Every now and again I come across a fantastic article that warrants posting here. I have seen a recent proliferation of articles in respected publications pointing out, bemoaning, and/or highlighting increasing problems with the trustworthiness of the alleged findings of the contemporary scientific community. I find these articles to be particularly interesting given how our society looks to science as a (the?) source of ultimate truths (often as a mutually exclusive alternative to spirituality). This sort of scientism may be misplaced, and these articles delve into the pitfalls that come with such an approach.
Here are the links the other articles I posted on this subject:
Be edified.
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Science is broken.
That’s the thesis of a must-read article in First Things magazine, in which William A. Wilson accumulates evidence that a lot of published research is false. But that’s not even the worst part.
Advocates of the existing scientific research paradigm usually smugly declare that while some published conclusions are surely false, the scientific method has “self-correcting mechanisms” that ensure that, eventually, the truth will prevail. Unfortunately for all of us, Wilson makes a convincing argument that those self-correcting mechanisms are broken.
For starters, there’s a “replication crisis” in science. This is particularly true in the field of experimental psychology, where far too many prestigious psychology studies simply can’t be reliably replicated. But it’s not just psychology. In 2011, the pharmaceutical company Bayer looked at 67 blockbuster drug discovery research findings published in prestigious journals, and found that three-fourths of them weren’t right. Another study of cancer research found that only 11 percent of preclinical cancer research could be reproduced. Even in physics, supposedly the hardest and most reliable of all sciences, Wilson points out that “two of the most vaunted physics results of the past few years — the announced discovery of both cosmic inflation and gravitational waves at the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica, and the supposed discovery of superluminal neutrinos at the Swiss-Italian border — have now been retracted, with far less fanfare than when they were first published.”
What explains this? In some cases, human error. Much of the research world exploded in rage and mockery when it was found out that a highly popularized finding by the economists Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhardt linking higher public debt to lower growth was due to an Excel error. Steven Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, largely built his career on a paper arguing that abortion led to lower crime rates 20 years later because the aborted babies were disproportionately future criminals. Two economists went through the painstaking work of recoding Levitt’s statistical analysis — and found a basic arithmetic error.
Then there is outright fraud. In a 2011 survey of 2,000 research psychologists, over half admitted to selectively reporting those experiments that gave the result they were after. The survey also concluded that around 10 percent of research psychologists have engaged in outright falsification of data, and more than half have engaged in “less brazen but still fraudulent behavior such as reporting that a result was statistically significant when it was not, or deciding between two different data analysis techniques after looking at the results of each and choosing the more favorable.”
Then there’s everything in between human error and outright fraud: rounding out numbers the way that looks better, checking a result less thoroughly when it comes out the way you like, and so forth.
Still, shouldn’t the mechanism of independent checking and peer review mean the wheat, eventually, will be sorted from the chaff?
Well, maybe not. There’s actually good reason to believe the exact opposite is happening.
The peer review process doesn’t work. Most observers of science guffaw at the so-called “Sokal affair,” where a physicist named Alan Sokal submitted a gibberish paper to an obscure social studies journal, which accepted it. Less famous is a similar hoodwinking of the very prestigious British Medical Journal, to which a paper with eight major errors was submitted. Not a single one of the 221 scientists who reviewed the paper caught all the errors in it, and only 30 percent of reviewers recommended that the paper be rejected. Amazingly, the reviewers who were warned that they were in a study and that the paper might have problems with it found no more flaws than the ones who were in the dark.
This is serious. In the preclinical cancer study mentioned above, the authors note that “some non-reproducible preclinical papers had spawned an entire field, with hundreds of secondary publications that expanded on elements of the original observation, but did not actually seek to confirm or falsify its fundamental basis.”
This gets into the question of the sociology of science. It’s a familiar bromide that “science advances one funeral at a time.” The greatest scientific pioneers were mavericks and weirdos. Most valuable scientific work is done by youngsters. Older scientists are more likely to be invested, both emotionally and from a career and prestige perspective, in the regnant paradigm, even though the spirit of science is the challenge of regnant paradigms.
Why, then, is our scientific process so structured as to reward the old and the prestigious? Government funding bodies and peer review bodies are inevitably staffed by the most hallowed (read: out of touch) practitioners in the field. The tenure process ensures that in order to further their careers, the youngest scientists in a given department must kowtow to their elders’ theories or run a significant professional risk. Peer review isn’t any good at keeping flawed studies out of major papers, but it can be deadly efficient at silencing heretical views.
All of this suggests that the current system isn’t just showing cracks, but is actually broken, and in need of major reform. There is very good reason to believe that much scientific research published today is false, there is no good way to sort the wheat from the chaff, and, most importantly, that the way the system is designed ensures that this will continue being the case.
As Wilson writes:
Even if self-correction does occur and theories move strictly along a lifecycle from less to more accurate, what if the unremitting flood of new, mostly false, results pours in faster? Too fast for the sclerotic, compromised truth-discerning mechanisms of science to operate? The result could be a growing body of true theories completely overwhelmed by an ever-larger thicket of baseless theories, such that the proportion of true scientific beliefs shrinks even while the absolute number of them continues to rise. Borges’ Library of Babel contained every true book that could ever be written, but it was useless because it also contained every false book, and both true and false were lost within an ocean of nonsense. [First Things]
This is a big problem, one that can’t be solved with a column. But the first step is admitting you have a problem.
Science, at heart an enterprise for mavericks, has become an enterprise for careerists. It’s time to flip the career track for science on its head. Instead of waiting until someone’s best years are behind her to award her academic freedom and prestige, abolish the PhD and grant fellowships to the best 22-year-olds, giving them the biggest budgets and the most freedoms for the first five or 10 years of their careers. Then, with only few exceptions, shift them away from research to teaching or some other harmless activity. Only then can we begin to fix Big Science.
Originally published in The Week on April 18, 2016 and can be found here.
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Superior Court Relaxes Rules for Requests for Admissions
The discovery process is one of the most critical parts of litigation. As any practitioner knows, the discovery process has very specific and procedurally established deadlines. While these deadlines are frequently missed, and subsequently compelled through court order, one form of discovery carries with it, in theory at least, much stricter deadlines, namely Requests for Admissions.
According to Pa.R.C.P. 4014(b) a party who receives Requests for Admissions has thirty (30) days to answer them; otherwise the requests are deemed conclusively established.
Just how “conclusively” the requests are established was explored in the recent matter of Krepps v. Snyder, 112 A.3d 1246 (Pa.Super.2015). The underlying matter involved a malpractice claim against a podiatrist. The malpractice allegedly involved the podiatrist misapplying amputation prevention procedures to the Plaintiff which resulted in the partial amputation of the Plaintiff’s leg.
At the trial level the court refused to allow the Plaintiff’s admissions to be conclusively established. On the last day of the trial, the Plaintiff attempted to introduce the requests for admissions as conclusively established due to the Defendant’s failure to respond to them in a timely or complete fashion. In response to the Plaintiff’s request to introduce the requests for admissions, the trial court denied the requests on the basis that the Plaintiff’s timing was inappropriate in introducing the requests at the end of trial, that their relative value in the face of the other evidence proffered during the trial was low, and it was the court’s belief that the Plaintiff was not prejudiced by the late (or lack of) responses to the requests for admissions. Instead, the court, used a rather liberal application of Pa.R.C.P. 126 (the rule which states that the Rules of Civil Procedure ought to be applied and construed liberally) to negate the clear terms of Pa.R.C.P. 4014(b). Despite the above, it is also worth noting that the court – rather counter intuitively – also recognized that the admissions “in principle” should be deemed established, but still refused to deem them as such.
The Plaintiff appealed the trial court’s decision to not find the admissions conclusively established to Pennsylvania Superior Court. In its review of the trial court’s decision, the Superior Court highlighted the portion of Pa.R.C.P. 4014(b) which indicates that the thirty (30) day deadline noted above may be modified to a “shorter or longer time as the court may allow.” Furthermore, it deferred to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision in Stimmler v. Chestnut Hill Hospital, 602 Pa. 539 (2009) which indicated that the purpose of Pa.R.C.P. 4014(b) is to help expedite the discovery process and placed the onus to enforce the requests for admission on the party requesting them. The Supreme Court went on to say that Rule 4014(b) permits the “withdrawal of or amendment to answers to requests for admissions ‘when the presentation of the merits of the action will be subverted thereby’ and where the requesting party has failed to establish that the withdrawal of or amendment to requests for admissions will prejudice the party ‘in maintaining the action or defense on the merits.”’
Additionally, the Superior Court looked to precedent in suggesting that the Rules of Civil Procedure, while compliance with them is expected, are to be understood as not ends in themselves which, in turn, discourages their rigid application. In short, the Rules are to serve the interests of fairness and justice and the court merely looks for substantial compliance to them.
The Plaintiff argued that an eleven (11) month delay on responding to the requests for admissions substantially affected him and the litigation and, moreover, could not be considered substantial compliance. The Plaintiff also claimed that the trial court’s refusal to enter the admissions into evidence adversely prejudiced his efforts to prove his case as, he argued, the admissions filled in some gaps left open by the other evidence presented at trial.
In reviewing the trial court’s decision, the Superior Court could not conclude that the trial court erred in allowing Pa.R.C.P. 126 to effectively negate the requirements of Pa.R.C.P. 4014(b) in this matter, if only because 4014(b) specifically allows the court to expand or contract those requirements (see above). The Superior Court did view the long delay in responding to the Admissions with disfavor, but it also took note of the fact that even with the long delay the Plaintiff still received responses to them from the Defendant eighteen months prior to the start of trial, which was more than enough time for Plaintiff to seek further discovery if need be. Further, the Plaintiff argued that the trial court’s failure to admit them could have given the jury the appearance that the issues in the Requests were “debated” rather than established. The Superior Court agreed in theory to the Plaintiff’s argument, but ultimately did not find it persuasive enough to overturn the trial court’s decision as the Superior Court agreed with the trial court that the timing of the responses were not prejudicial regardless (see above). In making this decision, the Superior Court looked to the matter of Estate of Borst v. Edward Stover Sr. Testamentary Trust, 30 A.3d 1207 which “observed that ‘[t]he test of prejudice turns on whether a party opposing the withdrawal [of an admission] is rendered less able to obtain the evidence required to prove the matters which had been admitted”’ and in reviewing the instant matter, the Superior Court could not find that the Plaintiff had been so prejudiced. The Superior Court also ruled that trying to admit the Requests at the end of trial – after two days’ worth of testimony – was inappropriate as they should have attempted to admit them at the start of trial. Finally the Superior Court noted that the discovery rules are designed to streamline the litigation and facilitate the eliciting of evidence and are not designed to be punitive; indeed, the court pointed out, that fairness and justice are not always served by strict application of the rules.
Despite what appears to be the very plain language of Pa.R.C.P. 4014(b), the court, through this ruling, appears to have taken some of the teeth out of the Rule and its application in matters where a party does not comply with its thirty (30) day deadline. Practitioners, both those sending and receiving discovery, should be aware of how the court has applied this rule and how to remain compliant with the same.
Originally published in The Legal Intelligencer on November 19, 2015 and can be seen here.