CategoryPeer Review
In Neuroscience Flap, Science Media Tackle “Pseudoscience” Claim
As the leading theory of consciousness is tarred by neuroscientists as “pseudoscience,” science media struggle to outline just WHAT science is
Leading Consciousness Theory Slammed as “Pseudoscience.” Huh?
Integrated Information Theory’s panpsychist leanings are the 124 neuroscientist critics’ real target
Near-Death Experience Study: Brain Is Active After Death
Science media are making surprisingly few efforts to attack or explain away the team’s findings
Science Is Self-correcting? Time for a Reality Check!
In the wake of the Stanford scandal, the reasons why science often ISN’T self-correcting are attracting much more attention
Is There a Boom in Research Dishonesty?
Or do some academics just feel sure they won’t get caught? Or that, if they do, it somehow doesn’t matter?What to make of this news stream? ● Distinguished Professor Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School was recently accused by other academics of falsifying data in a number of studies, including one on dishonesty, where she was a co-author, Professors Joseph Simmons, Uri Simonsohn and Leif Nelson of University of Pennsylvania, Escade Business School in Spain, and University of California, Berkeley, respectively, accused Gino of the fraud on their blog Data Colada. “Specifically, we wrote a report about four studies for which we accumulated the strongest evidence of fraud,” they wrote, stating they shared their concerns with Harvard Business School. Therese Joffre, “Harvard ethics professor allegedly fabricated multiple behavioral science studies” at The College Fix, June 28, 2023 Gino, currently Read More ›
Gloomy News from a Nature Article: Is the End of Science Near?
A study in the premier science journal notes the long term falling off of truly original findings, as opposed to endless citations of others’ findingsScience writer Tibi Puiu reports on new findings that reflect what many today, have begun to suspect: Over the past few decades, the number of science and technology research papers published has soared, rising at a rate of nearly 10% each year. In the biomedical field alone, there are more than a million papers pouring into the PubMed database each year, or around two studies per minute… The new study revealed that the “disruptiveness” of contemporary science has decreased, rendering ever diminishing returns. In this particular context, authors define disruptiveness as the degree to which a study departs from previous literature and renders it obsolete. In other words, a highly disruptive study is one that completely changes the way we Read More ›
When Scholars Simply Don’t Want To Believe Something Obvious…
… they are very good at developing clever arguments to avoid seeing itThis article was originally published in Salvo 62 (Fall 2022) under the title “The Whitewashing.” In Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), University of California historian Richard Weikart demonstrated painstakingly that the Nazis had developed an ethic based largely on applying Darwinian evolution principles to government. Scholars have since tried hard to obscure the connection, most likely because they believe in Darwinism and see it as science. Any suggestion that the Nazis were avid Darwinists too is unseemly and must be refuted by any and all means. With racism very much in current news, Weikart has focusing in Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism (Discovery Institute Press, 2022) on the way Read More ›
How the Inflation of Journal Citations Impacts Academia
Adjusted for inflation, a citation today is worth about half what it was ten years agoOver 30 years ago, I coauthored a book, Neural Smithing, on training artificial neural networks. In 2021 it was cited 112 times — more than in any previous year. Why? I wish the only reason was that my book is a classic and has stood the test of time. But the book was on training neural networks and a lot has happened in that field over the last 30 years. Another, more substantial reason, I’m afraid, is citation inflation. Stated simply, there are many more citations today than a few years ago and my book is catching its fair share. Monetary inflation can be corrected to tell us the value of a year 2000 dollar in 2022. Likewise, citation inflation Read More ›
Stanford’s Academic Freedom Conference Slammed by Academics
Opponents are angered by the fact that, although the conference will be live-streamed, it is by invitation only and no media are allowedStanford Business School’s academic freedom conference, starting next week and headlined by tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, is coming under fire. The organizers argue, Faculty organizers of the conference, from Stanford and several other institutions, promote it as follows: “Academic freedom, open inquiry, and freedom of speech are under threat as they have not been for decades. Visibly, academics are ‘canceled,’ fired, or subject to lengthy disciplinary proceedings in response to academic writing or public engagement. Less visibly, funding agencies, university bureaucracies, hiring procedures, promotion committees, professional organizations, and journals censor some kinds of research or demand adherence to political causes. Many parts of universities have become politicized or have turned into ideological monocultures, excluding people, ideas, or kinds of work Read More ›
The Hyper-Specialization of University Researchers
So many papers are published today in increasingly narrow specialties that, if there is still a big picture, hardly anyone can see itThe Bible warns that, “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” Nowadays, the endless making of books is dwarfed by the relentless firehose of academic research papers. A 2010 study published in the British Medical Journal reported that the U.S. National Library of Medicine includes 113,976 papers on echocardiography — which would weary the flesh of any newly credentialed doctor specializing in echocardiography: We assumed that he or she could read five papers an hour (one every 10 minutes, followed by a break of 10 minutes) for eight hours a day, five days a week, and 50 weeks a year; this gives a capacity of 10000 papers in one year. Read More ›
The Threat That Deepfakes Pose to Science Journals
Image manipulation has been a problem for decades but convincing deepfakes could magnify the problem considerablyWhen a team of researchers at Xiamen University decided to create and test deepfakes of conventional types of images in science journals, they came up with a sobering surprise. Their deepfakes were easy to create and hard to detect. Generating fake photographs in this way, the researchers suggest, could allow miscreants to publish research papers without doing any real research. Bob Yirka, “Computer scientists suggest research integrity could be at risk due to AI generated imagery” at Tech Explore (May 25, 2022) They created the deepfakes in a conventional way by starting with a competition between two powerful computer systems: To demonstrate the ease with which fake research imagery could be generated, the researchers generated some of their own using Read More ›
The Brady Bunch – Why Research Should Be Guided By Common Sense
Do our names really influence our choice in profession or the way our lives play out?The credibility of scientific research is undermined by scientists torturing and mining data in a tenacious search for media-friendly results. Media-friendly findings tend to be entertaining, provocative, and surprising, and there is a good reason why they are surprising – they are wrong. Here is an example from BMJ, a top-tier medical journal. A paper with the alluring title, “The Brady Bunch?,” investigated “nominative determinism,” the idea that our surnames influence our choice of professions. With my name being Smith, I might have been predestined to choose to be a blacksmith or silversmith. That didn’t happen, but a newspaper article did find “a dermatologist called Rash, a rheumatologist named Knee, and a psychiatrist named Couch.” The authors of the BMJ Read More ›
Get Your 8 (or 5?) Hours of Sleep
Data misrepresentation may win you big gigs, but it makes a bad name for scientistsMatthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology and founder of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He has become famous for his book and a TED talk promoting the importance of sleep for health and performance. He even got a job at Google as a “sleep scientist.” Walker has a receptive audience because he is entertaining and his arguments make sense. In one of his books, Walker used a graph similar to the figure below to show that a study done by other researchers had found that adolescent athletes who sleep more are less likely to be injured. The figure is compelling, but there are several potential problems. The hours-of-sleep data were based on 112 responses to an online Read More ›
Will the Real “Predatory Journal” Please Stand Up?
Large publishers serve themselves by painting "predatory journals" with a broad brushThe scientific publishing industry has been on a hunt for what it calls “predatory journals.” They want to make sure that all scientific publications occur in “legitimate” and “reputable” journals. Additionally, they encourage scholars to avoid “predatory” journals which are there merely to enrich themselves by having you pay for access. While I agree with these ideas in principle, I’ve noticed more and more that the way that these principles are applied has been, well, incredibly self-serving for the journals. To begin with, let’s look at a commentary on predatory journals published in 2019 in the journal Nature: Predatory journals are a global threat. They accept articles for publication — along with authors’ fees — without performing promised quality checks for issues such Read More ›
Will the Sokal Hoaxes Worsen the Academic Echo Chamber?
When only mainstream thinking is allowed, insularity and echo chambers are the resultThe latest spate of academic hoaxes, which includes not only the latest Sokal hoax, but also fake papers being published in journals such as the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, is a major cause for concern. While the hoaxes themselves are problematic, what is likely to be worse is the ongoing fallout for researchers and new ideas. Academics has long had a problem of being insular. Many papers are published on the basis of your status in academics, not the quality of the paper itself. This is not to say that the papers didn’t legitimately pass peer review (though that is questionable in some cases), but rather that the editor decides which papers are “worthy” of peer review based on the editor’s knowledge Read More ›
Be On the Lookout for More Sokal Hoaxes
If you spot a Sokal hoax, let us know by tagging @cnaintelligence on TwitterIn a previous article, we noted that a group of researchers have been testing the rigor of social science journals by submitting fake articles and data in order to demonstrate problems in these branches of academics. These hoaxes, known as Sokal hoaxes (named after the original hoaxer, Alan Sokal), have now begun their third round, with the first detected paper in the journal Higher Education Quarterly. The paper, “Donor money and the academy: Perceptions of undue donor pressure in political science, economics, and philosophy,” has now been retracted, but it looks like this is not quite the end of the matter. The Chronicle of Higher Education managed to get in contact with the Sokal hoaxers. While their identities are anonymous, they responded to emails sent to the Read More ›
Are Sokal Hoaxes Really Helping Reform Science?
The evidence is mixed. The current prank on Higher Education Quarterly prompts some questions
Why Did Video Gamers Uncover Fraud More Easily Than Scientists?
Video gamers are subject, a psychologist tells us, to much more rigorous constraints than scientistsIn a recent article at The Atlantic, King’s College psychologist Stuart Ritchie, author of Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth (2020), has noted a curious fact: Video gamers are much quicker to spot fraud than scientists. The video game fraud he focuses on involved a gamer’s claim that he had finished a round of Minecraft in a little over 19 minutes, a feat he attributed, Ritchie tells us, to “an incredible stretch of good luck.” “Incredible” is the right choice of word here. “Dream,” as the player was known, later admitted — in the face of skepticism — that he had “inadvertently” left some software running that improved his game — thus disqualifying Read More ›
Emotion Recognition Software Use Spreads While Science Is Doubted
Emotional recognition software has been coming under fire for misuse and racial bias for some timeAn editor at AI Trends notes The global emotion detection and recognition market is projected to grow to $37.1 billion by 2026, up from an estimated $19.5 billion in 2020, according to a recent report from MarketsandMarkets. North America is home to the largest market. John P. Desmond, “Market for Emotion Recognition Projected to Grow as Some Question Science” at AI Trends (June 24, 2021) But the software has been coming under fire for misuse and racial bias for some time: “How people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation,” stated the report, from a team of researchers led by Lisa Feldman Barrett, of Northeastern University, Read More ›