Ciência podre

Nos tempos do Covid tinhamos nos extremos os críticos acéfalos e os apoaintes acéfalos da ciência.

Ainda me lembro de me venderem que os vacinados não apanhavam Covid...

Adiante!

"However, my advisor had a different view: The paper had been published in a top management journal by three prominent scholars… To her, it was inconceivable to simply disregard this paper.

I felt trapped: She kept insisting, for more than a year, that I had to build upon the paper… but I had serious doubts about the trustworthiness of the results. I didn’t suspect fraud: I simply thought that the results had been “cherry picked”. At the end of my third year into the program (i.e., in 2018), I finally decided to openly share with her my concerns about the paper. I also insisted that given how little we knew about networking discomfort, and given my doubts about the soundness of CGK 2014, it would be better to start from scratch and launch an exploratory study on the topic.

Her reaction was to vehemently dismiss my concerns, and to imply that I was making very serious accusations. I was stunned: Either she was unaware of the “replication crisis” in psychology (showing how easy it is to obtain false-positive results from questionable research practices), or she was aware of it but decided to ignore it. In both cases, it was a clear signal that it was time for me to distance myself from this supervisor.

...

The story so far is very banal. I, a (very) early-career researcher, took a deep dive into a famous paper and discovered inconsistencies. These stories always start with “that’s odd…”, “it doesn’t make any sense…”, or “there is something off here…”. Then, I second-guessed myself, a lot. After all, the authors are famous, serious people; and the paper is published in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal. So I thought “I must have misunderstood,” “I must be missing a part of the puzzle,” “it was probably addressed during the peer review process”… Then, as I finally grew more confident that the issues were real and substantial, I decided to write about them.

What should happen then (if science were, as many people like to say, “self-correcting”) is that, after a peer-review of some form, my criticism would get printed somewhere, and the field would welcome my analysis the same way it welcomes any other paper: Another brick in the wall of scientific knowledge.

As revealed in the New Yorker piece, this is not at all what happened. The three members of my committee (who oversaw the content of my dissertation) were very upset by this criticism. They never engaged with the content: Instead, they repeatedly suggested that a scientific criticism of a published paper had no place in a dissertation."

 O artigo impressiona e faz pensar na quantidade de professores e investigadores em Economia que publicam artigos científicos enquanto louvam a economia da Venezuela, a Coreia do Norte e Cuba.

Trechos retirados de "A Post Mortem on the Gino Case".

Recordar "Sou um cândido ingénuo"

Sou um cândido ingénuo

Nestes tempos da Era da Ebulição em que os carris de ferro em Inglaterra derretem com o calor do sol, primeiro encontrei este artigo, "In some scientific papers, words expressing uncertainty have decreased": 

"Careful scientists know to acknowledge uncertainty in the findings and conclusions of their papers. But in one leading journal, the frequency of hedging words such as "might" and "probably" has fallen by about 40% over the past 2 decades, a study finds.

If this trend holds across the scientific literature, it suggests a worrisome rise of unreliable, exaggerated claims, some observers say. Hedging and avoiding overconfidence “are vital to communicating what one’s data can actually say and what it merely implies,” says Melissa Wheeler, a social psychologist at the Swinburne University of Technology who was not involved in the study. "If academic writing becomes more about the rhetoric ... it will become more difficult for readers to decipher what is groundbreaking and truly novel.""

Ontem, encontrei este outro, "Open science advocates warn of widespread academic fraud":

"A decade since Brian Nosek launched an initiative to tackle academic fraud, efforts to impose greater accountability in research have in the past few weeks claimed two of their most high-profile scalps.

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a distinguished neuroscientist and president of Stanford, resigned and pledged to retract a series of papers in prestigious journals after an independent inquiry concluded they used manipulated data. Harvard has similarly demanded retractions of papers co-written by Professor Francesca Gino, a leading dishonesty expert in its business school who is currently on administrative leave."

Depois, uma breve pesquisa no Twitter levou-me a esta thread onde também encontrei o nome de Dan Ariely.

 

O que é que pode ser feito?

Lembro-me do meu parceiro das conversas oxigenadoras comentar comigo, talvez em 2011, que estava sempre disponível para trabalhar com novos subcontratados. Estava tão habituado a sofrer com atrasos, com incumprimento de promessas, que tinha sempre a porta aberta a fazer experiências para dar oportunidade a outros.

Na semana que findou estive numa empresa pela segunda vez. Da primeira conversa que tive com os meus interlocutores fiquei com a ideia que tinham graves problemas com a subcontratação. Desta vez perguntei-lhes como tinha evoluído a subcontratação e, para minha surpresa, responderam-me muito animados. Tinham sido obrigados a testar dois novos subcontratados, por incapacidade dos habituais, e tiveram uma surpresa espectacular. Encontraram gente que se punha do lado das soluções e não do lado dos problemas. Escusado será dizer que os subcontratados anteriores não serão opção para o futuro.

Foi disto que me lembrei ao ler "When Solving Problems, Think About What You Could Do, Not What You Should Do":

"Nobody likes a troublemaker at work. We’ve all had colleagues who annoy us or deviate from the script with no heads-up, causing conflict or wasting time: jerks and show-offs who seem to be difficult for no good reason and people who break rules just for the sake of it and make others worse off in the process. But there are also people who know how to turn rule breaking into a contribution. Rebels like Palmieri [Moi ici: Excelente exemplo que abre o artigo] deserve our respect and our attention, because they have a lot to teach us.
...
One of the biggest lessons is given a challenging situation — kids who want pizza — we all tend to default to what we should do instead of asking what we could do.
...
I then asked participants either “What should you do?” or “What could you do?” We found that the “could” group were able to generate more creative solutions. Approaching problems with a “should” mindset gets us stuck on the trade-off the choice entails and narrows our thinking on one answer, the one that seems most obvious. But when we think in terms of “could,” we stay open-minded and the trade-offs involved inspire us to come up with creative solutions."