= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
FAWS comments on "Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us" - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (20)
Huh, I was expecting Science to mean "science as a social institution," but he really is making the strong claim that science as a way of learning things is "failing us" because the human body is complicated. Where of course the problem is, "failing us relative to what?"
Failing us relative to our expectations.
It's not particularly failing me relative to my expectations. And why does he use, say, the Pfizer executive's expectations as an example of something that science is failing by? "Our expectations" seems suspiciously similar to "all expectations ever." Or, more likely, "expectations the author thought it would be a good idea to have had of science when writing the article."
Well, most people seem to be surprised that the majority of medical science results (or at least a high percentage) turns out to be bogus.
see: social institution vs. way of learning things.
I assume that you really mean "the majority drug results (or at least a high percentage) turns to be ineffective"? A claim that is still far from uncontroversial.
Edit: Change "drug" results to "epidemiology".
Drug results and correlation studies, both environmental and genetic, mostly. Which should be high enough volume that the "at least a high percentage" part should be true even if you add more reliable types of research, no? Or is medical science the wrong word for the category that includes both?
How much is a high percentage?
I do think so. A lot of pre-clinical medical science is more about understanding specific mechanism, not looking at correlations and mapping out risk factors.
Do you have some data? I do agree that it's hard to actually learn something solid from epidemiology, biology is complicated and factors do not usually add in any intuitive way. But then there are categories where epidemiology is invaluable take for example people with hereditary colon cancer where the majority (with a specific set of mutations) get colon cancer. But you might be right that a lot is not really useful information . . .
Of course there is data. Besides the Ionnidis citations in the linked article, I also linked my previous post on the topic which, among other things, links to my section in the DNB FAQ on this topic with dozens of links/citations.
My bad, only browsed through "Why Science Is Failing Us", behaved kind of like a politician, will do my homework before opening my mouth next time.
But I still think that one should use medical epidemiology instead of the cluster word medical science.
Let's say more than 20%
I didn't necessarily mean to exclude things like that, just to include both of the categories mentioned.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
From the article:
Those didn't analyze all of medicine, of course, but it does sound pretty bad for the overall percentage.
Then our expectations are wrong. The effectiveness of science should add up to normality.
Correct, of course that's still a problem.