Azathoth123 comments on Too good to be true - Less Wrong

24 Post author: PhilGoetz 11 July 2014 08:16PM

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Comment author: IlyaShpitser 14 July 2014 04:58:14PM 5 points [-]

But none of the incentives seem particularly strong there.

The bad incentives here seem to be small bureaucratic ones along the line of it being easier to judge academics for promotion based on how many papers they publish.

People respond strongly to this in the West also -- "least publishable units", etc.

it seems that the spirit of science just didn't get conveyed

This is almost mystical wording. There is bad science in the West, and good science in the East. I would venture to guess that the crappy state of science in e.g. China is just due to the weak institutions/high corruption levels in their society. If you think you can get away with dumping plastic in milk, a little data faking is the least of your problems. As that gets better, science will get better too.

Comment author: Azathoth123 15 July 2014 02:19:04AM 8 points [-]

I would venture to guess that the crappy state of science in e.g. China is just due to the weak institutions/high corruption levels in their society. If you think you can get away with dumping plastic in milk, a little data faking is the least of your problems.

That explains China and Russia/USSR, it doesn't explain Japan and Taiwan.

Comment author: private_messaging 21 July 2014 05:42:39AM *  3 points [-]

The study was looking at English texts, not Russian, Chinese, or Japanese texts.

edit: a study on foreign language bias in German speaking countries.

Only 35% of German-language articles, compared with 62% of English-language articles, reported significant (p < 0.05) differences in the main endpoint between study and control groups (p = 0.002 by McNemar's test)

And that's Germans, for whom it is piss easy to learn English (compared to Russians, Chinese, or Japanese).

Comment author: gwern 21 July 2014 02:33:45PM 1 point [-]

Why did you omit the part where a third of the sample was published in both English and German, and hence weakens the bias? (That is comparable to the overlap for Chinese & English publications.)

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