Sign in with Facebook
David Rubenstein's Reviews > Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions
Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions
by
by
The title of this book Rigor Mortis is not about the death of humans, but is about the death of rigor in science, specifically, medical science and biochemistry. This book goes into considerable detail, about why so many research studies are not reproducible.
According to the book, the wasteful use of money to generate useless, incorrect, unreproducible research is a major contributor to the problem. The reasons are varied. One is that academia encourages publication of incremental, insignificant advances rather than significant increases in understanding. Quantity is encouraged, not quality.
Also, even after a publication has been retracted, it can be cited in the literature hundreds of times, and even assumed to be correct. Researchers are sometimes intellectually lazy, unwilling to accept that a hypothesis is wrong, even after it has been proven to be incorrect.
Then, there are the great technical difficulties in doing some of this research. Sometimes, the results of an experiment can depend on how a test tube is cleaned, how briskly a chemical is stirred, or how similar or different the genetics are of a set of mice.
Sometimes, the lack of money can be an issue, for example, not being able to afford a verification of the type of cell that has been purchased from a biochemical company, or using a sample of animals that is too small to have any statistical significance.
And, sometimes, experiments are simply designed poorly. The use of the "p-value" of statistical significance is often misused, and intellectually lazy researchers sometimes formulate their hypotheses after performing an experiment. This problem is reminiscent of a famous quote by Richard Feynman:
According to the book, the wasteful use of money to generate useless, incorrect, unreproducible research is a major contributor to the problem. The reasons are varied. One is that academia encourages publication of incremental, insignificant advances rather than significant increases in understanding. Quantity is encouraged, not quality.
Also, even after a publication has been retracted, it can be cited in the literature hundreds of times, and even assumed to be correct. Researchers are sometimes intellectually lazy, unwilling to accept that a hypothesis is wrong, even after it has been proven to be incorrect.
Then, there are the great technical difficulties in doing some of this research. Sometimes, the results of an experiment can depend on how a test tube is cleaned, how briskly a chemical is stirred, or how similar or different the genetics are of a set of mice.
Sometimes, the lack of money can be an issue, for example, not being able to afford a verification of the type of cell that has been purchased from a biochemical company, or using a sample of animals that is too small to have any statistical significance.
And, sometimes, experiments are simply designed poorly. The use of the "p-value" of statistical significance is often misused, and intellectually lazy researchers sometimes formulate their hypotheses after performing an experiment. This problem is reminiscent of a famous quote by Richard Feynman:
“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight... I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!�
Sign into ŷ to see if any of your friends have read
Rigor Mortis.
Sign In »
Reading Progress
Started Reading
January 13, 2019
–
Finished Reading
January 25, 2019
– Shelved
Comments Showing 1-4 of 4 (4 new)
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
Jose
(last edited Jan 26, 2019 03:43PM)
(new)
Jan 26, 2019 03:40PM
The Feynman joke is great as also is this :a man fearing that when flying in a plane a terrorist could put a bomb in it and knowing that it was very improbable that there were two bombs in the same plane he always had a bomb in his switcase when flying in a plane
reply
|
flag
The lack of statistical knowledge (& rigor) affects other branches of science as well. In particular, Climate "science" (aka Political "science"), where the lack of competent statistical oversight, and the obvious political axe-grinding of some of the activist-"scientists", makes much of their work suspect. If not worthless. Grrr.
" intellectually lazy researchers sometimes formulate their hypotheses after performing an experiment. " You won't belive it but often they are even encouraged to do just that!
