Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on January 30, 2015

Science, writ large, has an ongoing challenge in communicating its ideas and conclusions to the general public. Separately, it has an internal, rearguard problem with irreproducible results. These are distinct battles, and shouldnt be conflated. The reproducibility issue primarily involves laboratory experiments so laden with secret sauce and customized techniques that no one else can quite get the souffle to rise. The two issues overlap only to the extent that a major retraction or scientific blunder doesnt help the mainstream scientific institutions when they want to tell the world that they really do know what theyre talking about when they discuss climate change, vaccines, genetic engineering, nuclear power, etc. But the reproducibility problem isnt why some people reject the scientific consensus on certain issues. These issues have been cultural wedge issues and youll never fix that through more robust laboratory protocols.

Dan Vergano at National Geographic reports on the new Pew/AAAS survey showing the huge gap between scientific and public attitudes when it comes to such issues as whether GMO foods are safe to consume. Chris Mooney of our new Energy and Environment blog analyzes the Pew poll results. Aaron Blake at The Fix also provides a report. Heres the AP story. And heres the Pew report. Youll see massive gaps between what scientists think and what the public thinks, in aggregate. There are a couple of exceptions: The International Space Station, for example, has somehow failed to become a wedge issue. Someone surely is working on that right now. [Suggestion: Someone should reveal that three Russians have somehow found a way onto our space station!]

A couple of days ago I published a big story on reproducibility that I had started in August, and it had been just about ready to go into the paper when I had to stop everything to jump on the Ebola crisis.

First, the nut graphs:

Too often, experimental results cant be reproduced.

That doesnt mean the results are fraudulent or even wrong. But in science, a result is supposed to be verifiable by a subsequent experiment. An irreproducible result is inherently squishy.

And so theres a movement afoot, and building momentum rapidly. Roughly four centuries after the invention of the scientific method, the leaders of the scientific community are recalibrating their requirements, pushing for the sharing of data and greater experimental transparency.

So you see that, as a news story, it lacks the urgency of Ebola. But its a huge issue. Its global. I expect this story to be read around the world and translated in other languages and, you know, revered, and studied as closely as the Talmud.

But just to be clear: This is not a new topic. Were not really breaking any news here. People have been writing about the irreproducibility problem in science for many years. For example, heres a piece in The Atlantic in 2010. Heres one from The New Yorker in 2012. Heres our own Fred Barbash writing about Retraction Watch in 2014. Heres another 2014 piece, from The Scientist, and another, from The Monkey Cage.

Whats new, it seems to me, is the intensity with which powerful institutions in the scientific world the NIH, the journals Science and Nature, major foundations have decided to get together and find solutions. Theyve organized meetings, revised guidelines, funded new efforts like the Center for Open Science in Charlottesville (which I visited as part of my reporting).

Originally posted here:

Achenbach: Sciences war on two fronts

Category: Talmud
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