in biology, you can use peer-reviewed evidence to make plausible arguments for arbitrary hypotheses.
Et tu, Brut? That is obviously true for humanities and for things like observational studies of nutrition, but do you think it extends to most / all of biology? “For any hypothesis there is a mouse strain which proves it true”? :-/
...we face a replication crisis in the field of biomedicine, not unlike the one we’ve seen in psychology but with far more dire implications. Sloppy data analysis, contaminated lab materials, and poor experimental design all contribute to the problem.
...Freedman and his co-authors guessed that fully half of all results rest on shaky ground, and might not be replicable in other labs. These cancer studies don’t merely fail to find a cure; they might not offer any useful data whatsoever.
In most ways biology is intermediate between the hard and soft sciences, with all that implies. It’s usually impossible to identify all the confounders, most biologists are not trained in statistics, experiments are complex and you can get different results from slight variations in protocol, we’re trying to generalize from imperfect models, many high-profile results don’t get tested by other labs, … all these factors come together and we get something that people call a “replication crisis.”
Oh God, where will this end? Is it really only physics and chemistry that aren’t sloppy cargo-cults, or are they broken too?
A lot of this, I think is to do with taking tenure away from young academics. Once upon a time once you’d proved basic competence and cleverness, you could spend your whole career being careful about stuff. These days you’ve just got to turn out crap as fast as possible. And you spend most of your time applying for grants.
Et tu, Brut? That is obviously true for humanities and for things like observational studies of nutrition, but do you think it extends to most / all of biology? “For any hypothesis there is a mouse strain which proves it true”? :-/
Hmmm
This piece claims that
This open-access article discusses some of the issues in cancer research.
In most ways biology is intermediate between the hard and soft sciences, with all that implies. It’s usually impossible to identify all the confounders, most biologists are not trained in statistics, experiments are complex and you can get different results from slight variations in protocol, we’re trying to generalize from imperfect models, many high-profile results don’t get tested by other labs, … all these factors come together and we get something that people call a “replication crisis.”
tl;dr It’s complicated.
Yes, I know. But it would be nice if people recognized that it is complicated and not pretend that we know more than we actually do.
Oh God, where will this end? Is it really only physics and chemistry that aren’t sloppy cargo-cults, or are they broken too?
A lot of this, I think is to do with taking tenure away from young academics. Once upon a time once you’d proved basic competence and cleverness, you could spend your whole career being careful about stuff. These days you’ve just got to turn out crap as fast as possible. And you spend most of your time applying for grants.
Vocative!