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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31722 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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What’s the most-cited paper you know which airs such doubts?

I don’t think you make it into Nature (or the Lancet, or whatever) without acting like your work is the Real Deal. You can see a similar selection bias in Scott’s reviews of effect size, where even a moderate effect has to be touted as a miracle cure. It’s marketing, sure, but it’s not unique to COVID.

Don’t get me wrong—this is an obvious example of “consensus” crystallizing out of a bunch of incentives that aren’t just “the truth.” I would like for those incentives to be much better aligned!

But if you took away the fear of funding backlash, the geopolitics, the burgeoning CW lines…I expect you’d still see just as much confidence in the final paper.

Yeah, it's... getting buried a little, but that's kinda the worst-case scenario I touched here:

Even worse still, there's the possibility that even if the "Proximal Origins" authors were factually wrong -- still not proven! they could have been right by accident! -- they weren't exactly wrong about this being science-as-usual. The paper was ghost-written by an author who used his 'remove' from the publication to burnish its and his credibility, with preconceived result and a thumb being aggressively applied to hurry review? Well, "preconceived notion" is just an uncharitable way of saying, there's always a little bit of Kevin Bacon problem in reviewers for smaller fields, and that Nature bit about ghostwriting was more about aspirations than specific standards. There's no rule against using non-public information to make accurate 'predictions' after-the-fact, so long as you avoid preregistration requirements. Favor what would be nice if it were true? Well, if you aren't publishing data disproving it side-by-side, what's the problem?

Nate Silver points to his early disagreements with KG Anderson as signs that it's possible to notice extreme partisans, but a) very few people did, contemporaneously, and b) even now, quite a lot of people Silver wasn't getting into Twitter Tiffs with are defending the conduct here. And Anderson was only one of the bullshitters. What happens if it doesn't need WWIII, or Korematsu II: Electric Boogaloo, or Trump's Revenge?

Litany of Grenlin is nice and all, but especially when combined with past discussions suggesting on low-prominence papers, what sort of answer do you take away if the problem isn't "partisans are undermining trust in science" but "you can't trust it"?

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