Science Can’t Make Up Its Mind

[American_Jihad]

I don't have that much faith in some science especially with food.

Here’s Why Science Can’t Make Up Its Mind
Hundreds of scientists from around the world redid 100 psychology studies. Fewer than half reproduced the original results.

posted on Aug. 27, 2015, at 2:01 p.m.

Cat Ferguson

Red wine is good for you. Or bad for you. Or good for you. And coffee drinkers have a better shot at surviving cancer. And men prefer women wearing red. And millennials are selfish narcissists. And there’s a “liberal gene.” And semen is an antidepressant.

These stories make for good headlines. But science isn’t a lightning bolt. It’s an incremental process: Slivers of evidence build on each other, over long periods of time, to (hopefully!) get at the truth.

Unfortunately, that means that scientific studies are often wrong — or, at least, aren’t strong enough to show what they claim to. This sobering fact is underscored in a large study published Thursday in the journal Science showing that more than half of psychology studies can’t be replicated.

The study was carried out by 270 researchers from 17 countries. They tried to reproduce the findings of 100 different psychology studies — everything from whether having what we want makes us happy to whether white people look at a black person in the room when they hear racist remarks.

This so-called Reproducibility Project: Psychology is the largest-ever effort to systematically redo social science experiments. And its results are somewhat disheartening: Researchers were able to replicate the findings of just 39 out of 100 studies.

“As a social psychologist I feel like, ugh, boy, I wish we were doing better than this,” Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and leader of the new study, told BuzzFeed News. “We hope that any individual study provides the answer, but they almost never do. Any study is just a single piece of evidence.”

...

There are plenty of examples of famous studies that were totally wrong, like the faked study showing that talking to gay people makes you more likely to support gay marriage.

And some of the studies that didn’t replicate in the Reproducibility Project got news coverage when they were published, including one that suggested people who have less faith in free will are more likely to cheat.

So just because scientists can’t repeat an experiment once doesn’t mean the findings are wrong. But the next time you read about a hot new study, take it with a grain of salt. Or a lot of salt. Or as little salt as you can manage.


Science Frauds Who Steal Tons Of Federal Money Almost Never Go To Jail

Here’s Why Science Can’t Make Up Its Mind

 

[American_Jihad]

Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes - WHO

The Guardian
Sarah Boseley Health editor
3 hrs ago

Bacon, ham and sausages rank alongside cigarettes as a major cause of cancer, the World Health Organisation has said, placing cured and processed meats in the same category as asbestos, alcohol, arsenic and tobacco.

The report from the WHO’s cancer arm, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, said there is enough evidence to rank processed meats as group 1 carcinogens, because of a causal link with bowel cancer.

It places red meat in group 2A, as “probably carcinogenic to humans”. Eating red meat is also linked to pancreatic and prostate cancer, the IARC says.

Recommended for you: Bowel Cancer Symptoms - What Is Bowel Cancer Symptoms.
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Related: What’s so bad about ‘processed food’?

The IARC’s experts concluded that each 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increased the risk of colorectal cancer by 18%.

“For an individual, the risk of developing colorectal cancer because of their consumption of processed meat remains small, but this risk increases with the amount of meat consumed,” said Dr Kurt Straif, head of the IARC monographs programme. “In view of the large number of people who consume processed meat, the global impact on cancer incidence is of public health importance.”

The decision from the IARC, after a year of deliberations by international scientists, will be welcomed by cancer researchers but it triggered an immediate and furious response from the industry, and the scientists it funds, who rejected any comparison between cigarettes and meat.

“What we do know is that avoiding red meat in the diet is not a protective strategy against cancer,” said Robert Pickard, a member of the Meat Advisory Panel and emeritus professor of neurobiology at the University of Cardiff. “The top priorities for cancer prevention remain smoking cessation, maintenance of normal body weight and avoidance of high alcohol intakes.”.

But the writing has been on the wall for ham, bacon and sausages for several years. The World Cancer Research Fund has long been advising people that processed meat is a cancer hazard. It advises eating products such as ham, bacon and salami as little as possible and having no more than 500g a week of red meat, including beef, pork and lamb.

...

Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes - WHO

 

[American_Jihad]

Robert N. McCauley Ph.D. Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not
Posted Sep 22, 2013

Why Can't Science Make Up Its Mind?
What Most Schools Don't Teach about Scientific Inquiry

A Good Egg




Growing up during the Great Depression in rural America, my father was insulated from that economic upheaval’s worst shocks. He never went hungry. His diet was, however, somewhat monotonous. He used to regale me, when I was a child, with stories about his family eating soup beans and cornbread at every meal, often for many days at a time. As an adult his diet changed, but my father retained the practice of eating the same foods, at least at breakfast, not just for weeks but for months and years. He consumed two poached eggs and two pieces of toast for breakfast at least four of five times a week for what I would guess was about twenty years.

He might have persisted in that habit for half a century, if it had not been the case that some decades ago medical science decided that high cholesterol levels were associated with increased incidence of heart disease and heart attack and that since egg yolks are high in cholesterol, people should strictly limit the number of eggs that they consume. My father, whose cholesterol levels at the time were, unsurprisingly, quite high, abruptly abandoned his two-egg breakfasts on the basis of the best advice of science, that is, until it wasn’t. After scrupulously avoiding eggs for the next fifteen years, my father was bemused to learn that scientists had newly concluded that the benefits of eggs exceeded their risks, that earlier warnings had probably exaggerated those risks, and that eating a few eggs a week posed, on average, no particular danger.



Fickle Science?

Over the past few decades on subjects as diverse as the dangers of consuming eggs, the cause of ulcers, and the future of our climate, scientific researchers have made 180° reversals or, at least, have appeared to do so, once journalists have attempted to summarize the newest scientific findings and the scientific community’s current best judgment about such topics. Probably nothing so vexes the general public any more about science than its apparent fickleness.

Explaining science’s apparent fickleness is not too hard, though. Journalists’ misunderstandings and oversimplifications bear some of the responsibility, but it seems fair to say that conscientious science journalists mostly get things right. Moreover, they do have a difficult job. Not only must they manage complicated theories, technical research, sophisticated experiments, ambiguous findings, and abstruse arguments, they also try to summarize the views of large communities of vying researchers who are scattered all around the world. Even more importantly, science is contentious. Usually, the members of a community of scientific researchers are no more often uniform in their opinions about some topic than are the members of other kinds of communities. Ironically, in light of all of the political rhetoric and the hub-bub in the popular press, the sort of near-consensus about climate change and its causes among climate scientists is comparatively unusual in recent science – especially when considering a relatively new phenomenon of such potential importance.

...

Why Can't Science Make Up Its Mind?

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

I don't have that much faith in some science...

really?

no surprise here

 

[Delta4Embassy]

I don't have that much faith in some science especially with food.

Here’s Why Science Can’t Make Up Its Mind
Hundreds of scientists from around the world redid 100 psychology studies. Fewer than half reproduced the original results.

posted on Aug. 27, 2015, at 2:01 p.m.

Cat Ferguson

Red wine is good for you. Or bad for you. Or good for you. And coffee drinkers have a better shot at surviving cancer. And men prefer women wearing red. And millennials are selfish narcissists. And there’s a “liberal gene.” And semen is an antidepressant.

These stories make for good headlines. But science isn’t a lightning bolt. It’s an incremental process: Slivers of evidence build on each other, over long periods of time, to (hopefully!) get at the truth.

Unfortunately, that means that scientific studies are often wrong — or, at least, aren’t strong enough to show what they claim to. This sobering fact is underscored in a large study published Thursday in the journal Science showing that more than half of psychology studies can’t be replicated.

The study was carried out by 270 researchers from 17 countries. They tried to reproduce the findings of 100 different psychology studies — everything from whether having what we want makes us happy to whether white people look at a black person in the room when they hear racist remarks.

This so-called Reproducibility Project: Psychology is the largest-ever effort to systematically redo social science experiments. And its results are somewhat disheartening: Researchers were able to replicate the findings of just 39 out of 100 studies.

“As a social psychologist I feel like, ugh, boy, I wish we were doing better than this,” Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and leader of the new study, told BuzzFeed News. “We hope that any individual study provides the answer, but they almost never do. Any study is just a single piece of evidence.”

...

There are plenty of examples of famous studies that were totally wrong, like the faked study showing that talking to gay people makes you more likely to support gay marriage.

And some of the studies that didn’t replicate in the Reproducibility Project got news coverage when they were published, including one that suggested people who have less faith in free will are more likely to cheat.

So just because scientists can’t repeat an experiment once doesn’t mean the findings are wrong. But the next time you read about a hot new study, take it with a grain of salt. Or a lot of salt. Or as little salt as you can manage.


Science Frauds Who Steal Tons Of Federal Money Almost Never Go To Jail

Here’s Why Science Can’t Make Up Its Mind

Hard to imagine you don't get repeatable results when everyone's genes are different.

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes - WHO

My mom was warned about processed meats/cold cuts ages ago. We knew from as far back as the 1970s that they were loaded with nitrates and other crap.

My mom ended up with colon cancer. She beat it only to end up ...

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

Hard to imagine you don't get repeatable results when everyone's genes are different.

We've known for decades that processed meats were bad if eaten in large quantities and many people were told by their primary care doctors (if they had one) to lay off the cold cuts and franks.

 

[American_Jihad]

Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes - WHO

My mom was warned about processed meats/cold cuts ages ago. We knew from as far back as the 1970s that they were loaded with nitrates and other crap.

My mom ended up with colon cancer. She beat it only to end up ...

Sorry to hear about yo mom, same with my grandmother.

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Hard to imagine you don't get repeatable results when everyone's genes are different.

We've known for decades that processed meats were bad if eaten in large quantities and many people were told by their primary care doctors (if they had one) to lay off the cold cuts and franks.

Prescribed cocaine, heroin, alcohol, and ciggies at one time or another. Science is never static and evolves. Why it's reliable, when something's found out to not be repeatable it isn't science any more.

What's bad for one person may not be for another. Pleanty of people living beyond 100 eat things that would kill other people.

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

Prescribed cocaine, heroin, alcohol, and ciggies at one time or another. Science is never static and evolves. Why it's reliable, when something's found out to not be repeatable it isn't science any more.

What's bad for one person may not be for another. Pleanty of people living beyond 100 eat things that would kill other people.

What's is bad is bad for everybody. What happens is NOT everyone will react the same. And this is not about things like having a peanuts allergy. Peanuts are not bad in the way that tobacco is bad

Doing drugs in a recreational fashion will not kill or significantly do harm to most. But most know it could be dangerous or deadly to turn recreation into a habit

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

Prescribed cocaine, heroin, alcohol, and ciggies at one time or another. Science is never static and evolves. Why it's reliable, when something's found out to not be repeatable it isn't science any more.

What's bad for one person may not be for another. Pleanty of people living beyond 100 eat things that would kill other people.

exceptions that prove a rule?

Every been in an autopsy room? Look at the board (do they still use white/chalk boards? ). Listed is the condition of all the organs. When most people die of some cause or something, the board will show if what happened had been put off, the person had other things waiting in line to take them across to Valhalla

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes - WHO

My mom was warned about processed meats/cold cuts ages ago. We knew from as far back as the 1970s that they were loaded with nitrates and other crap.

My mom ended up with colon cancer. She beat it only to end up ...

Sorry to hear about yo mom, same with my grandmother.

My mom had health problems going way back. She was beautiful (big breasted blonde ) and strong (tough as nails). She was involved with the hypertension clinics when that was the rage in the late 1960s/early 1970s. She outlived most of her healthier girlfriends and guyfriends from back then because she was in the medical system. She had primary care doctors early on.


This is one reason I always thought healthcare reform had to include insuring everybody and getting people into primary care. I've seen it in practice with more than my mom