Replication Crisis

What is it?

It has been found that many classical scientific studies that form a foundation of modern science are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce. It has been particularly widely discussed in the fields of psychology and medicine. In 2019 in response to the crisis eight hundred scientists and mathematicians signed a paper "Redefine statistical significance"

Choosing the evidence that supports creators own conclusion may be coming from the
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My-side bias
– Our cognition is distorting facts in order to defend our stories and our ego and create the most favorable picture of ourselves.

"There are many different techniques for collecting, interpreting, and analyzing facts, and different techniques often lead to different conclusions, which is why scientists disagree about the dangers of global warming, the benefits of supply-side economics, and the wisdom of low-carbohydrate diets. Good scientists deal with this complication by choosing the techniques they consider most appropriate and then accepting the conclusions that these techniques produce, regardless of what those conclusions might be. But bad scientists take advantage of this complication by choosing techniques that are especially likely to produce the conclusions they favor, thus allowing them to reach favored conclusions by way of supportive facts." – Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling On Happiness.

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My-side bias

How to tackle replication crisis? Redefining statistical significance

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My-side bias

is causing exploitation of the ambiguity in the interpretations of data in order to create the most-favorable conclusions – one way to tackle it is to make findings less ambiguous. The paper "Redefine statistical significance", was signed in 2019 by 800+ of scientists and mathematicians, and proposes that in "fields where the threshold for defining statistical significance for new discoveries is P < 0.05, we propose a change to P < 0.005."

Links

Daniel Khanaman at the end of Shane Parrish Podcast and in Sam Harris

Adam Grant in Sam Harris podcast

Scientists rise up against statistical significance, Nature link

Redefine statistical significance link

Inbox

“It’s possible around 50 percent of the published psychological literature fails upon retesting, but no one knows precisely the extent of the instability in the foundations of psychological science.”

The replication crisis devastated psychology. This group is looking to rebuild it. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/22360363/replication-crisis-psychological-science-accelerator via Instapaper