"And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean."
> Ask a small hotel owner in one of the islands about their plan of turning their property into a "hacker house" in the off-season.
Maybe instead they should look into making their hotels into "doctor house", or "teacher house" or generally "something affordable by public workers" so that people who move to the island to do their job can have a reasonable life without competing with north EU nomads for living space.
My PhD supervisor would wash his teeth over the sink where we'd rinse all the gel preparation tools.
He got throat cancer in his 50s and died soon after my PhD defense.
So, are you suggesting that the gel was the cause of the cancer for the supervisor? If so, was that sink’s drain connected to a diverter such that the waste didn’t enter the typical sewage system?
I don't want to hear any of these stories, considering I am a very clumsy person AND considering that I synthesized polycyclic aromatics. Thank god I got out after a couple of years, but sometimes I wonder what is still floating around in my DNA...
- Nature published a paper twice after the reviewers voted "no". Of course, it is not a voting process, the editor makes their decision. But evidently the editor didn't use the referee's input for that decision. That input, must I say, is free work that academics do for the journal. Click-baitiness simply weighted more to the editor and her supervisors. People should just stop paying attention to what Nature publishes.
- The students... I think this is the worst part of the story. Sometimes, students are on a student visa that depends on them holding for dear life to their university position. Been there, done that. I remember when I did my PhD: four to five international students--very well prepared I must say--to one from the host country. The ones from the host country were the ones with the best soft skills but they rarely put the long hours. I'll never forget that Iranian student who was a political refugee passing as a PhD student, because she couldn't bear the indignity of an asylum process. She couldn't return to her home country either.
- The replication...For the first retraction, I could find nowhere in the article that replication attempts were made. If those replication attempts were impossible to produce with the data published in the article itself, then its not a scientific paper, but a promotional brochure. In fact, some promotional materials are more extensive than Nature's articles; they really want to make the thing very short and academics are forced to jump through hoops to condense their publications, until they are practically impossible to understand, not to mention replicate. Again, the only solution to that problem is to ignore Nature.
The people writing the Nature article did not seem to notice the issue. The third part especially was what was occurring to me while reading.
The LK-99 paper, lots of attempts at replicating the results. Crazy quick. Like front-running the published results.
These results, like people never even had the thought to try, and it devolved into arguing sampling issues rather than just trying the material.
There is some certain sub-segment of humanity that often feels that way. Like 8B humans will all bend over backward to let them get away with almost anything. Totally abandon all normal procedures, safety checks, laws, replication, validation, ...
Fun fact: Nature used to publish papers without any peer review whatsoever right up to the mid-60s. The selection was based on what the editors thought was interesting or provocative.
Legend has it that the submissions tracking system consisted of a particularly wide windowsill, in which the submitted manuscripts were stacked up in piles for each month.
For all the problems that Nature (and science in general) has, and while I'm sure this incident will be used by some as "evidence" that we shouldn't trust in science, ultimately this incident was another win for science. It should have happened much much sooner, but in the end, the truth was found and the record corrected. That's exactly the result we want.
I appreciate that Nature's news team is willing to publish information about Nature's massively embarrassing failure to do their job reviewing the paper, and I hope they mean it when they say “We are looking at this case carefully to see what lessons can be learnt for the future.”
It's a "win" for science in the sense that the truth was finally revealed.
It's "loss" in the sense that our truth determining apparatus (e.g. peer review) appears to be highly unreliable, and a massive, unquantified amount of bullshit research has already passed it and is actively being used as a foundation for subsequent research.
Realistically, we can't reduce false positives to absolutely zero without giving up on some True Positives (sensitivity/specificity tradeoff).
Nature intentionally plays loose with potentially world-changing discoveries. It probably makes sense to have some journals that publish with fairly high rates of (post-hoc determined) false positives, simply to move the fields forward more quickly.
That although scientists are people and so there will always be some who try to cheat and lie, those lies will eventually be found out and when that happens the record will be put right. It shows that science is not only non-dogmatic in the sense that new information which challenges or improves on our previous best understanding of a given topic will be used to update or replace the old, but that even when there is no new evidence, new research is still being openly challenged and tested by other scientists.
Scientific journals have their problems, but finding and correcting mistakes, and being transparent about the correction and about how those mistakes were made, are all indications of credibility. Even better, in this case, the alarms were sounded very very early and yeah Nature really fucked up by ignoring them for as long as they did, but there were people who cared about the truth who were persistent and in the end Nature did the right thing. That's says something really good about science.
The replication crisis is still a big problem. Lots of less dramatic results are probably false and will likely go unchallenged for a longer time, but that's just something we have to consider when deciding how confident we are in those results. Results which have been independently verified multiple times are those we can be more confident in, results which haven't been verified should be taken with a much larger grain of salt. It'd be silly to take examples like this as a sign that science as a whole shouldn't be trusted.
> truth was found and the record corrected. That's exactly the result we want.
I hope science can one day overcome people like you and actually address the systemic issues it is facing. Denial that there is anything really wrong, that ultimately everything works fine so nothing has to fundamentally change, is exactly the problem that causes those systemic failures we are seeing in science and academia all the time.
This is exactly why Nature can write about their own failure, because there are no expectations beyond "hoping" and trusting they change. But of course nothing will ever actually change.
The linked article is on Nature news. It’s a different team from Nature scientific articles.
It’s mentioned in the linked article and they do some investigation in Nature’s own failures.
Peer review is not a magic thing which can detect all mistakes and prevent all fraud. The biggest problem with peer review is people assume it means published research is correct. I do not think that peer review can do that. I think peer review at best gives good feedback to honest researchers and catches some mistakes.
Here are my reasons why I think peer review will not reach a higher standard.
1) Peer review is hard work and probably tedious. In order to do a really good job, someone would have to spend tens or hundreds of hours reviewing a paper. The best reviewers would actually replicate the research. This probably will not happen often.
2) Peer review is not rewarded. No one is going to get tenure for being an excellent reviewer.
3) Good reviewers may even be punished. Unfortunately, many humans do not like critical feedback and hate having their work invalidated. Some of these people take revenge, and "shoot the messenger".
I think the solution is to stop thinking something is correct because it is published in a peer reviewed journal. Instead, people need to recognize that while the scientific process may eventually get the right result, it often makes mistakes, and is not perfect.
Nature and Science are kind like the tabloids of scientific publishing. Legitimate news mixed with unsubstantiated gossip; all with a high “sexiness” factor that draws attention and moves copy.
