gwern comments on Dealing with the high quantity of scientific error in medicine - Less Wrong

36 Post author: NancyLebovitz 25 October 2010 01:53PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (55)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: gwern 20 October 2012 12:30:36AM 1 point [-]
Comment author: mfb 20 October 2012 12:59:00AM 0 points [-]

Why do you write "Flaws in mainstream science", if you mean specific parts of science only?

Some other mainstream areas have replication rates of more than 95%.

Comment author: gwern 20 October 2012 01:10:05AM 1 point [-]

A specific part of science is part of mainstream science - or is a white horse not a horse?

Comment author: mfb 20 October 2012 12:35:58PM *  0 points [-]

If something applies to white horses only, I would write "white horses" instead of "horses". Otherwise it might suggest (at least to some readers) that it applies to many, most or even all horses. It is not wrong, but it can be misleading.

Comment author: gwern 20 October 2012 05:00:44PM *  0 points [-]

I'm not sure it is misleading; the material is obviously focused on health and psychology as the areas I read most in, but the the results I discuss should apply to many areas: the specific problems of no incentives for replication or less than p<0.05 significance are common to all areas or all areas which use NHST statistics, etc. You may like to think that hard sciences like chemistry are exempt... but I get a lot of these citations off a biochemistry blog!

Comment author: mfb 24 October 2012 01:28:41PM 0 points [-]

Papers I read are mainly physics papers, especially particle physics. Not replicated results there are so rare that they often get significant attention in the community (Blog article) or even mainstream media (OPERA neutrino speed measurement).

The usual study&publication process for a new particle detector looks like that:
* identify particles flying through the detector (known for >50 years)
* find the decays of frequent short-living particles (known for >30 years), use them as calibration
* look for other known particles and compare their masses and decays with the existing values * look for known decay modes of those particles and related properties, compare them with existing values and improve them by a significant factor * find new things

Completely new measurements are just a small fraction of the studies - most results confirm earlier experiments and improve the precision.