Is it possible to be negative all the time?

13

Replies

  • _John_
    _John_ Posts: 8,642 Member
    3ur4nn.jpg
  • thisonetimeatthegym
    thisonetimeatthegym Posts: 1,977 Member
    I've been in metal things that flew across continents, and that was reproducible on demand.

    We are also communicating words across a medium provided by scientific research and principles.

    That we can apply good science doesn't negate that much of it is bunk. And that much of it is bunk does not negate that a lot of it is good.

    Just that you have to be mindful that just because an academic journal published it doesn't mean its true.

    Back on topic, I still think I'm an optimistic realist or a realistic optimist. Haven't decided which one yet. :)
  • NorthCascades
    NorthCascades Posts: 10,970 Member
    So, half of what's published in the entire scientific literature is fake. Can we tell it apart, what's real from what's fake?

    If the answer is yes, it's not really a problem.

    If the answer is no, then how did we build a rocket to the moon?
  • thisonetimeatthegym
    thisonetimeatthegym Posts: 1,977 Member
    Grey_1 wrote: »
    Did you know that most published scientific research is fake?

    Fake like a deliberate hoax to fool everybody, or fake like how you could send a rocket to the moon with Newton's laws but they're not a complete description of reality?

    Fake as in not reproducible.

    Here's a quote:

    "It is the title of a paper [why most published scientific findings are false] written 10 years ago by the legendary Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis. The paper, which has become the most widely cited paper ever published in the journal PLoS Medicine, examined how issues currently ingrained in the scientific process combined with the way we currently interpret statistical significance, means that at present, most published findings are likely to be incorrect.

    Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet recently put it only slightly more mildly: "Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue." Horton agrees with Ioannidis' reasoning, blaming: "small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance." Horton laments: "Science has taken a turn towards darkness."
    This quote is...disingenuous at best...

    On the first bold, he doesn't distinguish between known fact, such as the laws of aerodynamics, and accepted theories, which are always subject to change based on available data/observations etc.

    Second bold, Again, there's no granularity. Our world and everything in it, above it, beneath it that we can study, we pretty much are. The phrase "Much of the scientific literature" covers an absolutely mind boggling span of study...break it down a bit....

    The third bold - Penicillin was once considered to be "of dubious importance". Attempts at flight were mocked and laughed at...

    He wrote a piece that appeals to peoples nameless, often baseless fears....

    We need specific studies cited on specific unreproducible events/results etc....


    The problem was so pervasive, a project was opened to improve the problem, called OSF, the Open Science Framework. Asking for a "specific study" is akin to seeking a grain of sand on the beach. The problem is systemic and pervasive.

    The Open Science Collaboration decided to look at the 100 most important studies in psychology - the ones they put in textbooks, and reproduced them. Or rather, attempted to. 69% were not reproducible. Some specs:

    "In the biggest project of its kind, Brian Nosek, a social psychologist and head of the Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, and 269 co-authors repeated work reported in 98 original papers from three psychology journals, to see if they independently came up with the same results.

    The studies they took on ranged from whether expressing insecurities perpetuates them to differences in how children and adults respond to fear stimuli, to effective ways to teach arithmetic.

    According to the replicators' qualitative assessments, as previously reported by Nature, only 39 of the 100 replication attempts were successful."

    http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248

    A very candid researcher speaks up:

    "“As someone who has been doing research for nearly twenty years, I now can’t help but wonder if the topics I chose to study are in fact real and robust. Have I been chasing puffs of smoke for all these years? I have spent nearly a decade working on the concept of ego depletion, including work that is critical of the model used to explain the phenomenon. I have been rewarded for this work, and I am convinced that the main reason I get any invitations to speak at colloquia and brown-bags these days is because of this work. The problem is that ego depletion might not even be a thing.”

    https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/472272

    It is not limited to psychology.

    According to a 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists reported in the journal Nature, 70% of them failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments (50% failed to reproduce their own experiment). These numbers differ among disciplines:[4]

    chemistry: 90% (60%),
    biology: 80% (60%),
    physics and engineering: 70% (50%),
    medicine: 70% (60%),
    Earth and environment science: 60% (40%).
    In 2009, 2% of scientists admitted to falsifying studies at least once and 14% admitted to personally know someone who did. Misconducts were reported more frequently by medical researchers than others.[5]

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
  • thisonetimeatthegym
    thisonetimeatthegym Posts: 1,977 Member
    Did you know that most published scientific research is fake?

    Fake like a deliberate hoax to fool everybody, or fake like how you could send a rocket to the moon with Newton's laws but they're not a complete description of reality?

    Fake as in not reproducible.

    Here's a quote:

    "It is the title of a paper [why most published scientific findings are false] written 10 years ago by the legendary Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis. The paper, which has become the most widely cited paper ever published in the journal PLoS Medicine, examined how issues currently ingrained in the scientific process combined with the way we currently interpret statistical significance, means that at present, most published findings are likely to be incorrect.

    Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet recently put it only slightly more mildly: "Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue." Horton agrees with Ioannidis' reasoning, blaming: "small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance." Horton laments: "Science has taken a turn towards darkness."

    Confused what your point is. Or rather, confused what your endgame with this line of thought is - are you implying modern science is somehow invalid?

    Are there poorly designed, limited studies that get published? Yes, frequently. Are there scientists who present their results so they skew toward a particular agenda? Of course, everyone has inherent bias, and some have a harder time letting it go than others. But there's also good ones, and I'm smart enough that when I read them I can tell the difference. I'm pretty good at filtering out actual data from a biased discussion, too. Plus a handful of small studies with interesting but non-reproducible results lead to larger studies and meta-analyses that bring about a clearer picture. Just because there are some hurdles with methodology doesn't mean scientific research as a whole should be dismissed.

    Also, they media rarely reports on scientific studies in any sort of accurate manner, so there's a good chance that what my local news is "reiterating" is not what the researchers actually found. Internet news sites in all their clickbaitiness are super guilty of this.

    As to the original topic: yes, some people can be amazingly negative all the time. They thrive on talking about how much their lives suck and how dark and gloomy the world is. They seek out sob stories and bad news for gossip. Could we maybe talk about puppies and butterflies instead of how your sister's friend's husband's second cousin's mom's coworker got cancer?

    ...Is this post too negative?

    Lolol. I do prefer cheery.

    "Confused what your point is. "

    The truth.

    I've lied, I'm sure you have too, yet we somehow put a class of people as above mere human nature. I've worked in academia a long time and found out we are human and fallible just like everyone else.

    The fact IS that the sciences are in a crisis, scientists know that science is in a crisis, and has been for at least a decade now, but the general public does not know this. And when informed that there is a crisis, because of the mental block that is the trust in people in lab coats, the general public don't believe the scientists that say science is broken.

    But it is and I want it fixed. Don't you?
  • thisonetimeatthegym
    thisonetimeatthegym Posts: 1,977 Member
    I've been in metal things that flew across continents, and that was reproducible on demand.

    That is correct.

    If half of everything we knew about the world was wrong, planes would be falling out of the sky left and right - if they could get airborne in the first place.

    We have digital cameras, and they work, because the science on light as a particle and a wave (and lots of other science) is right.

    We have refrigeration, because the science it relies on is correct.

    We have medicine, because what we know about chemistry, biology, genetics, evolution, and a great many other things, is largely correct (but incomplete).

    Electrical lighting in the night.

    GPS. GPS would put you in the wrong place if Einstein was wrong about relativity.

    Xrays.

    I could go on and on.

    How do we build this stuff if we don't know what we're doing? Penguins genuinely don't understand science, and penguins don't build satellites to visit the edge of the solar system. We have thumbs and penguins don't, but I don't think that's why we can send a person to the moon and bring them home safely.

    So where am I going wrong in my thinking?


    Because you are looking at the beautiful paint and wainscotting and scientists are telling you there are cracks in the foundation.
  • Sinistrous
    Sinistrous Posts: 5,589 Member
    Don't be negative. You might mess up your tv.




    3525bp2skerd.gif

    Ah, all it took was an ashtray when I flung it into the 50"'s monitor.
  • Grey_1
    Grey_1 Posts: 1,139 Member
    Grey_1 wrote: »
    Did you know that most published scientific research is fake?

    Fake like a deliberate hoax to fool everybody, or fake like how you could send a rocket to the moon with Newton's laws but they're not a complete description of reality?

    Fake as in not reproducible.

    Here's a quote:

    "It is the title of a paper [why most published scientific findings are false] written 10 years ago by the legendary Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis. The paper, which has become the most widely cited paper ever published in the journal PLoS Medicine, examined how issues currently ingrained in the scientific process combined with the way we currently interpret statistical significance, means that at present, most published findings are likely to be incorrect.

    Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet recently put it only slightly more mildly: "Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue." Horton agrees with Ioannidis' reasoning, blaming: "small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance." Horton laments: "Science has taken a turn towards darkness."
    This quote is...disingenuous at best...

    On the first bold, he doesn't distinguish between known fact, such as the laws of aerodynamics, and accepted theories, which are always subject to change based on available data/observations etc.

    Second bold, Again, there's no granularity. Our world and everything in it, above it, beneath it that we can study, we pretty much are. The phrase "Much of the scientific literature" covers an absolutely mind boggling span of study...break it down a bit....

    The third bold - Penicillin was once considered to be "of dubious importance". Attempts at flight were mocked and laughed at...

    He wrote a piece that appeals to peoples nameless, often baseless fears....

    We need specific studies cited on specific unreproducible events/results etc....


    The problem was so pervasive, a project was opened to improve the problem, called OSF, the Open Science Framework. Asking for a "specific study" is akin to seeking a grain of sand on the beach. The problem is systemic and pervasive.

    The Open Science Collaboration decided to look at the 100 most important studies in psychology - the ones they put in textbooks, and reproduced them. Or rather, attempted to. 69% were not reproducible. Some specs:

    "In the biggest project of its kind, Brian Nosek, a social psychologist and head of the Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, and 269 co-authors repeated work reported in 98 original papers from three psychology journals, to see if they independently came up with the same results.

    The studies they took on ranged from whether expressing insecurities perpetuates them to differences in how children and adults respond to fear stimuli, to effective ways to teach arithmetic.

    According to the replicators' qualitative assessments, as previously reported by Nature, only 39 of the 100 replication attempts were successful."

    http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248

    A very candid researcher speaks up:

    "“As someone who has been doing research for nearly twenty years, I now can’t help but wonder if the topics I chose to study are in fact real and robust. Have I been chasing puffs of smoke for all these years? I have spent nearly a decade working on the concept of ego depletion, including work that is critical of the model used to explain the phenomenon. I have been rewarded for this work, and I am convinced that the main reason I get any invitations to speak at colloquia and brown-bags these days is because of this work. The problem is that ego depletion might not even be a thing.”

    https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/472272

    It is not limited to psychology.

    According to a 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists reported in the journal Nature, 70% of them failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments (50% failed to reproduce their own experiment). These numbers differ among disciplines:[4]

    chemistry: 90% (60%),
    biology: 80% (60%),
    physics and engineering: 70% (50%),
    medicine: 70% (60%),
    Earth and environment science: 60% (40%).
    In 2009, 2% of scientists admitted to falsifying studies at least once and 14% admitted to personally know someone who did. Misconducts were reported more frequently by medical researchers than others.[5]

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

    Ok this is something more concrete:

    Regarding Psychology - that will always be changing in my opinion. There are far to many variables within even a small, handpicked control group, much less trying to apply it across a broad spectrum. I may catch flak for this, but in many ways we're still in the dark ages of mapping and researching the mind.

    I'm familiar with the OSF, but their study is based partly on citing the process the scientific principle is based on, which is simply weeding out what's true for what isn't. This is how the scientific method works.

    1.question
    2. research
    3. hypothesis
    4. test
    5. amend hypothesis based on test results
    6. analyze the data

    By the very nature of the scientific method, a large number of results will be unreproducible.

    What I take issue with are scientists who are trying to pass off garbage as fact. And yeah there are a few...
  • DeficitDuchess
    DeficitDuchess Posts: 3,099 Member
    Did you know that most published scientific research is fake?

    Fake like a deliberate hoax to fool everybody, or fake like how you could send a rocket to the moon with Newton's laws but they're not a complete description of reality?

    Fake as in not reproducible.

    Here's a quote:

    "It is the title of a paper [why most published scientific findings are false] written 10 years ago by the legendary Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis. The paper, which has become the most widely cited paper ever published in the journal PLoS Medicine, examined how issues currently ingrained in the scientific process combined with the way we currently interpret statistical significance, means that at present, most published findings are likely to be incorrect.

    Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet recently put it only slightly more mildly: "Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue." Horton agrees with Ioannidis' reasoning, blaming: "small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance." Horton laments: "Science has taken a turn towards darkness."

    However this could actually be, their own bias towards scientific facts; that they don't desire to believe themselves!
  • thisonetimeatthegym
    thisonetimeatthegym Posts: 1,977 Member
    edited December 2016
    So, half of what's published in the entire scientific literature is fake. Can we tell it apart, what's real from what's fake?

    If the answer is yes, it's not really a problem.

    If the answer is no, then how did we build a rocket to the moon?

    Let's say you are a materials scientist. They specialize in making and improving materials. They have made a huge amount of progress, progress you see in Teflon, Velcro, plastics, steel.

    These are proven, reproducible materials that NASA uses to rocket things into space.

    Now let's say as a reasonably ambitious materials scientist, you decide that you want to improve the strength of an object. You can do this by changing the shape (like an arch can handle a heavier load than a rectangle), changing the material, changing the temperature in the manufacturing process, and many other factors. To do so, that materials scientist will likely utilize formulas that predict breaking points for specific materials in specific temperatures in specific shapes.

    It isn't until the prototype is made and tested do those predictive models show to be true or false. In addition, because of variations in manufacturing processes, lab conditions, biases in data analysis, and so on, the material really isn't ready for use until several generations of prototypes have been replicated and thoroughly tested. NASA has every motivation to do this. Because screw ups have big consequences at that level. And those scientists are on a salary, and they better produce PRODUCT.

    At the run of the mill science lab, with an equally ambitious scientist, who must PUBLISH or die career-wise, no such motivation exists to follow up. And academic journals, who must sell journals or die, no such motivation exists to publish such dull products such as, what we found last year, we found it again this year, or, worse, we did this study and found no causitive factor.

    Makes sense now?
  • mysteps2beauty
    mysteps2beauty Posts: 494 Member
    I find that news, FB posts, crowds of people, all the time (traffic, public transportation, elevators) bring me low i.e. negative and unhappy.

    So, since the election is finally over, I find that I don't need to stay connected as much...so I weaned myself off these cesspools of negativity and bad news. I now watch the Hallmark Channel which has some of the corniest story lines in each of the Christmas shows I watch...everyday. My pretend world of happiness. It starts with everybody in a low mood in the beginning, then everybody gets happy as it marches to the end of the movie. Good stuff.
  • DeficitDuchess
    DeficitDuchess Posts: 3,099 Member
    I am fine with people, that have depression; being negative all of the time because they can't help it. I don't consider them, toxic people. I also don't consider people that overall, have a difficult life; as toxic either. As long as they, didn't intentionally; cause their difficulties. I consider drama kings/queens & those that complain about 1st world problems, as if it ruins their life when it doesn't; to be problematic & avoid them, if/when possible!
  • thisonetimeatthegym
    thisonetimeatthegym Posts: 1,977 Member
    I find that news, FB posts, crowds of people, all the time (traffic, public transportation, elevators) bring me low i.e. negative and unhappy.

    So, since the election is finally over, I find that I don't need to stay connected as much...so I weaned myself off these cesspools of negativity and bad news. I now watch the Hallmark Channel which has some of the corniest story lines in each of the Christmas shows I watch...everyday. My pretend world of happiness. It starts with everybody in a low mood in the beginning, then everybody gets happy as it marches to the end of the movie. Good stuff.

    Applause.
  • thisonetimeatthegym
    thisonetimeatthegym Posts: 1,977 Member
    I am fine with people, that have depression; being negative all of the time because they can't help it. I don't consider them, toxic people. I also don't consider people that overall, have a difficult life; as toxic either. As long as they, didn't intentionally; cause their difficulties. I consider drama kings/queens & those that complain about 1st world problems, as if it ruins their life when it doesn't; to be problematic & avoid them, if/when possible!

    Applause.
  • beagletracks
    beagletracks Posts: 6,035 Member
    Yes, especially when people trust fake news more than science and choose ignorance over active, informed engagement in democracy.
  • DeficitDuchess
    DeficitDuchess Posts: 3,099 Member
    I am fine with people, that have depression; being negative all of the time because they can't help it. I don't consider them, toxic people. I also don't consider people that overall, have a difficult life; as toxic either. As long as they, didn't intentionally; cause their difficulties. I consider drama kings/queens & those that complain about 1st world problems, as if it ruins their life when it doesn't; to be problematic & avoid them, if/when possible!

    Applause.

    Thank you!
  • thisonetimeatthegym
    thisonetimeatthegym Posts: 1,977 Member
    I am fine with people, that have depression; being negative all of the time because they can't help it. I don't consider them, toxic people. I also don't consider people that overall, have a difficult life; as toxic either. As long as they, didn't intentionally; cause their difficulties. I consider drama kings/queens & those that complain about 1st world problems, as if it ruins their life when it doesn't; to be problematic & avoid them, if/when possible!

    Applause.

    Thank you!

    Standing ovation.

    Really food for thought.
  • thisonetimeatthegym
    thisonetimeatthegym Posts: 1,977 Member
    So, half of what's published in the entire scientific literature is fake. Can we tell it apart, what's real from what's fake?

    If the answer is yes, it's not really a problem.

    If the answer is no, then how did we build a rocket to the moon?

    Another example.

    Have you heard of Dean Kamen? He's the founder of Deka. Typically he makes medical supplies and devices. He also created the Segway. Now he's working on a device called the Slingshot, to purify water cheaply for the poor.

    He owns his company. He employs a team of engineers and other scientists. They get paid to make things and improve things. When a hospital orders a product, they make money.

    Contrast this to an academic research scientist or a medical researcher. They have some grant money given to them to find something. If they find it, and a journal publishes their paper on the study, they can get more funding, and maybe a teaching job. If they don't find it, the journal is not going to be interested in publishing those uninteresting findings.

    The first scientist makes things, the second group writes papers and teach. Both groups make discoveries. One group has a much greater incentive to make sure what they are promoting actually works.
  • sw33tp3a_1
    sw33tp3a_1 Posts: 795 Member
    Yes. My kids father is the most negative person I know. It's quite sad.
  • NorthCascades
    NorthCascades Posts: 10,970 Member
    The first scientist makes things, the second group writes papers and teach. Both groups make discoveries. One group has a much greater incentive to make sure what they are promoting actually works.

    Let's assume for the sake of discussion that it's true, engineers are good honest people who want to do right by the world, and scientists are conceiving tricksters who just want to publish anything they can to fatten their pockets.

    Ok. Engineers genuinely want to make things that work. But half of everything we think we know about reality is false. So how do engineers succeed in building incredibly complex things from scientific knowledge that's patently false? Good intentions aren't enough.