The replication crisis in science has just begun. It will be big.

By Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website.

Summary: After a decade of slow growth beneath public view, the replication crisis in science begins breaking into public view. First psychology and biomedical studies, now spreading to many other fields — overturning what we were told is settled science, the foundations of our personal behavior and public policy. Here is an introduction to the conflict (there is pushback), with the usual links to detailed information at the end, and some tentative conclusions about effects on public’s trust of science. It’s early days yet, with the real action yet to begin.

“Men only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence.”

— Goethe, from Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret .

Mickey Kaus referred to undernews as those “stories bubbling up from the blogs and the tabs that don’t meet MSM standards.” More broadly, it refers to information which mainstream journalists pretend not to see. By mysterious processes it sometimes becomes news. A sufficiently large story can mark the next stage in a social revolution. Game, the latest counter-revolution to feminism, has not yet reached that stage. The replicability crisis of science appears to be doing so, breaching like a whale from the depths of the sea in which it has silently grown.

See these powerful articles in the past month about the crisis. The first four discuss egregious failures of scientific institutions — with large public policy consequences; the last two are among the few articles describing this crisis for a general audience.

This crisis emerged a decade ago as problems in a few fields — especially health care and psychology. Slowly similar problems emerged in other fields, usually failures to replicate widely accepted research. Even economics, with its high standards for transparency — has been hit. The landmark 2010 paper “Growth in a Time of Debt” by Harvard professors Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff — used to justify austerity policies in scores of nations — was found to have serious errors in their spreadsheets. Even physics has been affected, as William Wilson notes:

“Two of the most vaunted physics results of the past few years — the announced discovery of both cosmic inflation and gravitational waves at the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica, and the supposed discovery of superluminal neutrinos at the Swiss-Italian border — have now been retracted, with far less fanfare than when they were first published.” {See this about the former and this about the latter.}

By now it’s obvious that there is a structural problem in modern science, a deterioration of the always sloppy (as with most social processes) self-correcting dynamics of institutional research. Only small scale research has been conducted so far, so we do not know how broad and deep this dysfunctionality extends. The available evidence suggests that “large” is the most likely answer.

The stakes are almost beyond imagination. It’s not just a matter of time and money wasted when bad studies send research down blind allies. Science is one of our best ways to see the world, and effective public policy requires reliable research on scores of subjects, from health care to climate change. Trillions of dollars, the world’s rate of economic growth, and the health of billions can be affected.

Actions and resistance

Talk precedes action, and there are have several high-level conferences about this crisis. Such as the February 2014 workshop by the Subcommittee on Replicability in Science, part of the Advisory Committee to the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. They produced this typically thorough report: Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Perspectives on Robust and Reliable Science“.

Journalists describe the replication crisis as a “Whig history” — another step in the inevitable evolution and perfection of science. They seldom mention the scientists — and science institutions — resisting reforms, making the outcome uncertain (here’s an example in social psychology). This hidden side of the crisis is described by David Funder (Prof of psychology, UC-Riverside) at his website.

“It’s not just – or even especially – about psychology. I was heartened to see that the government representatives saw the bulk of problems with replication as lying in fields such as molecular biology, genetics, and medicine, not in psychology. Psychology has problems too, but is widely viewed as the best place to look for solutions since the basic issues all involve human behavior.

“It makes me a bit crazy when psychologists say (or sometimes shout) that everything is fine, that critics of research practices are “witch hunting,” or that examining the degree to which our science is replicable is self-defeating. Quite the reverse: psychology is being looked to as the source of the expertise that can improve all of science. As a psychologist, I’m proud of this.

Backlash and resistance.

“This issue came up only a couple of times and I wish it had gotten more attention. It seemed like nobody at the table (a) denied there was a replicability problem in much of the most prominent research in the major journals or (b) denied that something needed to be done. As one participant said, “we are all drinking the same bath water.” … {But} there will be resistance out there. And we need to watch out for it.

“…One of Geoff Cumming’s graduate students, Fiona Fidler, recently wrote a thesis on the history of null hypothesis significance testing {NHST}. It’s a fascinating read and I hope will be turned into a book soon. One of its major themes is that NHST has been criticized thoroughly and compellingly many times over the years. Yet it persists, even though – and, ironically, perhaps because – it has never really been explicitly defended! Instead, the defense of NHST is largely passive. People just keep using it. Reviewers and editors just keep publishing it; granting agencies keep giving money to researchers who use it. Eventually the critiques die down. Nothing changes.

“That could happen this time too. The defenders of the status quo rarely actively defend anything. They aren’t about to publish articles explaining why NHST tells you everything you need to know, or arguing that effect sizes of r = .80 in studies with an N of 20 represent important and reliable breakthroughs, or least of all reporting data to show that major counter-intuitive findings are robustly replicable. Instead they will just continue to publish each others’ work in all the “best” places, hire each other into excellent jobs and, of course, give each other awards. This is what has happened every time before.

“Things just might be different this time. Doubts about statistical standard operating procedure and the replicability of major findings are rampant across multiple fields of study, not just psychology. And, these issues have the attention of major scientific studies and even the US Government. But the strength of the resistance should not be underestimated.”

Conclusions

“But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!”

— By Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

This just touches on the many dimensions of the replication crisis. For example, there is the large and growing literature about the misuse of statistics — and the first steps to understanding the various causes of replication failure (almost certainly from structural issues, perhaps common to many or all sciences today).

We can only guess at how many of the sciences have serious problems with replication — and the methodological problems that produce it. This might be one of the greatest challenges to science since the backlash to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Depending on the extent of the problem and the resistance of institutions to reform, this might become the largest challenge since the Roman Catholic Church’s assault in the 15th and 16th centuries, putting the works of famous scientists on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (e.g., Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo). But this time the problems are within, not external to science.

The likely (but not certain) eventual results are reforms which strengthen the institutions of science, but the crisis might have severe side-effects — such as a loss in public confidence. America has long had a rocky relationship with science, from the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” about evolution to the modern climate wars. With our confidence in our institutions so low and falling, news about replication failures in “settled science” might have affect the public’s confidence willingness to trust scientists. This might take long to heal.

Many sciences are vulnerable, but climate science might become the most affected. It combines high visibility, a central role in one of our time’s major public policy questions, and a frequent disregard for the methodological safeguards that other sciences rely upon.

Watch for news developments in this important story.

To learn more about this crisis in science

Some early articles about the crisis

Some of the many papers about the replication crisis

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