Tag: science

The adjective modifies the noun

I wonder if all those people who were going on and on about how I hated and didn’t understand science are going to come back and apologize now that my skepticism about scientistry is being supported by dozens of failed attempts to confirm previously published studies? I don’t think I’ll hold my breath.

The past several years have been bruising ones for the credibility of the social sciences. A star social psychologist was caught fabricating data, leading to more than 50 retracted papers. A top journal published a study supporting the existence of ESP that was widely criticized. The journal Science pulled a political science paper on the effect of gay canvassers on voters’ behavior because of concerns about faked data.

Now, a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested. The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of whom volunteered their time to double-check what they considered important work. Their conclusions, reported Thursday in the journal Science, have confirmed the worst fears of scientists who have long worried that the field needed a strong correction.

The vetted studies were considered part of the core knowledge by which scientists understand the dynamics of personality, relationships, learning and memory. Therapists and educators rely on such findings to help guide decisions, and the fact that so many of the studies were called into question could sow doubt in the scientific underpinnings of their work.

“I think we knew or suspected that the literature had problems, but to see it so clearly, on such a large scale — it’s unprecedented,” said Jelte Wicherts, an associate professor in the department of methodology and statistics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

More than 60 of the studies did not hold up. Among them was one on free will. It found that participants who read a passage arguing that their behavior is predetermined were more likely than those who had not read the passage to cheat on a subsequent test.

Most “social science” is not science at all. It’s nothing more than science-flavored fiction concocted by people who look and talk like scientists, but are merely mimics.

Now, my dear critic, are you still entirely comfortable with your decision to dismiss out of hand my various other controversial statements about science? Are you still certain that your feelings trump my logical conclusions?

Scientistry is not scientody

Nature reports how more rigorous documentation requirements are demonstrating the intrinsic unreliability of scientistry (the profession of science) and showing how the substitution of scientistry for scientody (the actual scientific process) makes what subsequently passes for science unreliable.

The launch of the clinicaltrials.gov registry in 2000 seems to have had a striking impact on reported trial results, according to a PLoS ONE study1 that many researchers have been talking about online in the past week.

A 1997 US law mandated the registry’s creation, requiring researchers from 2000 to record their trial methods and outcome measures before collecting data. The study found that in a sample of 55 large trials testing heart-disease treatments, 57% of those published before 2000 reported positive effects from the treatments. But that figure plunged to just 8% in studies that were conducted after 2000. Study author Veronica Irvin, a health scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, says this suggests that registering clinical studies is leading to more rigorous research. Writing on his NeuroLogica Blog, neurologist Steven Novella of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, called the study “encouraging” but also “a bit frightening” because it casts doubt on previous positive results.

Irvin and her co-author Robert Kaplan, chief science officer at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in Rockville, Maryland, focused on human randomized controlled trials that were funded by the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). The authors conclude that registration of trials seemed to be the dominant driver of the drastic change in study results. They found no evidence that the trend could be explained by shifting levels of industry sponsorship or by changes in trial methodologies.

Translation: there is good reason to be dubious about more than 7 in every 8 historical corporate sponsored medical trials. Keep this in mind when you are basing an argument in support of the safety and efficacy of vaccines on research published by the pharmaceutical industry.

This higher standard of documentation is very welcome, but it underlines the way in which that the human factor is the weak link in the scientific process. No amount of “training” can substitute for forcing scientists to be completely transparent about their work.

Nature beats nurture

Genetic science is not only destroying the last 50 years of educational policy, but social policy in general. The fact that up to 65 percent of the difference in academic results are genetic also explains why the post-1965 and post-1986 waves of immigration are destined to reduce the USA to Second World status:

Genes influence academic ability across all subjects, latest study shows 

The researchers analysed genetic data and GCSE scores from 12,500 twins, about half of whom were identical. Results in all subjects, including maths, science, art and humanities, were highly heritable, with genes explaining a bigger proportion of the differences between children (54-65%) than environmental factors, such as school and family combined (14-21%), which were shared by the twins.

Comparing the outcomes for identical twins with fraternal twins allows scientists to investigate the extent to which genetics influence a person’s life. Identical twins share 100% of their genes, whereas fraternal twins share on average only half of the genes that differ between people.

So if genetics were a significant factor governing GCSE results, the differences between fraternal twins’ performances would be expected to be consistently greater than those between identical twins – and this is what the scientists saw.

When the scientists factored in IQ scores, they found that intelligence appeared to account for slightly less than half of the genetic component, suggesting that other heritable traits – curiosity, determination and memory, perhaps – play a significant role.

Kaili Rimfeld, who led the study and is also at King’s College London, said: “There’s a general academic achievement factor. Children who do well in one subject tend to better in another subject and that is largely for genetic reasons.”

Plomin said that while talking about genetics and education was no longer the taboo that it was twenty years ago, education professionals were slow to adapt teaching methods in the face of new scientific findings. “It’s a problem with evidence,” he said. “Thirty years ago medicine wasn’t particularly evidence-based. I think education is fundamentally not based on evidence. What programme has been rolled out that has been based on evidence?

The “Blank Slate” theory is dead. It was never anything but political philosophy and science killed it. Every nominal justification for human equality is being gradually eliminated, one by one, as scientists revisit hypotheses that have long been passed off as pseudoscientific facts.

I suspect that what we are seeing here is not unrelated to yesterday’s “cuckservative” kerfluffle, which is only going to get bigger now that Milo is working on a story. Remember, the Ciceronian political cycle predicts aristocracy will follow mob rule that has collapsed into dictatorship, and the anti-equalitarian backlash is going to have the benefit of a much stronger scientific foundation than historical justifications for the rule by the best.

I suspect that those equalitarians who claim to believe that a meritocracy is the best of all possible systems are going to rapidly change their tune once it becomes apparent that material merit is predominantly genetic in origin. Because in a post-Christian world of scientific rational materialism, there is no way that a meritocratic approach will not eventually lead to Eugenics 2.0.

The irony is that it is the equalitarians and anti-racists who will likely cling to the concept of race. Now that genetics gives us far more precise metrics, the new eugenicists won’t have to pay any attention to race at all in order to achieve their desired results. And they can claim, quite truthfully, that their policies are race- and color-blind. For example, if variants of the MAO-A, DAT1, and DRD2 genes are deemed to be unsuitable for an occupation, those possessing the unwanted genetic markers can be banned with absolutely no reference to race at all.

Stamping out sexism in science

Nature has a few ideas on that score. And if we lose a few male Nobel Laureates along the way, what does it matter? After all, the vast influx of female talent that is certain to replace the old sexist dinosaurs will more than make up for any losses, right?

The problem is serious and long-standing. But there are plenty of ways to tackle it. Nature has discussed and promoted them before, and is happy to do so again. Here is a list of measures to consider afresh:

  • Recognize and address unconscious bias. Graduate students given
    grants by the US National Institutes of Health are required to undergo
    ethics training. Gender-bias training for scientists, for example, would
    be a powerful way to help turn the tide.
  • Encourage universities and research institutions to extend the
    deadlines for tenure or project completion for scientists (women and
    men) who take parental leave, and do not penalize these researchers by
    excluding them from annual salary rises. Many workplaces are happy to
    consider and agree to such extension requests when they are made. The
    policy should simply be adopted across the board.
  • Events organizers and others must invite female scientists to
    lecture, review, talk and write articles. And if the woman asked says
    no — for whatever reason — then ask others. This is about more than mere
    visibility. It can boost female participation too. Anecdotal reports
    suggest that women are more likely to ask questions in sessions chaired
    by women. After acknowledging our own bias towards male contributors, Nature, for example, is engaged in a continued effort to commission more women in our pages.
  • Do not use vocabulary and imagery that support one gender more than
    another. Words matter. It is not ‘political-correctness-gone-mad’ to
    avoid defaulting to the pronouns ‘him’ and ‘he’, or to ensure that
    photographs and illustrations feature women.
  • In communication and promotional materials, highlight women who have
    made key contributions to previous work, whether in your own lab or
    within your research discipline more broadly.
  • Be aware of the importance of informal settings and social
    activities to workplace culture, and people’s sense of their place
    within it. Senior scientists can, where possible, make such events
    inclusive.

Can one really say the Law of Unintended Consequences applies when the consequences of a proposed action are so entirely obvious to anyone with half a brain? How many Shakespeares, Dantes, or even JRR Tolkiens have been produced since since the liberation of women from the male oppression that forcibly prevented them from putting pen to paper 40, or 80, or 97 years ago?

And what is the price of trading a few Watsons and Hunts for the scientific equivalents of Stephanie Meyers and E.L. James going to be?

Now, obviously I support women in science; I publish more female scientists than 99.9 percent of my critics do. But I don’t support female thought police in science, which is really what Nature is advocating here. It is the thought police, of both sexes, who truly have NO PLACE whatsoever in science.

How much longer

Will they “fucking love science”? I wonder. Heartiste takes no little amusement in pointing to the potential ideological challenges to the secular orthodoxy increasingly being posed by genetic science:

“People really do see the world differently,” says lead author Rebecca Todd, a professor in UBC’s Department of Psychology. “For people with this gene variation, the emotionally relevant things in the world stand out much more.”

The gene in question is ADRA2b, which influences the neurotransmitter norepinephrine. Previous research by Todd found that carriers of a deletion variant of this gene showed greater attention to negative words. Her latest research is the first to use brain imaging to find out how the gene affects how vividly people perceive the world around them, and the results were startling, even to Todd.

“We thought, from our previous research, that people with the deletion variant would probably show this emotionally enhanced vividness, and they did more than we would even have predicted,” says Todd, who scanned the brains of 39 participants, 21 of whom were carriers of the genetic variation….

Compared to non-carriers, carriers of the ADRA2b deletion variant gene estimated lower levels of noise on positive and negative images, relative to neutral images, indicating emotionally enhanced vividness, or EEV. Carriers of the deletion variation also showed significantly more brain activity reflecting EEV in key regions of the brain sensitive to emotional relevance.

About the gene

The ADRA2b deletion variant appears in varying degrees across different ethnicities. Although roughly 50 per cent of the Caucasian population studied by these researchers in Canada carry the genetic variation, it has been found to be prevalent in other ethnicities. For example, one study found that just 10 per cent of Rwandans carried the ADRA2b gene variant.

So, an aggression-linked gene is 500 times more common while an empathy-linked gene is one-fifth as common in various gene pools. But aggression and empathy probably wouldn’t have anything at all to do with actual human behavior, would they?

It’s always fascinating to see how quickly those who claim their opinions and morality are guided by science are to throw science out the window whenever it contradicts their actual beliefs and values.

Science is not a reliable guide

The problem with appealing to science isn’t limited to the problem of deriving “ought” from “is”. It is that the human element corrupts the process to the point that one cannot reasonably expect to rely upon science to accurately relate “is” any longer, barring exogenous real-world confirmation:

If you want to see just how long an academic institution can tolerate a string of slow, festering research scandals, let me invite you to the University of Minnesota, where I teach medical ethics.

Over the past 25 years, our department of psychiatry has been party to the following disgraces: a felony conviction and a Food and Drug Administration research disqualification for a psychiatrist guilty of fraud in a drug study; the F.D.A. disqualification of another psychiatrist, for enrolling illiterate Hmong refugees in a drug study without their consent; the suspended license of yet another psychiatrist, who was charged with “reckless, if not willful, disregard” for dozens of patients; and, in 2004, the discovery, in a halfway house bathroom, of the near-decapitated corpse of Dan Markingson, a seriously mentally ill young man under an involuntary commitment order who committed suicide after enrolling, over the objections of his mother, in an industry-funded antipsychotic study run by members of the department.

And those, unfortunately, are just the highlights.

The problem extends well beyond the department of psychiatry and into the university administration. Rather than dealing forthrightly with these ethical breaches, university officials have seemed more interested in covering up wrongdoing with a variety of underhanded tactics. Reporting in The Star Tribune discovered, for example, that in the felony case, university officials hid an internal investigation of the fraud from federal investigators for nearly four years.

This is why religion and philosophy will always trump science. Due to the human element of scientistry and its obvious susceptibility to corruption, science that has not yet reached the level of reliability and credibility we call “engineering” simply does not merit being taken seriously by anyone who is not a professional scientist.

The war on free expression

The principled defenses have failed. The attempts to ignore it have failed. The attempts to placate have, predictably, failed. The only way to shut down the “army of self-appointed militants who see themselves as the guardians of correct thinking” is hit back twice as hard and hold the SJWs completely accountable to their own rules.

When Professor Tim Hunt, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, recently addressed a major conference in Seoul about women in science, he said he had three problems with ‘girls in laboratories’, namely that: ‘You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.’

As a media storm erupted, Hunt insisted that his remarks were made in ‘a totally jocular, ironic way’.

But none of that matters to today’s self-righteous crusaders against offensive opinions, for whom language is never a laughing matter. Professor Hunt was immediately surrounded online by an outraged Twitter mob demanding his head on a pike.

These boycott-and-ban zealots are not content with exercising their right to criticise somebody who makes an offensive joke. Quivering with self-righteous indignation, they want to silence those who fail to conform to their group-think.

In this case, their bullying worked. The scientific authorities immediately caved in. Not only was Hunt forced to resign from his post at University College London, but he was also dismissed from the science committee of the European Research Council.

So biochemistry loses a brilliant pioneer, while we lose more ground to the forces of oppressive censorship.

For the saga of Tim Hunt’s downfall is just the latest example of how a culture of verbal prohibition is taking over society, led by an army of self-appointed militants who see themselves as the guardians of correct thinking.

If you don’t want to see more Nobel Laureates like Tim Hunt and James Watson hounded from science, more innovators like Brandon Eich hounded from tech, then you should endorse the Tor Books boycott and force the SJWs to realize that they will be held twice as accountable for their every joke, every tweet, every Facebook comment, and every personal statement as they hold everyone else.

Scientistry is not scientody

And as for those who claim that I am anti-science because I am anti-corrupt scientistry, I’ve got two appeals to scientific authority that will trump yours right here:

In the past few years more professionals have come forward to share a truth that, for many people, proves difficult to swallow. One such authority is Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet – considered to be one of the most well respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world.

Dr. Horton recently published a statement declaring that a lot of published research is in fact unreliable at best, if not completely false.

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

This is quite disturbing, given the fact that all of these studies (which are industry sponsored) are used to develop drugs/vaccines to supposedly help people, train medical staff, educate medical students and more.

It’s common for many to dismiss a lot of great work by experts and researchers at various institutions around the globe which isn’t “peer-reviewed” and doesn’t appear in a “credible” medical journal, but as we can see, “peer-reviewed” doesn’t really mean much anymore. “Credible” medical journals continue to lose their tenability in the eyes of experts and employees of the journals themselves, like Dr. Horton.

He also went on to call himself out in a sense, stating that journal editors aid and abet the worst behaviours, that the amount of bad research is alarming, that data is sculpted to fit a preferred theory. He goes on to observe that important confirmations are often rejected and little is done to correct bad practices. What’s worse, much of what goes on could even be considered borderline misconduct.

Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime Editor in Chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ), which is considered to another one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, makes her view of the subject quite plain:

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine”

I note that it isn’t any of the pro-vaxxers, the climate change scammers, the “I fucking love science” crowd or the True Believers in evolution that are calling out this vast quantity of scientific fraud, but rather the science skeptics, like me, who have repeatedly and reliably observed that the human element of the profession has indelibly tainted all confidence in the process.

And then recall that this is what Sam Harris believes can and should replace philosophy and traditional morality as an effective guide to human behavior.

SCIENCE is not science

Whatever happened to the idea that science is self-correcting?

Over the past few days a scandal has begun to plague political science. A UCLA graduate student, Michael LaCour, appears to have faked a data set that was the basis for an article that he published in the highly prestigious journal Science. I have examined a second paper by LaCour. As I’ll explain, I’m convinced that it also is the product of faked results.

The Science article purportedly showed that personalized, door-to-door canvassing is effective at changing political views. LaCour and his co-author, Don Green of Columbia University, enlisted members of an LGBT organization at UCLA to contact voters who had earlier indicated on a survey that they opposed gay marriage. The article shows, based on follow-up surveys, that the LGBT door-to-door canvassing had a significant effect in shifting voters toward pro-gay-marriage views.

Two graduate students at UC Berkeley, however, had significant difficulties in replicating the study. They called the private firm that LaCour had supposedly enlisted to conduct his survey. The firm, however, said that it did not conduct such a survey. LaCour had also reported to the grad students the name of an employee of the survey firm with whom he worked. The firm, however, said that it had no records of such an employee ever working at the firm.

After confronting his coauthor, Green requested that Science retract the article. LaCour still stands by his results. Science, faced with this dilemma, has not (yet) retracted the paper.

That pretty much settles the question of whether Science concerns scientody – the scientific method – or scientistry – the scientific profession. An “editorial expression of concern” is not sufficient. The study could not be replicated and there is evidence that the first study was not legitimate. Therefore, a reputable publication that was actually dedicated to scientody would retract the study immediately pending further evidence of its replicability. Science is observably not such a publication.

Especially when the man who developed the method that researcher utilized has come out very strongly against the legitimacy of LaCour’s work:

I think the bulk of the evidence suggests that LaCour faked at least some of the results of this second paper. Not only would I be willing to bet on this conclusion, I would be willing to give 10:1 odds on it. Still, I’m not certain, and I would be hesitant to give 100:1 odds. And I would refuse to give 1,000:1 odds.

Regardless, I am certain that LaCour faked the results of the original paper—the one published in Science. I predict that UCLA will refuse to award him a PhD, and I predict that Princeton will retract the assistant professorship that it offered him. I predict that UCLA or Princeton or both will conduct an investigation. I suspect that they will find that LaCour faked results in a few papers, not just one.

But the most damning thing, as far as the credibility of Science goes, is this observation, “It is very rare for political scientists to have our results mentioned alongside results from the “hard” sciences.” So why, then, was this apparently fraudulent paper selected for such unusual publication in the first place?

The Excluded

This concept of intellectual exclusion may help explain why the credentialed elite are so often at odds with me. They can’t believe I am willing and able to challenge them so successfully, and I can’t believe what clueless idiots they are despite their credentialed positions of intellectual authority. It explains an awful lot; I thought they were smarter than they apparently are:

The probability of entering and remaining in an intellectually elite profession such as Physician, Judge, Professor, Scientist, Corporate Executive, etc. increases with IQ to about 133. It then falls about 1/3 by 140. By 150 IQ the probability has fallen by 97%! In other words, a significant percentage of people with IQs over 140 are being systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded from the population that addresses the biggest problems of our time or who are responsible for assuring the efficient operation of social, scientific, political and economic institutions.

“Over an extensive range of studies and with remarkable consistency, from Physicians to Professors to CEOs, the mean IQ of intellectually elite professions is about 125 and the standard deviation is about 6.5.  For example, Gibson and Light found that 148 members of the Cambridge University faculty had a mean IQ of 126 with a standard deviation of 6.3.  The highest score was 139.”

“From a theoretical standpoint, democratic meritocracies should evolve five IQ defined ‘castes’, The Leaders, The Advisors, The Followers, The Clueless and The Excluded. These castes are natural in that they are the result of how people of different intellectual abilities relate to one another.  This is based on research done by Leta Hollingworth in the 1930’s and the more recent work of D.K. Simonton.”

“Leta Hollingworth studied profoundly gifted children.  She reported them as having IQs of 180+, which was a R16 score.  As such, on today’s tests this equates to 159+.  Her conclusion was that when IQ differences are greater than 30 points, leader/follower relationships will break down or will not form.  It establishes an absolute limit to the intellectual gulf between leader and followers.”

In other words, more than a few PhDs at elite universities are more than two standard deviations below me in IQ terms. And here I am supposed to be impressed by a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy of Language from a second-tier Midwestern university? In fact, given the ability of the Ilk and my Vile Faceless Minions to not only follow my lead in a disciplined manner but also correctly anticipate my intentions without having them explained, the evidence would tend to suggest that the mean intelligence of the regulars here is higher than the Cambridge faculty.

Based on my interactions with “intellectually elite professionals” this doesn’t shock me, although I’m a little surprised that both the mean and the ceiling as as low as they are.

So it should be no surprise that I’ve been “systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded” from the science fiction community, as its mean is probably around 1.5 standard deviations below the university professors. (Although in my estimation there are a few SF people with whom I have interacted who clearly have IQs over 139.) But in most instances, the intellectual gulf is simply too great.

Garth Zietsman has said, referring to people with D15IQs over 152, ‘A
common experience with people in this category or higher is that they
are not wanted – the masses (including the professional classes) find
them an affront of some sort.’  While true, it is more likely a symptom
than a cause of the exclusion.  We need to understand why they are an
affront.

I can tell him that. People who work very hard and spend years in order to climb to what they regard as the pinnacle of achievement actively resent those who can simply leap up to the peak. And because their knowledge is hard won, they tend to cling to it much more tenaciously than the more intelligent individual who is no more tied to one piece of information than the next. What makes it worse is that they cannot fathom that the more intelligent individuals do not think like they do.

Members of high IQ societies, especially those that require D15IQs above
145, often comment that around this IQ, qualitatively different
thinking emerges.  By this they mean that the 145+ D15IQ person doesn’t
just do the same things, intellectually, as a lower IQ person, just
faster and more accurately, but actually engages in fundamentally
different intellectual processes.  

I’ve been pointing this out for years, if you recall. But because I don’t think like the less intelligent, I am regularly labeled everything from stupid to racist. In my experience, the 150 IQ individual does not resent the
individual with the 160 or the 175 IQ, and this may be because being above 145, we all tend to engage in similar thought processes, albeit with different capabilities. The 135 IQ individual dislikes
and fears the 150+ individuals, while the 115 IQ individual either
doesn’t believe the 150+ individuals exist or blithely insists that they are crazy.

That’s
why I despise midwits. You simply can’t talk to them. They don’t even
try to understand you, but instead move to disqualify you as fast as they can. I have much more sensible conversations with
people in the 75 to 100 range than I do with most in the 105 to 120
range. The 125 to 140 crowd is okay as long as they don’t have an
inferiority complex, but when they do, they’re the biggest annoyances of
all.

People with D15IQs over 150 are effectively ‘The Excluded’, routinely
finding their thoughts to be unconvincing in the public discourse and in
productive environments.  If placed in a leadership position, they will
not succeed.

Now you know why I have such an allergy to being asked to lead in any way, shape, or form. In any event, this may be one of the more interesting aspects of Brainstorm (a reminder, there are 20 places left for the Wednesday session at 7:30 PM Eastern), as even those who aren’t +3SD or higher are, at least, open in principle to the wild and crazy thoughts being expressed by the higher intelligences. If we can figure out how to best harness a community of High IQ Excluded, we should be able to come up with more than a few interesting projects.