Science Fictions links for February 2024
Yes, that well-endowed rat is here, but so is loads of other stuff
February might be the shortest month, but there’s been no shortage of bad science. Here are the most interesting links on that topic from the past month (and by the way, scroll to the bottom for a job ad that might just be of interest to readers of this Substack).
Enjoy - and don’t forget to become a subscriber if you aren’t already!
February’s best bad science links
Okay, let’s get it out of the way. You’ll only have missed this one if you happen to have had your internet cut off for the past fortnight. It is, of course, the AI-generated picture of a rat with an enormous penis, published in a supposedly serious peer-reviewed scientific journal. This went mega-viral, the paper rapidly got retracted, and it’s a portent of what we’re going to see much more of in the coming years: fake AI pictures, text, and data making it past scientific gatekeepers who are sleeping on the job.
“Cognitive dissonance” is a great phrase, but it was also supposed to be an empirical discovery about people’s behaviour made by psychologists in the 1950s and 60s. How does that empirical work hold up? According to this very large new replication attempt, not particularly well.
A fun preprint on how Google Scholar citations can be (and are being) gamed. The researchers develop the c-index, which is like the h-index, but about the number of papers that cite a given scientist multiple times. Most scientists are only cited once or twice in a given paper. But when there are at least 45 papers that cite you at least 45 times? Either you’ve founded your own field of study, or something funny’s going on.
A feelgood study on how children who got vaccinated in India had higher future wages receives a pretty devastating critique: “the study is really measuring the effects of passage of time”.
“Nature Medicine recently corrected a figure after my PubPeer comment and email. The ‘corrected figure’ contains a different version of the same error.” Remind me: what’s the point of scientific journals?
You might’ve seen the study that claimed that women hunt in 79% of hunter-gatherer societies. If that was true, it would mean the general wisdom on the gender split in these societies is totally wrong. Well, it turns out the study was fatally flawed, so no need to update your views this time.
Here’s a tip. If you want to get an article in Science where you demand that students be taught things for which there’s no good evidence, like transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, just make sure it’s in an article that’s filled with buzzwords like “equity”, “social justice”, “problematic”, and “power and privilege dynamics”.
Another way of getting an article in Science: write about how “indigenous knowledge” is “complementary” to science. The same way herbal medicine is “complementary” to actual medicine, I’m sure.
Depressing story of how one guy’s fraudulent research on curcumin (a chemical compound that can dye things yellow-orange but probably has no health effects) has spawned a whole supplement industry - and even more fake research.
Excellent paper on how to think about statistical power analysis and effect sizes in the research you’re planning. ~Everyone in psychology research, and many other fields besides, should read this.
A weird one: the Dean of the School of Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno runs his own pay-to-publish journal that’s full of complete gibberish. Imagine he was your boss! Andrew Gelman has a suitably baffled article on it.
The Retraction Watch article on the case notes that “the pages of the journal were also filled with articles from [the Dean’s] wife, his son, his students and the current editor-in-chief”. Help me understand why this exists!
The Nobel Prize-winning medical scientist Gregg Semenza has just had his eleventh paper retracted due to data integrity concerns. Nothing to see here, everything fine, no big deal.
Let’s end on a positive note: there’s a very cool new initiative to encourage people to spot and report errors in scientific papers. It’s like what I did for my book: if you find a mistake, you get paid - and bigger errors mean bigger payments. You can sign up to become an error-checker on their site. Do your bit for a slightly less error-strewn science!
P.S. A job at GiveWell
GiveWell, the amazing organisation that rates charities as to their cost-effectiveness (and thus makes charitable donations much better at saving lives), is looking for a Head of Communications.
The job will involve the sorts of things that readers of this Substack enjoy, like sorting good scientific studies from bad ones, and writing and talking about (meta-)science to a wide audience. And that’s all in a job where you really know you’re making a direct, positive difference in the world. If you think you might be a good candidate, you should definitely apply - all the info is right here.
P.P.S. The Studies Show
Psychotherapy! Climate models! A big episode on whether phones and social media cause mental health problems! These are just some of the recent topics we’ve covered on my science podcast with Tom Chivers, The Studies Show. If you become a paid subscriber you can get access to the recent episodes on male and female brains and the Hans Eysenck affair, too.
Image credit: Getty
I had a quick read of the Science article on why genetics is racist. Its ironic that after pointing out the arbitrary nature of population segmentation of some historic 'racist' science, they immediately do the same thing themselves in assertions such as 'people of colour suffer have higher allostatic load'. Also the idea that Mendelian genetics is overly determinisitic seems odd - it is an explanation of inherited traits, so by definition it will be all about what causes traits to be inherited. Traits that are non-inherited are out of scope. I also like the defence of epigenetics that 'in a sense' environmental influences can be passed down. In what sense exactly?