Yet, Here We Are
In the search for honesty, we’re pedaling backwards.
Apparently we can’t tell the truth about telling the truth.
To make matters worse, it took ten years and a whole mess of repeating the false study before somebody thought, “you know, that doesn’t sound right” and checked the data.
The 2012 paper reported that asking people who fill out tax or insurance documents to attest to the truth of their responses at the top of the document rather than at the bottom significantly increased the accuracy of the information they provided. The paper has been cited hundreds of times by other scholars, but more recent work had cast serious doubt on its findings.
If you’re slapping your palm to your forehead, you’ve good aim.
Pity that “fake it until you make it” has so permeated our culture.
1I looked at the paper refuting the original study…..it was actually done by the original researchers who, in trying to replicate it in the real world discovered the flaw in their own original study.
The NYTimes headline is misleading….that’s where the dishonesty lies. The researchers went back and figured out what they did wrong and corrected their own mistake because they realized what they thought was true didn’t work int he real world.
If only newspapers and government officials would do the same.
2@ Opinionated Hussy
Always assume a popular news medium will get it at least partially wrong. 🙂
Jelly beans case acne
Here is an interesting discussion about the overall issues in the case.
3Data Falsificada (Part 1): “Clusterfake”
Blast it, messed up that link http://datacolada.org/109
4Notably, the original study had a small sample size. (In fact, it seems surprising that the paper was accepted with that.) The refutation used 20X the original sample size.
5OT, but what’s being said there in abbutt country about the continuing power outage during extreme heat? Anyone blaming his inaction on the repeated power outages, year after year, hot or cold?
(Disclaimer I don’t ever copy a Fox associated story but this was on Apple News)
6https://apple.news/AtrVQCFtKRNWkk4gWPgrw4Q
Thank You, Opinionated Hussy!
7One of my favorite news sites is Retraction Watch: https://retractionwatch.com/
In spite of their name, they also cover papers that weren’t withdrawn by the original authors, but have been show to be hoaxes, use fake data, or plain old bum logic.
While the field of psychology has plenty of bad studies (including the infamous Stanford prison one), it’s the ones in biomedical fields that are downright dangerous. I seriously believe that ultimately, Andrew Wakefield is solely to blame for the anti-vax mania infesting the US now. We also now have publication mills that will print almost anything, provided the author pays “publication costs”. No telling how many medical treatment methodologies are useless or even harmful now, and when it’s backed by a major pharmaceutical company it’s almost impossible to blow the whistle or stop it.
Slightly more amusing, the scifi writer Peter Watts has a presentation for a fake pharmaceutical company called FizerPharm. The company slogans on the slides were the best part:
Health for the haves
Ancient remedies, modern markups
Flexible ethics for a complex world
A better life for every stockholder
Exceptional profits. Acceptable side effects
Improving the world one tax bracket at a time
Success no matter what you call it
8When I ws in grad school my one and only famous study was the Minnesota twins. Has that been knocked off the shelf?
9Those twin studies have now included more than 10,000 people and are ongoing. That’s a pretty good sample size.
Unless you mean any research into whether the old Minnesota Twins stadium contributed to their World Series wins. I don’t know how that theory held up.
10Pretty squishy research. I never pay that sort any attention.
Something like 40 years ago, i read that there were then 8,000 medical journals. I bet it’s a lot more now.
Publishing in the bottom 7,900 journals must be pretty much like perishing.
Tyler Vigen is obsessive about Spurious Correlations. Good for a chuckle. https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
11I just checked Vigen’s page and discovered something worth investigating.
The correlation is almost perfect between per capita cheese consumption and dying by being strangled in bedsheets.
What is interesting, though, if you look at he very small print, is that between 2000 and 2009, the number of people strangled by bedsheets doubled. The absolute number i startlilg, too: 800.
12OTOH, between 1999 and 2010, the number of people who drowned after falling out of fishing boats declined by two-thirds, and the decline was steady and even.
Weird
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