are latching on to the one thing that helps reaffirm your position, not the thousands that don't.

 

[birdman]

LOL.......that's hillarious. So the left politicizes science, weaponizes it against "the stupid and ignorant and religious", ratchets it up to fever pitch, and NOW they call for it to be non-partisan??????

Where are these people when it's used inappropriately to attack people politically? Where is the accountability when they allowed a completely bogus vaccine/autism paper to get into the biggest medical science journal on the planet, creating the recent anti-vaccination movement. It was all fine and dandy when they want to play into the "man existence is bad" narrative....so these well-trained ethical scientists couldn't resist the fabricated "autism is increasing" story. Then these well meaning well trained scientists linked the increase to vaccines which pointed to the evils of big pharma screwing everyone, another liberal narrative. The link wasn't even statistically significant!!! That means by fiat they weren't well-trained, and neither were the reviewers and editors of the top medical science journal that allowed it into the journal.

But THEN after welcoming all this bad science because it played into popular progressive narratives, they turned around and blamed the stupid and ignorant for believing said SCIENCE.....when the bad science was exposed. REPEAT. That's what most people see today.....a lot of bad science pushed for progressive political reasons to attack half the population, science that THEY help pay for.

I'm glad someone is finally calling for a non-partisan viewpoint. As they allude to, a lot of scientists aren't exactly excited to March for Science when they know it'll just end up looking like the March for Women...and make things worse than they already are.

Also, statistical significance testing is so 1990's. It's a passe basis for inference and the value of p-values has been rejected by most statisticians.

Editing to say, no wonder we got some shit wrong in the decades between 1940 and 1990. The misappropriation of R.A. Fishers analytical approach and the application of the p< 0.05 arbitrary standard is well documented and is actually pretty amazing that we weren't wrong about a lot more.

Here are a couple citations:
http://www.scaillet.ch/risk_mngt/ASA_statement.pdf
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3802789?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

 

[ImTheCaptain]

but have you met, pourdeac?

 

[PhDeac]

pourman is a great example of the lack of science literacy we need to target.

 

[Louis Gossett Jr]

Why should we care since Ebola is surely airborne by now. Death is coming!

 

[pourdeac]

link?

LOL....a link to what? Do you want one of the activists like Bill Nye or how about Neil deGrasse Tyson's twitter feed where it's a constant attack on religion? Anyone using the term "settled science" trying to make a political argument fits the bill because the notion of "settled science" doesn't even really exist......in real science. If you aren't always skeptical you aren't well-trained. "Settled" is basically a way to weaponize it...infallible, non-questioned and the scientifically ignorant absolutely buy into that concept.

I guess I could just link back to this thread ......since the title is a classic progressive claim meant to get people to believe there's an attack on what's good and rational and that's not what is going on.

Bad science and politicization is what is being attacked. If the science community is smart, it would start policing itself and holding itself up to actual...ya know...real scientific standards. They'll eventually get it. That PNAS piece is a start. The Gulf War Lancet paper has been ripped to shreds..finally. Another good sign.

 

[ImTheCaptain]

lol, literally two people "constantly attack" religion (they don't)

we defs need the entire force of the Government to balance to the Force

 

[pourdeac]

nah instead of being glib, i will attempt to address the autism study pour is talking about in Lancet

ignoring for a moment that the lead author, Andrew Wakefield, and the journal itself are both British, and nothing the Americans will do policy-wise will force great journals like BMJ or Lancet to change their editorial policies AND ignoring the fact that Wakefield himself says "In fact, the Lancet paper does not claim to confirm a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Research into that possible connection is still going on." AND ignoring that fraud-based retraction rates are incredibly low and pour is hand-picking the most egregious one perhaps in the history of modern medicine, pour actually has a point

peer review is imperfect

of course the PNAS piece he quotes addresses that point, and the fact that public trust in science is low for some good reasons

The American scientific community can absolutely stand up to bad scientific practices. Science has no boundaries, remember?

The same types of practices that led to that paper go on all the time...and the papers don't get retracted. The only reason that one got attacked is because it was so widely cited for political purposes and those that pushed it were so embarrassed. I've said this in the past, look at all the health related "science" that ends up falling apart to the point where science has both claimed without doubt the egg is the worst food in the world, and now it's called the best thing you can eat. The next one will be bacon and the recent claim it's as bad as smoking cigarettes. Those flip flops erode confidence in science. Then when it's used daily to attack people politically and it's more of the same "settled science", how do you think people will respond? Favorably?

 

[ImTheCaptain]

hoo boy, 'science' didnt declare the egg anything. scientists published papers and media outlets did their science simplification thing

never change, pour

 

[pourdeac]

Very real structural problems exist within science, and one of them that pour is close to, but doesn't quite get at, is reproducibility. There was a forum yesterday sponsored by AAAS in response to some of these topics, and a quote I loved was: "I can't make a good souffle to save my life, but that doesn't make Julia Child a fraud."

When experiments are hard to reproduce, it can be for many reasons. At our journals, we've pushed for more thorough methods sections to be published as supplements, revamped our reviewer finder system, and really invested a lot into an ethics program to detect fraud, image manipulation, etc. Association publishers like mine do that as part of the cost of doing business. Commercial publishers may do a little less, but again, rates of fraud-based retractions and corrections are very low across STM publications.

Experimental science of the sort you are talking about is not the kind of thing that gets the public upset. Being a synthetic chemist..and much like a cook..Julia Childs making a souffle is something tangible. That someone else can't make it certainly doesn't make her a fraud....lots of people don't have good hands and there are always little things that get left out of the experimental method that make a difference (sometimes intentionally but....). We deal with that all the time. But if it is tangible then it occurred. Someone ate the souffle. She can make it again and others can test it.

What has really enraged people are all these conclusions from big data....all of the correlations and conclusions from studies where people make definitive statements that can't possibly mean anything and where advocates...both the scientists themselves and public advocates....push for policy changes, ie for government to act. The science is at the stage of concluding: what we know at this time is maybe X and it warrants study. But it turns into: we know absolutely that X happens and we need to act ASAP or there will be some detrimental effect on everyone. That urgency elevates the significance of the work and the prestige of the scientist and political activists, and to more funding. There is no counter argument to it....because it's essentially observational science, observing complex systems with many variables with hundreds of assumptions.

People get awards here for having an effect on US government policy and all of it comes from the soft science side of our business where these kinds of conclusions occur....the kind of conclusion that led to the "autism is increasing" claim when it was just a broadening of the definition that most actually working in the field of autism knew. Data analysts had no idea.

 

[pourdeac]

This recent NYTimes piece is another good example of how public trust in science gets eroded. Carlo Croce has an incredible career with well over 1000 publications to his name, has won tons of awards, is a Fellow at the AAAS, and his discoveries and additions to the field of cancer research are unimpeachable. His work with genetics and cancer is almost unsurpassed. But allegations of fraud have surrounded his career. Where it gets tricky is that when you're as prolific as he is, your contributions to papers are variable. Sometimes you're a lead author and you write every word of a paper. Sometimes you're a collaborator who just contributed a cell line or a method and you have little to do with authoring a paper. In all of the claims against him where corrections or retractions have been issued, he has had little to do with the writing of the papers or the submission of images (some of which have been proven falsified). Yet the Times story runs, and for people with biases against science, it confirms many of them.

As for Carlo.....he was screwed the second he aligned at all with big tobacco.....the worst of the "big" industries. Once you get that label, the attacks are brutal. You instantly become a target and none of your work will ever be taken seriously by those scientists or activists. A friend who was doing work on a smoking cessation therapeutic of all things was literally spit at because he had ties to big tobacco when at a nicotine conference. So Carlo is getting hit by the same political activism.....that is not actually following science.