I'm primarily posting this because I think that @Chris would want to read this article.
The Lancet Retraction: What peer review is not designed to prevent
I did want to, thanks! It’s incredibly important and the weaknesses in the process the author pointed out feel right to me, unfortunately. I think the world is still reeling from the Andew Wakefield paper about vaccines that got published in the Lancet before being retracted 12 years later.
From the moment the Lancet published this one and scientists started questioning Surgisphere’s improbably large dataset, I wondered what the outcome would be.
I can’t remember if I linked this a few weeks ago when it came out:
I have read either that article or another one on her research work. It is sad that there is such a big demand for her ability.
I listened to something on Public Radio today but cannot find which program it was unless it was near the end of "On The Media." (Because of a data cap, I only download large audio files when I have access to public wifi.)
A scientific author was being interviewed about a book that calls in question many of the standard views regarding whether people are prone to violence or prone to kindness. His proposition was that much of the research that suggests that we are more likely to be violent than kind was either fraudulent (Stanford experiment) or suspect for other reasons. He also reported on a real life island stranding in 1965 that had results that were the exact opposite of the novel "Lord of the Flies"
Sadly, I didn't get the man's name. He is from the Netherlands, though.
I've located the public radio segment that I heard yesterday and which I mentioned in my reply to your response. I don't agree with every sentence in this audio but I find the rejection of previously held theories and the new views of scientists to be quite in alignment with our on-going discussion of Science as a process in flux.
On the webpage linked, the third segment is titled "Human are only as bad as the systems we build." (Not a sentiment with which I am in complete agreement but I do believe that systems which are based on an expectation of bad behavior do provoke bad behavior.)
Thanks! I’ll give it a listen and let you know my impressions.
I don’t love the tech paper, peer review process at all, and I’m dismayed at the way scientists write them in such unintelligible ways in the third person, devoid of emotion. I believe that’s why marketing triumphs over science so often.
Pasteur was a showman and that is why he persuaded so many people, I believe.
Here’s a case in point: a pathologist and a physician were seeing h pylori bacteria in the stomachs of their ulcer patients. Bacteria were not thought to grow in the upper digestive tract because it’s too acid for them to survive. But these two saw them under the microscope.
Science believed ulcers were caused by excess acid. These two came to believe the presence of h pylori was causally related to both ulcers and stomach cancer.
For decades the tech paper peer review process failed them and they got nowhere. But this is science, where if you can prove you’re right, your skeptics have to change their minds and you get to change the world. And maybe you get to win a rare battle against marketing, where Rolaids and Alka Seltzer own public opinion.
So the doc went full Pasteur and made a broth of cultures from one of his ulcer patients, and drank it publicly. And just like that he got the precursor to ulcers and was able to demonstrate the cure (antibiotics, not antacid tablets).
Gross. He shouldn’t have had to. But it worked and the two of them won the Nobel Prize for medicine. Skeptics now on board.
And now we know how to prevent ulcers and most stomach cancers, with only partial thanks to peer reviewed papers.
Have you checked out retractionwatch.com?
I learned of it from listening to an episode of The Skeptics Guide podcast (H/t @cvdavis)
The article, which appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research, has now been retracted — marking the second such retraction for Ping Dong. Dong was the second author; the senior author was Meng Zhang, of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The first author was Xue (Irene) Huang, a marketing researcher at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Here’s the retraction notice:
The first and third authors have requested to retract the above-referenced article due to data and analysis anomalies they discovered across the studies underpinning the research. The editors of the Journal of Consumer Research have been unable to contact the second author. The editors agree that these anomalies make the findings reported in this article unreliable. The two co-authors and the editors apologize for any problems that the publication of this article may have caused.
You might be interested in this book. The first link or podcast is a discussion of Michael Shermer with the author Gerald Posner. His book is Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America.
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/science-salon/id1352860989?i=1000483132963
Here’s another link with a discussion with Posner
