[Daveinyork]

They have abandoned the scientific method. Instead of setting out to test theories, they set out to prove their own beliefs, and it’s easy to do so. All you have to do is ignore any exculpatory evidence, or you can simply cook the books.

[relictele]

As the author suggests, what good are peer reviews when every single one of your peers are cut from the same Marxist cloth?

[anton]

Every PhD candidate in the academic world already knows this. There are virtually no truths, only fund-able research.

[Sherman Logan]

Really good scientific research is done using a triple-blind approach.

Those who design the study do not gather data, and those who gather data do not analyze it and draw conclusions.

This process, of course, is quite rare. Its purpose is not to prevent intentional fraud, which is probably pretty rare, but to eliminate scientists finding what they expect to find.

We have a great deal of evidence, stretching over more than a century, that this is a HUGE problem in science.

It’s bad enough when such confirmation bias only helps scientists “prove” their own hypotheses. It’s far worse when (to use AGW as an example) finding A results in fame, fortune and the attentions of admiring female students, while finding B results in ostracism and loss of funding for future research.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Some of the tricks used by the MMGW crowd are “insider” peer review, in which raw data or the means used to collect it, as well as any data “adjustments”, are provided only to a sympathetic peer, effectively a co-conspirator, who will support it as legitimate.

At the lower level are “incestuous” or “round robin” peer reviews, that involve a small circle of friends, lets call them A,B,C,D, and E. This is done to create a large volume of science fraud with many different papers that all agree on the falsehoods.

In the first paper, for example, A is the “lead researcher”, with B and C as “co-authors”, and the paper “peer reviewed” by D and E. In the second paper, B is the “lead researcher”, with C and D as “co-authors”, with “peer review” by E and A.

This way, each of them gets credit as a lead researcher at some point, as well as getting peer review credit.

It is all clearly science fraud, and rotten to the core. It is also heavily subsidized by both government and those individuals who seek to profit financially from the “scientific conclusions”.

The long term effect is that it terribly cripples honest scientific pursuit, replacing science with politically correct magic. And to protect their schemes, they attack honest scientists who dispute them.

Much like their philosophical predecessor Trofim Lysenko.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko

[laterldf]

I would have written the title of the article:

A MIDDLE finger on the scales

Lew, Ks

[The_Reader_David]

A lot of the problem is neither fraud nor incompetence, but a very strong bias against publishing negative results. An amusing send up of this behavior on the part of scientists and social scientists is made in this xkcd cartoon:

Now, if it was really the same scientists doing all those "studies", a referee would almost certainly have objected that the paper looked like a fishing expedition and that a Bonferoni adjustment was needed to the significance tests (do 20 tests, divide the significance level by 20, but report it as the original significance level -- so reporting a p<.05 significance would need the individual test to have p<.0025).

On the other hand, if 20 teams each conducted well-designed, honest studies of a different color of jelly bean (in the silly example), the one that studied green would get to publish a paper with their "positive" finding, while the other 19 would have "no findings" and wouldn't get to publish. The chance finding that green jelly beans cause acne would then be one of the irreproducible results in a peer reviewed paper, even though the study had been well-designed and no fraud was involved.

Quite frankly, I'm glad I'm in mathematics. You can't fake proofs, and even erroneous proofs sometimes lead to important advances (Fermat and Poincaré providing notable examples of this).