Fall of top US scientists points to ethics gap in research

Three prominent US scientists have been pushed to resign over the past 10 days after damning revelations about their methods...

"The good news is that we are finally starting to see a lot of these cases become public," said Ivan Oransky co-founder of the site Retraction Watch, a project of the Center for Scientific Integrity that keeps tabs on retractions of research articles in thousands of journals.

The problem, he said, is that scientists, and supporters of science, have often been unwilling to raise such controversies "because they're afraid that talking about them will decrease trust in science and that it will aid and abet anti-science forces."

"At the end of the day, we need to think about science as a human enterprise, we need to remember that it's done by humans," he said. "Let's remember that humans make mistakes, they cut corners, sometimes worse."

Attention has long focused on financial conflicts of interest, particularly because of the influence of the pharmaceutical industry.

But the Wansink case illustrates that other forms of conflict, including reputational, are equally important. Academic careers are largely built on how much one publishes and in which journals.

As a result, researchers compete to produce positive, new and clear results -- but work that produces negative results or validates previous findings should also be rewarded, argued Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia who heads the pro-transparency Center for Open Science.

(Skip) "...the bad part of the incentives environment is that the reward system is all about the result."

"Culture change is hard," he argued, adding: "Universities and medical centers are the slowest actors."

Here is yet another article telling us that we must remember that scientists are regular people, who are tempted, just like other people, to cheat to advance their reputations or to get more money. I just wish there would be some government grants to check on other profs who have "fudged" their climate change results so that they could get more government grants. But I suspect that "deep academy" is even more resistant to something like that than the "deep state" is resistant to Trump.

When reading any news of scientific findings, look for the words “linked to” or “associated with”. You can then safely ignore the findings. Those words are the admission that they didn’t do real science. They collected some half-assed statistics from an uncontrolled population and then used it to declare some conclusion that they cannot, in fact, back up. This is exactly why in nutrition studies one group will say eggs are “linked to increased risk of hear disease” and another will say eggs are “associated with an improvement in heart health”. Because their studies were BS and the outcome was rigged.

There are a number of phenomenon regarding which the so-called consensus of scientists has determined the science to be settled and no longer subject to legitimate challenge. Such topics include not only anthropogenic global warming, but also the heritability of cognitive ability and related human characteristics, the adverse effects of various chemical compounds as well as evolution and similarly unprovable hypotheses in sociology and psychology.

Lysenkoism is really a better example of the current phenomenon than geocentricity because the former is rooted in incentives created by politics and is much more modern whereas the latter was rooted in religious dogma and was pre-Enlightenment (admittedly, the political challenges posed by the Reformation caused the Vatican to be hidebound about all sorts of dogma.) Lysenkoism is also a better example because it had catastrophic consequences for the Soviet Union whereas the Copernican view of the universe really had no immediate benefit to the well-being of humanity. An even more current example is government’s adoption of lipid hypothesis — cholesterol in diet increases blood cholesterol and heart attack incidence — in its dietary and agricultural policies, which has resulted in an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Despite a woeful absence of solid empirical or theoretical justification for the lipid hypothesis, McGovern and CSPI insisted that decisions had to be made and could not wait. Once the decision was made, govt funding went to only scientists who favored the hypothesis and skeptics were shunned regardless of their bona fides.

It’s no coincidence that hypotheses that favor the expansion and other interests of government are often argued to be settled science whereas anomalies to well-established laws of science such as the speed of light being the universal speed limit, the laws of thermodynamics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, even conservation of mass are seriously investigated by serious scientists without ridicule. Except for the weird behavior at the quantum level, such challenges have generally failed to be reproducible and therefore rejected, but even apparent anomalies are considered worthy of investigation.

In every age the most interesting and controversial topics are banned from discussion—whether by religion in earlier centuries or science today.

Let us just mention one topic (and then duck). How are men and women similar, and how are they different?

Any scientist who seriously studies this topic will be eating dog food within weeks of publishing any findings.

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