The Chinese were dishonest from the beginning. ‘Everyone was covering their eyes’: In Wuhan, doctors knew the truth Opinion by the Editorial Board
And? The issue here is how the USA should progress. Should we get butthurt? Should we surrender? Ensuring that working with China is impossible while rousing batshit crazy Americans to harm Asians in America is NOT A POLICY. Making it impossible even for WHO to make further progress was a crime against the world. The direction Trump took on COVID was detrimental to America in MANY ways.
China is the enemy as much as the virus is. From the Washington Post link in #585: ". . . . What happened in Wuhan was not a single slip-up or misjudgment. It was a result of how the system works, demanding fealty and imposing control in all directions. It was a deliberate choice to order doctors not to wear masks that could have saved lives; to slow-walk the reporting and thus impede early warning; to shut down communications with the public; and to instruct doctors not to write anything down about the spreading danger. The consequence was death and misery for the Chinese people and the rest of the world on an unimaginable scale."
This is not an excuse for America to be STUPID. Yes, the problem is difficult. But, then America made it worse instead of working to improve the situation for the USA and the world - including China. China is our major trading partner. And disease does not know political boundaries.
Weekend reads: A journey through a paper mill; Stanford president’s retractions; developments in Gino case The week at Retraction Watch featured: Former Alabama chemistry prof faked data in grant applications: Federal watchdog ‘Unethical and misleading’: Researcher finds his name on editorial boards of journals he’s never heard of Researcher sues U.S. government following debarment, misconduct finding Stanford president retracts two Science papers following investigation Withdrawn AI-written preprint on millipedes resurfaces, causing alarm Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to well over 350. There are now 42,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in Edifix, EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains 200 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read): Continue reading
This is one of the seriously strong CREDITS to science. There are measures and checking in place to root out and eliminate information that is questionable or actually false. In fact, there are layers of checking in place before as well as after a paper is published, lest false papers do damage to further research. We don't see that in other sources of information. For example, in X Musk has decided to give totally illegitimate sources such as Russian disinformation sources privileges in posting - even giving them the blue checkmark to indicate they are somehow more approved than other posters! And, that happens with absolutely NO checking or pushback of any kind. Where is the Retraction Watch for X, Fox, and for the rest of the media that publishes papers on important topics?
A victory for science. The Retraction Watch Database becomes completely open – and RW becomes far more sustainable Today is a very big day for Retraction Watch and The Center For Scientific Integrity, our parent non-profit. Bear with me while I explain, starting with some history. When Adam Marcus and I launched Retraction Watch in 2010, we envisioned it as a journalism blog that would break stories no one else was covering, and examine whether scientific correction mechanisms were robust. And for some time, that’s just what it was. Our traffic and visibility grew quite quickly, but the team didn’t. It was years before we even had an intern. Things changed in 2014 and 2015. Three philanthropies – the MacArthur Foundation, the Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures), and the Helmsley Trust – approached us with some version of “We think what you’re doing is important. How can we help?” Continue reading
If this is a thread as it sounds to justify NOT trusting research it appears to be soliciting subjective opinions by people with the preconceived view research can not be trusted quoting people they think provide research to prove research can not be trusted. So with due respect the thread responses have become contradictory and absurd as people try justify their subjective biases quoting alleged "authority figures". Logic dictates that whether research is accurate or inaccurate depends on its contents. To go the next step and say research is fraudulent suggests dishonesty a human motive. This thread does not differentiate inaccurate research and subjective biases or defective measurement methods from people with the deliberate intent to deceive using "research" as their pretext. I will now say this. Distrust of science, research, authority figures all gets mixed in a half assed, subjective **** storm of paranoia. Accurate and inaccurate research can be measured objectively to assess their accuracy. If you have a specific example of a researcher deliberately lying then prove it please. This **** in research approach where people sit on their sofa second guessing research as dishonest is absurd. Its not a general phenomena you can use to obscure and void all research, only the research in which it presents inaccuracies or deliberate misrepresentations for motive other than unintended bias. Everyone of you claiming research is dishonest have done nothing to prove that. What you do though is throw out a Trump canard-a distrust for authority canard he throws out to his followers. Because they fear what they do not understand, its easy for him to say, its fake, its fake news, fake science and you follow along like sheep claiming Trump is protecting you from liars. Horseshit. Think for yourself. If you do not have the appropriate level of academia to know what you are assessing then understand that limitation and understand it prevents you from definitively being able to know truth from falsehood unless you rely on someone's opinion. That then leads you to the very point you talk around. Anyone, any one who provides you a source of information or opinion may be accurate, inaccurate and may be deliberately or unintentionally misrepresenting. That is life. To just come up with a pat answer that well, since some people misrepresent everyone does is nonsense. Its fear mongering. By the way what I expressed is a subjective opinion. I do not care if you agree with it or not but your agreeing with it or not doesn't make it false or true-it just means you might agree or disagree with it. Scientific methodology that uses inaccurate, distorted or false presumptions, assumptions can and is exposed. No scientific conclusion remains absolute and fixed. When science determines a cause and effect result in a controlled environment that leads it to be able to explain how the cause and effect connect, such observations are always subject to further research. The entire premises of this thread assumes that scientific methodology is absolute and never changes as its constantly updated to account for possible biases, inaccuracies. If false research leads to false claims-how did you find out they were false? Well? How did you render the conclusion they were false. Using this thread how does anyone know the basis you use to conclude something is false is not false either? Do you know the difference between calling something false and simply disagreeing with it? Trump claims anyone who says anything he disagrees with is false. Did or does that make it false? So why the Trumpist canard that research is false and can't be trusted?
In a perfect world you'd be unquestionably correct. However the scientific research world is far from perfect. First off, in many cases research is done to DISPROVE the results of other research. Second, we're seeing more and more instances where papers (particularly in AGW) are rejected because the fail to regurgitate the party line. I'm not saying we should dismiss all research work out of hand; including those we may disagree with. That would be counter productive to scientific progress. I'd like to see a pro/con approach to publishing whenever possible.
I voted against Trump twice and will do so again if I have to. Three philanthropies – the MacArthur Foundation, the Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures), and the Helmsley Trust all support Retraction Watch, which is at the heart of this thread. They are about as "unTrump" as anyone can be. This thread is about keeping personal agendas out of the scientific process.
Peer-review has been broken for a very long time. "Can’t take criticism? Just make up your own reviews! It may sound far-fetched, but we’ve now counted more than 270 retractions, more than half of them this year, which occurred because authors or editors compromised the peer-review process in some way—most egregiously, some authors faked email addresses for peer reviewers and gave their own papers a green light." THE SCIENTIST, The Top 10 Retractions of 2015, A look at this year’s most memorable retractions, By Retraction Watch | December 23, 2015. https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/44895/title/The-Top-10-Retractions-of-2015/
Exactly! That's what is so great about science. When studies are found to have errors, they get retracted!!! Where else are claims that are erroneous retracted?? We know that Fox PURPOSFULLY broadcasts false reports to blatantly promote their political objectives, because they have lost court cases over that. Did they retract? No. Valid sites RETRACT. Also, peer review is only one safeguard. It's important, but it is not perfect. There is also emphasis on duplication by unrelated groups, studies that overlap, the fact that scientists can essentially get themselves black balled, etc.
The commercial pressure is toward publishing legitimate studies. Remember the studies Lancet published, and then found to be invalidated? That raised serious questions about whether academia should continue subscribing to Lancet or giving Lancet, once a highly rated journal, continued attention. A publisher whose market is academia can not survive while publishing papers that must be retracted. It's a matter of capitalism.
The Inconvenient Truth: The current "Replication Crisis" is now very serious and well documented, "The organization that uncovered the world of offshore tax havens and rogue international finance in the Panama Papers and Luxembourg Leaks has shifted its attention to fake science. In collaboration with reporters from 18 news outlets all over the world, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung examined 175,000 scientific articles published by five of the world’s most prominent pseudo-scientific publishing platforms. The result? The collaboration found that some 400,000 scientists worldwide have been published in these journals since 2013." MOTHER JONES, 400,000 Scientists All Over the World Have Been Published in Fake Journals, Journalists investigated widespread fraud within the scientific publishing community., BY KARI SONDEJUL. 20, 2018. https://www.motherjones.com/media/2018/07/real-news-tackles-fake-science/ Scientists lie like rugs.
Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, like many other science journals have been caught red handed publishing Fake Science. All efforts to fix the Replication Crisis have failed so far. “Researchers have discovered, over and over, that lots of findings in fields like psychology, sociology, medicine, and economics don’t hold up when other researchers try to replicate them. This conversation was fueled in part by John Ioannidis’s 2005 article “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” and by the controversy around a 2011 paper that used then-standard statistical methods to find that people have precognition.” “After tons of resources spent demonstrating the scope of the problem, fighting for more retractions, teaching better statistical methods, and trying to drag fraud into the open, papers still don’t replicate as much as researchers would hope, and bad papers are still widely cited — suggesting a big part of the problem still hasn’t been touched. We need a more sophisticated understanding of the replication crisis, not as a moment of realization after which we were able to move forward with higher standards, but as an ***ongoing rot*** in the scientific process that a decade of work hasn’t quite fixed.” VOX, SCIENCE, Science has been in a “replication crisis” for a decade. Have we learned anything? Bad papers are still published. But some other things might be getting better., By Kelsey Piper Oct 14, 2020, 12:20pm EDT. (Emphasis mine) https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21504366/science-replication-crisis-peer-review-statistics Fake Science = Anti-Science. "Scientists" who fudge their data should be fired. Starbucks is still hiring.
No it isn't. It's toward profit from advertising. Lancet's publisher had no reason to care as long as the revenue came in. So they just don't retract unless they have to. It's a matter of capitalism.
