Is science in the midst of a crisis of replicability and false discoveries? In a recent article, Alexander Bird offers an explanation for the apparent lack of replicability in the biomedical sciences. Bird argues that the surprise at the failure to replicate biomedical research is a result of the fallacy of neglecting the base rate. The base-rate fallacy arises in situations in which one ignores the base rate—or prior probability—of an event when assessing the probability of this event in the (...) light of some observed evidence. By extension, the replication crisis would result from ignoring the low prior probability of biomedical hypotheses. In this paper, my response to Bird’s claim is twofold. First, I show that the argument according to which the replication crisis is due to the low prior of biomedical hypotheses is incomplete. Second, I claim that a simple base-rate fallacy model does not account for some important methodological insights that have emerged in discussions of the replication crisis. (shrink)

The recent Bigelow Institute contest rewarding the "best" evidence for life after death epitomizes much of what's wrong with the current state of survival research, its participants constituting a who's who list of contemporary survival researchers. Cases that are regularly hyped as among the best evidence for an afterlife are all too often easily susceptible to normal explanations--if only survival researchers would give them a chance. The consistently negative results of 121 years of experimental survival research ought to have spurred (...) soul-searching questions for survival researchers by now. And if we treat discarnate personal survival as a scientific hypothesis, then researchers are rationally obliged to seriously consider biological facts that tell against it, too. Limiting one's inquiry to attempts to only collect data that might confirm survival is one of the chief hallmarks of pseudoscience, and it's sadly a feature, not a bug, of the survival literature. This systematic review reveals that survival researchers would better serve science by setting aside their feelings and heeding what the data are telling them, for the probabilities should drive our beliefs, not the other way around. Is discarnate personal survival likely to occur in light of the total available evidence? The overall evidence doesn't even make personal survival more probable than not. -/- 1. Introduction 2. In Science the Quality of the Evidence is Paramount -- 2.1 Prospective Experimental Tests of Survival -- 2.2 Where Have All the Deceased Survival Researchers Gone? -- 3. What Does the Total Available Relevant Evidence Tell Us? -- 4. Ranking the Survival Evidence -- 5. The Mind-Body Problem, Botched -- 6. Conclusion: Not Much Better than Religious Faith. (shrink)

While there has been much discussion of how the scientific establishment’s culture can engender research misconduct and scientific irreproducibility, this has been discussed much less frequently with respect to the medical profession. Here the authors posit that a lack of self-criticism, an encouragement of novel scientific research generated by the recruitment policies of the UK Royal Training Colleges along with insufficient training in the sciences are core reasons as to why research misconduct and dishonesty prevail within the medical community. Furthermore, (...) the UK General Medical Council’s own data demonstrates a historic inattentiveness to the ease with which doctors can engage in research misconduct. Suggestions are made as to how these issues can be investigated and alternative incentives for career advancement are adumbrated. (shrink)

The most recent tool for acting on the world, the exosomatization of cognitive activities, is often considered an autonomous and objective replacement of knowledge construction. We show the intrinsic limits of the mechanistic myths in AI, from classical to Deep Learning techniques, and its relation to the human construction of sense. Human activities in a changing ecosystem – in their somatic and sensible dimensionalities proper to any living experiences – are at the core of our analysis. By this, we stress (...) the key role of the knowing subject, far away from any allegedly objective big collections of data. The production of organized structures of physics, biology and in societal analysis will be compared and distinguished by trying to set on more robust grounds the constructive as well as the disruptive roles of entropic, negentropic, anti-entropic dynamics that are different concepts in different domains, to be handled with care: the use of machine learning and optimization methods as tools and models to analyse and manage human activities in view of their scientific and political ideology of technoscientific governance. They suppose that which they try to produce is objective, that is, standardized and controllable behaviours. In this dialogue we stress a mirror symmetry between the lack of theoretical interpretation of scientific data and the lack of democracy in this fiction of neutrality. Moreover, bad analogies constitute an obstacle to grasp the anteriority of biological and ecological constraints which enable and limit all artificial products of human intelligence. We will thus stress biological specificity, the role of normativity and constraints in evolution, of labour in structuring the human historical construction of sense by common activities. (shrink)

As it has historically been the case with many pandemics, the Covid-19 experience will induce many philosophers to reconsider the value of medical practice. This should be a good opportunity to critically scrutinize the way medical research and medical interventions are carried out. For much of its history, medicine has been very inefficient. But, even in its contemporary forms, a review of common protocols in medical research and medical interventions reveal many shortcomings, especially related to methodological flaws, and more importantly, (...) conflicts of interests due to profit incentives. In the face of these problems, we propose a program of “gentle medicine”. This term, originally formulated by philosopher Jacob Stegenga, describes a form of medicine in which physicians intervene less than they currently do. As part of this general program, we advance a series of reform recommendations that could be enacted both by medical staff in their everyday practice, but also by public health officials and policymakers. (shrink)

The paper discusses self-plagiarism and associated practices in scholarly publishing. It approaches at some length the conceptual issues raised by the notion of self-plagiarism. It distinguishes among and then examines the main families of arguments against self-plagiarism, as well as the question of possibly legitimate reasons to engage in this practice. It concludes that some of the animus frequently reserved for self-plagiarism may be the result of, among others, poor choice of a label, unwarranted generalizations as to its ill effects (...) based on the specific experience (and goals) of particular disciplines, and widespread but not necessarily beneficial publishing practices. (shrink)

Nowadays, almost everyone seems to agree that science is facing an epistemological crisis – namely the replicability crisis – and that we need to take action. But as to precisely what to do or how...

The social and cognitive science replication crisis is partly due to the limitations of commonly used statistical tools. Inferential statistics require that unsystematic measurement variation is independent of system history, and weak relative to systematic or causal sources of variation. However, contemporary systems research underscores the dynamic, adaptive nature of social, cognitive, and behavioral systems. Variation in human activity includes the influences of intrinsic dynamics intertwined with changing contextual circumstances. Conventional inferential techniques presume milder forms of variability, such as unsystematic (...) measurement error, as in a Gaussian distribution. Inferential statistics indicate an elementary Newtonian cause-effect metaphor for change that is inconsistent with known principles of change in complex systems. Pattern formation in self-organizing systems and quantum probability are used to illustrate theoretical metaphors that instantiate alternative notions of change in complex systems. Inferential statistics and related techniques are crucial scientific resources. However, in the social and behavioral sciences, they must be practiced in conjunction with an appropriate general systems framework that accommodates intrinsic fluctuations and contextual adaptation. (shrink)

Research integrity is core to the mission of higher education. In undergraduate student samples, self-reported rates of data fabrication have been troublingly high. Despite this, no research has investigated undergraduate data fabrication in a more systematic manner. We applied duplication screening techniques to 18 data sets submitted by psychology honors students for assessment. Although we did not identify any completely duplicated cases, there were numerous partial duplicates. Rather than indicating fabrication, however, these partial duplicates are likely a consequence of poor (...) measure selection, insufficient data screening, and/or participant characteristics. Implications for the teaching and supervision of honors students are discussed. (shrink)

Biological mimicry is regarded by many as a textbook illustration of Darwin’s idea of evolution by random mutation followed by differential selection of reproductively fit specimens, resulting in gradual phenotypic change in a population. In this paper, I argue that some cases of so-called mimicry are probably merely look-a-likes and do not gain an advantage due to their similarity in appearance to something else. In cases where a similar appearance does provide a benefit, I argue that it is possible that (...) these forms of mimicry were created in a single generation. An interpretive response to an appearance as a sign can make a new structure perform drastically differently in an environment. In such cases, Darwin’s natural selection mechanism only helps to explain gradual the spread of these new forms, not the creation of them. I argue that biosemiosis should be regarded as a much more powerful mechanism for affecting evolutionary trajectories than the gradualist view allows. I focus on two cases of butterfly mimicry: the Viceroy (Nymphalidae: Limenitis archippus) and Monarch (Nymphalidae: Danaus plexippus) butterflies, supposed Müllerian mimics, and deadleaf mimic butterflies (Kallima). (shrink)

Notwithstanding the popularity of psychology courses throughout the world, educators face a constant and difficult problem of overcoming the fear of and dislike for statistics which represents one of the pillars of modern psychological science. Although the issue is complex and multifaceted, here I argue that “statophobia” might represent a rational and justified response to the sense of unease felt in contact with abstract statistical concepts which are often vague, circular or ill-defined. I illustrate the problem by briefly discussing two (...) myths about the nature of probability and statistics, namely that probability and statistics generate knowledge and that the fault for not understanding probability lies solely with the subjective cognition which is incapable of comprehending deeper mathematical truth. I argue that the confident presentation of statistical methods hides numerous conceptual blind spots that students might be aware of and that need to be addressed before other causes of statistics anxiety can be tackled successfully. (shrink)

Anonymous argumentation has recently been the focus of public controversy: flash points include the outing of pseudonymous bloggers by newspapers and the launch of an academic journal that expressly permits pseudonymous authorship. However, the controversy is not just a recent one—similar debates took place in the nineteenth century over the then common practice of anonymous journalism. Amongst the arguments advanced by advocates of anonymous argumentation in either era is the contention that it is essential if the widest range of voices (...) are to be heard; amongst the counterarguments of its critics, that it weakens the credibility of individual arguments and irresponsibly cheapens the standard of public discourse. This paper explores some implications of the controversy for the ethics of argumentation in general and virtue theories of argumentation in particular. (shrink)

In their paper titled “Gender and philosophical intuition,” Buckwalter and Stich argue that the intuitions of women and men differ significantly on various types of philosophical questions. Furthermore, men's intuitions, so the authors claim, are more in line with traditionally accepted solutions of classical problems. This inherent bias, so the argument goes, is one of the factors that leads more men than women to pursue degrees and careers in philosophy. These findings have received a considerable amount of attention and the (...) paper is to appear in the second edition of Experimental Philosophy edited by Knobe and Nichols , which itself is an influential outlet. Given the exposure of these results, we attempted to replicate three of the classes of questions that Buckwalter and Stich review in their paper and for which they report significant differences. We failed to replicate the results using several different sources for data collection (one being identical to the original procedures.. (shrink)

In one of the earlier influential papers in the field of experimental philosophy titled Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions published in 2001, Jonathan M. Weinberg, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich reported that respondents answered Gettier type questions differently depending on their ethnic background as well as socioeconomic status. There is currently a debate going on, on the significance of the results of Weinberg et al. (2001) and its implications for philosophical methodology in general and epistemology in specific. Despite the debates, however, (...) to our knowledge, there has not been a replication attempt of the experiments of the original paper. We collected data from four different sources (two on-line and two in-person) to replicate the experiments. Despite several different data sets and in various cases larger sample sizes and hence greater power to detect differences, we failed to detect significant differences between the above-mentioned ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Our results suggest that epistemic intuitions are more robust across ethnic and socioeconomic groups than Weinberg et al. (2001) indicates. Given our data, we believe that the notion of differences in epistemic intuitions among different ethnic and socioeconomic groups that follows from Weinberg et al. (2001) needs to be corrected. (shrink)

The field of experimental philosophy has received considerable attention, essentially for producing results that seem highly counter-intuitive and at the same time question some of the fundamental methods used in philosophy. A substantial part of this attention has focused on the role of intuitions in philosophical methodology. One of the major contributions of experimental philosophy on this topic has been concrete evidence in support of intuitional diversity; the idea that intuitions vary systematically depending on variables such as ethnicity, socioeconomic background, (...) or gender. Because of the important implications, these findings have been the subject of extensive debate. Despite the seeming significance of the findings and despite all the debates that the experimental philosophy movement has prompted, what has not been examined systematically is the reproducibility of the results. Instead, the reported findings have been simply accepted as established facts. We set out to replicate a wide range of experiments and surprisingly failed to reproduce many of the reported findings, some of which are from the most cited and attention grabbing papers of the field. We draw two conclusions from our findings. The first is that the instability of intuitions has been exaggerated by experimental philosophers. Intuitions appear to be more uniform across different demographic groups. The argument that intuitions need to be discarded because they depend on arbitrary factors such as ethnicity, socioeconomic background, or gender does not seem tenable anymore. The second conclusion is that experimental philosophy needs a better system to ensure the reproducibility of published findings. The current research-publication system of various empirical fields, especially those employing statistical methods, leads to an overproduction of false-positive findings in the published literature. Unless changes are made to the current research-publication system, this overproduction is likely to continue, in experimental philosophy as well as other disciplines. (shrink)

The main message of Neuroethics is that neuroscience forces us to reconceptualize human agency as marvelously diverse and flexible. Free will can arise from unconscious brain processes. Individuals with mental disorders, including addiction and psychopathy, exhibit more agency than is often recognized. Brain interventions should be embraced with cautious optimism. Our moral intuitions, which arise from entangled reason and emotion, can generally be trusted. Nevertheless, we can and should safely enhance our brain chemistry, partly because motivated reasoning crops up in (...) everyday life and in the practice of neuroscience itself. Despite serious limitations, brain science can be useful in the courtroom and marketplace. Recognizing all this nuance leaves little room for anxious alarmism or overhype and urges an emphasis on neurodiversity. The result is a highly opinionated tour of neuroethics as an exciting field full of implications for philosophy, science, medicine, law, and public policy. (shrink)

Change is the fundamental idea of evolution. Explaining the extraordinary biological change we see written in the history of genomes and fossil beds is the primary occupation of the evolutionary biologist. Yet it is a surprising fact that for the majority of evolutionary research, we have rarely studied how evolution typically unfolds in nature, in changing ecological environments, over space and time. While ecology played a major role in the eventual acceptance of the population genetic viewpoint of evolution in the (...) synthetic era (circa 1918-1956), it held a lesser role in the development of evolutionary theory until the 1980s, when we began to systematically study the evolutionary dynamics of natural populations in space and time. As a result, early evolutionary theory was initially constructed in an abstract vacuum that was unrepresentative of evolution in nature. The subtle synthesis between ecology with evolutionary biology (eco-evo synthesis) over the past 40 years has progressed our knowledge of natural selection dynamics as they are found in nature, thus revealing how natural selection varies in strength, direction, form, and, more surprisingly, level of biological organization. Natural selection can no longer be reduced to lower levels of biological organization (i.e., individuals, selfish genes) over shorter timescales but should be expanded to include adaptation at higher levels and over longer timescales. Long-term and/or emergent evolutionary phenomena, such as multilevel selection or evolvability, have thus become tenable concepts within an evolutionary biology that embraces ecology and spatiotemporal change. Evolutionary biology is currently suspended at an intermediate stage of scientific progress that calls for the organization of all the recent knowledge revealed by the eco-evo synthesis into a coherent and unified theoretical framework. This is where philosophers of biology can be of particular use, acting as a bridge between the subdisciplines of biology and inventing new theoretical strategies to organize and accommodate the recent knowledge. Philosophers have recommended transitioning away from outdated philosophies that were originally derived from physics within the philosophical zeitgeist of logical positivism (i.e., monism, reductionism, and monocausation) and toward a distinct philosophy of biology that can capture the natural complexity of multifaceted biological systems within diverse ecosystems—one that embraces the emerging philosophies of pluralism, emergence, and multicausality. Therefore, I see recent advances in ecology, evolutionary biology, and the philosophy of biology as laying the groundwork for another major biological synthesis, what I refer to as the Second Synthesis because, in many respects, it is analogous to the aims and outcomes of the first major biological synthesis (but is notably distinct from the inorganic and contrived progressive movement known as the extended evolutionary synthesis). With the general development of a distinctive philosophy of science, biology has rightfully emerged as an autonomous science. Thus, while the first synthesis legitimized biology, the Second Synthesis autonomized biology and afforded biology its own philosophy, allowing biology to finally realize its full scientific potential. (shrink)

Research Integrity (RI) is high on the agenda of both institutions and science policy. The European Union as well as national ministries of science have launched ambitious initiatives to combat misconduct and breaches of research integrity. Often, such initiatives entail attempts to regulate scientific behavior through guidelines that institutions and academic communities can use to more easily identify and deal with cases of misconduct. Rather than framing misconduct as a result of an information deficit, we instead conceptualize Questionable Research Practices (...) (QRPs) as attempts by researchers to reconcile epistemic and social forms of uncertainty in knowledge production. Drawing on previous literature, we define epistemic uncertainty as the inherent intellectual unpredictability of scientific inquiry, while social uncertainty arises from the human-made conditions for scientific work. Our core argument—developed on the basis of 30 focus group interviews with researchers across different fields and European countries—is that breaches of research integrity can be understood as attempts to loosen overly tight coupling between the two forms of uncertainty. Our analytical approach is not meant to relativize or excuse misconduct, but rather to offer a more fine-grained perspective on what exactly it is that researchers want to accomplish by engaging in it. Based on the analysis, we conclude by proposing some concrete ways in which institutions and academic communities could try to reconcile epistemic and social uncertainties on a more collective level, thereby reducing incentives for researchers to engage in misconduct. (shrink)

This paper introduces the concept of ‘hyper-ambition’ in academia as a contributing factor to what has been termed a ‘replication crisis’ across some sciences. The replication crisis is an umbrella term that covers a range of ‘questionable research practices’, from sloppy reporting to fraud. There are already many proposals to address questionable research practices, some of which focus on the values, norms, and motivations of researchers and institutes, and suggest measures to promote research integrity. Yet it is not easy to (...) promote integrity in hyper-competitive academic environments that value high levels of ambition. I argue that in such contexts, it is as likely that a kind of hyper-ambition is fostered that (inadvertently or otherwise) prioritises individual success above all, including to the detriment of scientific quality. In addition, efforts to promote values like integrity falter because they rely on sufficient uniformity in motivations or tendencies. Codes and guidance promoting integrity are, however, likely to influence those for whom such values are not optional, while others simply find ways around them. To demonstrate this I offer a thought experiment in which we consider the imaginary working situations of two ordinary academics. I conclude that tackling questionable research practices in the light of the replication crisis requires robust ‘top down’ measures that expect and accommodate a broader range of academic values, motivations, and tendencies, while challenging those that help to promote hyper-ambition. (shrink)

English summary: This paper uses research on the COVID-19 pandemic as the backdrop for an accessible discussion of the value and status of science, and of the role of valuesin science. In particular, the paper seeks to debunk three common myths or dogmas about scientific research: (i) that there is such a thing as 'scientific proof' of a theory or hypothesis, (ii) that disagreement is necessarily unhealthy or unnatural in science, (iii) and that personal values play no role in scientific (...) research. (shrink)

Many people no longer trust mainstream science. It seems reasonable to assume that this unfortunate state of affairs - which...

This paper examines a looming reproducibility crisis in the core of the hard sciences. Namely, it concentrates on molecular modeling and simulation (MMS), a family of methods that predict properties of substances through computing interactions on a molecular level and that is widely popular in physics, chemistry, materials science, and engineering. The paper argues that in order to make quantitative predictions, sophisticated models are needed which have to be evaluated with complex simulation procedures that amalgamate theoretical, technological, and social factors (...) – leading to problems with reproducibility. Thus, for methodological reasons, the predictive success causes a reproducibility problem. (shrink)

The deep crisis in modern fundamental science development is ever more evident and openly recognised now even by mainstream, official science professionals and leaders. By no coincidence, it occurs in parallel to the world civilisation crisis and related global change processes, where the true power of unreduced scientific knowledge is just badly missing as the indispensable and unique tool for the emerging greater problem solution and further progress at a superior level of complex world dynamics. Here we reveal the mathematically (...) exact reason for the crisis in conventional science, containing also the natural and unified problem solution in the form of well-specified extension of usual, artificially restricted paradigm. We show how that extended, now causally complete science content provides various "unsolvable" problem solutions and opens new development possibilities for both science and society, where the former plays the role of the main, direct driver for the latter. We outline the related qualitative changes in science organisation, practice and purposes, giving rise to the sustainability transition in the entire civilisation dynamics towards the well-specified superior level of its unreduced, now well understood and universally defined complexity. (shrink)

Open access-introduction into moral philosophy in German language that contains chapters on the concept of morality, on the development and the main positions of normative ethics, on meta-ethics, and on the various fields of applied ethics. One of its distinctive features is that it explicitly reflects on the role of morality and ethics in modern society and that it analyses the import of alternative conceptual and normative positions for determining this role. The book can be freely downloaded from the publisher's (...) website via the URL below. (shrink)

Les principaux problèmes rencontrés par les scientifiques qui travaillent avec des ensembles de données massives (mégadonnées, Big Data), en soulignant les principaux problèmes éthiques, tout en tenant compte de la législation de l'Union européenne. Après une brève Introduction au Big Data, la section Technologie présente les applications spécifiques de la recherche. Il suit une approche des principales questions philosophiques spécifiques dans Aspects philosophiques, et Aspects juridiques en soulignant les problèmes éthiques spécifiques du règlement de l'UE sur la protection des données (...) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation, « GDPR »). La section Problèmes éthiques détaille les problèmes spécifiques générés par le big data. Après une brève section de Recherche de big data, sont présentées les Conclusions sur l’éthique de la recherche dans l’utilisation du big data. SOMMAIRE: Abstract 1. Introduction - 1.1 Définitions - 1.2 Les dimensions du big data 2. La technologie - 2.1 Applications - - 2.1.1 En recherche 3. Aspects philosophiques 4 Aspects juridiques - 4.1 RGPD (GDPR) - - Étapes du traitement des données personnelles - - Principes du traitement des données - - Politique de confidentialité et transparence - - Finalités du traitement des données - - Confidentialité par conception et confidentialité implicite - - Le paradoxe (juridique) des mégadonnées 5. Problèmes éthiques - L'éthique dans la recherche - Prise de conscience - Consentement - Contrôle - Transparence - Confiance - Propriété - Surveillance et sécurité - Identité numérique - Réalité ajustée - De-anonymisation - Inégalité numérique - Confidentialité 6. Recherche des mégadonnées Conclusions Bibliographie DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.10128.56328 . (shrink)

Most theories and hypotheses in psychology are verbal in nature, yet their evaluation overwhelmingly relies on inferential statistical procedures. The validity of the move from qualitative to quantitative analysis depends on the verbal and statistical expressions of a hypothesis being closely aligned – that is, that the two must refer to roughly the same set of hypothetical observations. Here, I argue that many applications of statistical inference in psychology fail to meet this basic condition. Focusing on the most widely used (...) class of model in psychology – the linear mixed model – I explore the consequences of failing to statistically operationalize verbal hypotheses in a way that respects researchers' actual generalization intentions. I demonstrate that although the “random effect” formalism is used pervasively in psychology to model intersubject variability, few researchers accord the same treatment to other variables they clearly intend to generalize over. The under-specification of random effects imposes far stronger constraints on the generalizability of results than most researchers appreciate. Ignoring these constraints can dramatically inflate false-positive rates, and often leads researchers to draw sweeping verbal generalizations that lack a meaningful connection to the statistical quantities they are putatively based on. I argue that failure to take the alignment between verbal and statistical expressions seriously lies at the heart of many of psychology's ongoing problems, and conclude with a discussion of several potential avenues for improvement. (shrink)

There is substantial published evidence showing that countless people enroll each year in ethically deficient clinical trials. Many of the trials are problematic because the quality of the science used to justify their launch may not be sufficiently vetted while many other trials may lack requisite social value. This poses the question: why do people volunteer for them? The answer resides in large part in the fact that informed consent practices have historically masked, rather than disclosed, the information that would (...) alert research candidates to the ethically problematic nature of the trials. The “reasonable person” and “key information” provisions in the revised US Common Rule create the opportunity to correct this historical shortcoming. Two sources are employed to shed light on what the “key information” is that should be disclosed to a “reasonable person”: the original disclosure aims of the Nuremberg Code, as well as an extensive body of meta-research evidence. Those sources jointly support a range of new disclosures in the informed consent process that would unmask the heretofore undisclosed information. The resulting proposed new disclosures pertain to the overall success prospects of clinical trials, the quality of the prior research that both forms the basis of clinical trials and informs assessment of their risks and benefits, the potential social value of clinical trials, and the commercial purposes of clinical trials. (shrink)

Research Ethics Committees (RECs) play a critical gatekeeping role in clinical trials. This role is meant to ensure that only those trials that meet certain ethical thresholds proceed through their gate. Two of these thresholds are that the potential benefits of trials are reasonable in relation to risks and that trials are capable of producing a requisite amount of social value. While one ought not expect perfect execution by RECs of their gatekeeping role, one should expect routine success in it. (...) This article reviews a range of evidence showing that substantial numbers of ethically tainted trials are receiving REC approvals. Many of the trials are early phase trials that evidence shows have benefits that may not be reasonable compared with their risks and many others are later trials that evidence shows may lack sufficient social value. The evidence pertains to such matters as methodologically inadequate preclinical studies incapable of supporting the inferences that REC members must make about the prospects for potential benefit needed to offset the risks in early phase trials and sponsorship bias that can cause improperly designed, conducted, analysed and reported later phase trials. The analysis of the evidence makes clear that REC practices need to be strengthened if they are to adequately fulfil their gatekeeping role. The article also explores options that RECs could use in order to improve their gatekeeping function. (shrink)

The diversified methodology and expertise of interdisciplinary research teams provide the opportunity to overcome the limited perspectives of individual disciplines. This is particularly true at the interface of Robotics, Neuroscience, and Psychology as the three fields have quite different perspectives and approaches to offer. Nonetheless, aligning backgrounds and interdisciplinary expectations can present challenges due to varied research cultures and practices. Overcoming these challenges stands at the beginning of each productive collaboration and thus is a mandatory step in cognitive neurorobotics. In (...) this article, we share eight lessons that we learned from our ongoing interdisciplinary project on human-robot and robot-robot interaction in social settings. These lessons provide practical advice for scientists initiating interdisciplinary research endeavors. Our advice can help to avoid early problems and deal with differences between research fields, prepare for and anticipate challenges, align project expectations, and speed up research progress, thus promoting effective interdisciplinary research across Robotics, Neuroscience, and Psychology. (shrink)

Wood, Kressel, Joshi, and Louie’s meta-analysis of menstrual cycle influences on mate preferences identified three artifacts that influenced study findings: imprecise estimates of the fertile phase, decline over time, and publication effects. These artifacts also were evident in another recent meta-analysis by Gildersleeve, Haselton, and Fales. This consistent evidence of artifacts is not challenged by Gildersleeve et al.’s failure to find another artifact–chasing significance levels. In addition, Wood et al. correctly coded the findings of Gangestad and colleagues’ research, given the (...) variation in their reporting formats and inclusion criteria, which in some studies included only 54% of the sample. The controversy over menstrual cycle effects could be beneficial in increasing interest in publishing null results as well as in identifying evolutionary models that build on women’s capacity to regulate reproduction according to societal roles. (shrink)

Ioannidis [Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Med 2: e124 ] identifies six factors that contribute to explaining why most of the current published research findings are more likely to be false than true, and argues that for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this article, we argue that three “hot” areas in current biological research, viz., agent-based modeling, evolutionary developmental biology , and systems biology, are (...) especially prone to the flaws. (shrink)

In their recent book, Oreskes and Conway describe the ‘tobacco strategy’, which was used by the tobacco industry to influence policymakers regarding the health risks of tobacco products. The strategy involved two parts, consisting of promoting and sharing independent research supporting the industry’s preferred position and funding additional research, but selectively publishing the results. We introduce a model of the tobacco strategy, and use it to argue that both prongs of the strategy can be extremely effective—even when policymakers rationally update (...) on all evidence available to them. As we elaborate, this model helps illustrate the conditions under which the tobacco strategy is particularly successful. In addition, we show how journalists engaged in ‘fair’ reporting can inadvertently mimic the effects of industry on public belief. 1Introduction2Epistemic Network Models3Selective Sharing4Biased Production5Journalists as Unwitting Propagandists6ConclusionAppendix. (shrink)

As machine learning has gradually entered into ever more sectors of public and private life, there has been a growing demand for algorithmic explainability. How can we make the predictions of complex statistical models more intelligible to end users? A subdiscipline of computer science known as interpretable machine learning (IML) has emerged to address this urgent question. Numerous influential methods have been proposed, from local linear approximations to rule lists and counterfactuals. In this article, I highlight three conceptual challenges that (...) are largely overlooked by authors in this area. I argue that the vast majority of IML algorithms are plagued by (1) ambiguity with respect to their true target; (2) a disregard for error rates and severe testing; and (3) an emphasis on product over process. Each point is developed at length, drawing on relevant debates in epistemology and philosophy of science. Examples and counterexamples from IML are considered, demonstrating how failure to acknowledge these problems can result in counterintuitive and potentially misleading explanations. Without greater care for the conceptual foundations of IML, future work in this area is doomed to repeat the same mistakes. (shrink)

Scientists often respond to failures to replicate by citing differences between the experimental components of an original study and those of its attempted replication. In this paper, we investigate these purported mismatch explanations. We assess a body of failures to replicate in neuroscience studies on spinal cord injury. We argue that a defensible mismatch explanation is one where a mismatch of components is a difference maker for a mismatch of outcomes, and the components are relevantly different in the follow-up study, (...) given the scope of the original study. With this account, we argue that not all differences between studies are meaningful, even if they are difference makers. As our examples show, focusing only on these differences results in disregarding the representativeness of the original experiment’s components and the scope of its outcomes, undercutting other epistemic aims, such as translation, in the process. (shrink)

Medicine is increasingly subject to various forms of criticism. This paper focuses on dominant forms of criticism and offers a better account of their normative character. It is argued that together, these forms of criticism are comprehensive, raising questions about both medical science and medical practice. Furthermore, it is shown that these forms of criticism mainly rely on standards of evaluation that are assumed to be internal to medicine and converge on a broader question about the aim of medicine. Further (...) work making medicine’s internal norms explicit and determining the aim of medicine would not only help to clarify to what extent the criticism is justified, but also assist an informed deliberation about the future of medicine. To illustrate some of the general difficulties associated with such a task, the paper concludes by critically engaging Edmund Pellegrino’s account of the aim of medicine as well as the Hastings Center’s consensus report. (shrink)

This articles suggests that the root of the current crisis in modern scientific innovation is mainly due to the method that science applies towards the real world. The scientific method reduces its possibilities by not considering the comprehensiveness of the human person, i.e. science is impersonal. Philosophers of science in the 20th century have identified this anthropological reductionism and further detected the limits of the scientific method. The lack of alternative solutions leads science into a cul-de-sac. The notion of crisis, (...) recently pointed out by Leonardo Polo’s Transcendental Anthropology, allows us to detect the limit, to abandon that limit and to open knowledge to further dimensions of unrestricted novelty such as freedom or love. Here we highlight the following distinctions: firstly, the state of crisis and the critical conscience, secondly, the ‘desperate vs. puzzle-solver’ critical conscience, thirdly, the limit of science and its abandonment. (shrink)

The primary aim of this study was to investigate the relation between self-perceived executive functions and the school achievement of young adolescents, while controlling for parental education and sex. We specifically focused on executive aspects of daily life behavior and the higher-order EFs, as measured with self-report, rather than on the more basic EFs which have been the primary focus of prior investigations. In two independent samples of sixth graders, students evaluated their EFs on a self-report questionnaire, the Amsterdam Executive (...) Functioning Inventory. School achievement in the domains of mathematics and reading comprehension were evaluated with nationally used, norm-based achievement tests. Results revealed that the self-perceived EFs of young adolescents were significantly correlated with their school achievement in both study samples. School achievement was also correlated with the level of parental education, but the factor sex did not have such influence. In study 1, self-perceived EFs explained additional variance in school achievement, while controlling for parental education and sex. In study 2, this was only the case for the most robust measure of school achievement, i.e., the end-of-primary-school final achievement test. Furthermore, besides the relation with achievement tests, we also found a relation between self-perceived EFs and teacher ratings behavioral problems in the classroom. Together, our findings imply that young students can properly reflect on the effectiveness and appropriateness of their EFs in a way that is relevant to their academic achievement and classroom behavior. The findings underscore the importance of considering the development of EFs and parental education in the evaluation of academic achievements in early adolescence. (shrink)