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Home » On the difficulties of research with human subjects

On the difficulties of research with human subjects

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Frederick” makes a good point about retractions of research results:

The retractions and replication problems affect some sciences way more than others. Physics, chemistry, math, hardly at all. Medicine, psychology, social sciences, quite a bit.

To oversimplify, some disciplines rely heavily on trying to tease small effects out of very noisy data, and the statistical rules of thumb that have been relied on are not sufficient to do that reliably. The data is noisy and the effects are small not because scientists in general are lazy or incompetent. It’s because studying anything alive, or anything involving human behavior, is very difficult, because humans and other living systems are incredibly complex.

Some disciplines do not labor under this handicap.

Not only that, but there are enormous ethical restrictions on what researchers are allowed to manipulate in terms of human subjects, as well as rules about informed consent. Lastly, a great deal of research on humans can be easily used to make a political point, and so the temptation is great to present the data in a certain way to conform with a desired outcome. How often does this happen? Hard to say, but politics certainly affects funding, hiring, and publication decisions.

That holds true in some of the “harder” sciences, as well, in particular “climate science” – which, although supposedly a harder science, has some things in common with the softer sciences (noisy data and small effects, for starters), and is highly highly politicized. AGW “deniers” are considered pariahs in academia at this point.

Comments

On the difficulties of research with human subjects — 20 Comments

  2. “Climate science” has become more religion than science, and no, I’m not claiming to make an original or unusual point.

    What’s interesting to me are the different ways climate science resembles a religion.

    End of the world prophecy? Check. We’ve got 12 years left to save the planet.

    Dietary restrictions? Check. Vegetarianism or veganism at the least. Synthetic and/or insect proteins being readied.

    A prophet and his/her/xir disciples? Yeah, lots of disciples although I’m still trying to figure out who the prophet is.

    Sacred objects? Check. For a while it was the CFL, now I’m not too sure.

    A sacred text? Yup. The one Al Gore wrote.

    Religious rituals? I suppose, if driving around in your battery powered car, by yourself wearing a face mask counts.

    Shaming sinners? Oh yeah, you bet, scolding other people for their climate sins is definitely part of the picture, but if you have enough money and recite the correct pieties (see: John Kerry) you don’t get shamed.

  3. In regards to softer sciences, specifically the social sciences and psychology, one thing pursuers of these disciplines will never be able to do, i.e. quantify, via a man invented precise measuring tool, is the act of a free man choosing.

  4. The past few days I got into a FB “discussion” with a former student of one of my grad school friends about climate change. It started when my friend posted the latest IPCC screed. I posted a list of 50 years of failed climate predictions. The guy started quoting chapter and verse the catechism of the church of climate change, including the debunked chestnut of 97% of scientists…..

    I finally shamed him with the ‘open mind’ argument to take a look at a paper I wrote a few years back that I’ve updated which shows all the contrary data, most of which is from NOAA, etc. Sent it to him yesterday, haven’t heard back. 🙂 Kate has seen the paper.

  5. Neo,

    I think even as laymen we have all seen these mistakes. And I admit sometimes they are simply honest errors or outlier results.

    Much of what passes for science these days seems to simply be politics wearing a surgeons mask.

    Two prominent fields that I would not really call science at all are sociology and “climate scientists”. Sociology seems to be simply observations used to reinforce the sociologist personal politics beliefs.

    And what passes for climate “science” has proven to be nearly entirely bogus. Primarily since there is no control sample in which to compare their data to. And there are so many statistical inputs that not only do they not grasp them all. But they seem to have little clue as to the actual weight they should be given.

    I tend to view any conclusions in these areas simply as political cudgels and nothing more

  6. It’d still be relevant to refer to Sokal Squared and try to figure how many authors of similar hoaxes kept quiet.

  7. I’ve seen physicsguy’s paper. It’s good. I’ve also looked through Steven Koonin’s “Unsettled.” I can’t pretend to understand all of the details. But this I do understand. These climate apocalypse forecasts are based on computer simulations, which have numerous assumptions built in, and which vary widely in their results, and whose confidence intervals are getting worse, not better, as more powerful computers run them. They are not good enough to be the basis of policy.

    As to “social sciences,” they are less precise than hard sciences for the reasons Frederick cites. You can “prove” lots of things with regression analysis, depending on what data you choose and what assumptions you make.

  8. I’m not quite on the same page as physicsguy on climate science. There are political activists who work in that discipline, you find them everywhere. But what I find for the most part is that the scientists are careful to state the nuance and uncertainty in their scientific work, and activists who are mostly not themselves scientists strip all the nuance and uncertainty away from the scientific work in presenting to the public. Even if they didn’t the media would, because it always does (think about any reporting you’ve read on nutrition or things that might cause cancer).

    So people on the Right blame the scientists for the misrepresentations of the science by activists and media. Any scientists who might like to correct those misrepresentations will not get a hearing in the media, it will be like they don’t exist. (And yes I know that some climate scientists are themselves activists.)

    The earliest mention of this situation that I know of was made by Richard Dawkins back in 1976, in a passage complaining at length of the misrepresentations in the media of the ideas he presented in “The Selfish Gene”.

  9. Political science and accepted models that must not be challenged are a thing with scientists; they are human after all, That the models don’t work is inconvenient, but not as inconvenient if the grants or funding from the Feds stop,

  10. I couldn’t find the exact language in Unsettled that I was looking for, after a quick search, but Koonin discusses some of the flaws in the IPPC reporting process around page 200. I did see him say the reports intended for policy makers/ leaders were created by political folks, so they were clearly biased to political ends. I vaguely recall him saying (somewhere) that the policy report writers can totally ignore the qualifications and nuance provided in the technical reports and via the technical team leader reviewers; and those leaders really have no recourse. Plus some of the reviewers are hand picked ahead of time so the “reviews” are compromised from that perspective as well. The opportunities for open and fair debate of questionable data or interpretations is absent, and side stepped on purpose. [Witness Neo’s preference for Judith Curry’s views over most others on this topic.]

    The Heartland Institute held their 15th International Conference on Climate Change (15th ICCC) in Orlando last month: https://climateconference.heartland.org .
    In particular, I can recommend Panel 3A – Is Climate Science Scientific? as showing the conflict between observed data and model projection results. [I believe all sessions were recorded and are now available on video replay.]

  11. To add to Sgt. Joe Friday’s list of religious symbols of climate alarmism:
    “The Faculty of Theology of the University of Helsinki will award an honorary doctorate to Greta Thunberg.”
    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/03/24/greta-thunberg-doctor-of-theology/
    It’s a religion.

    Also, from Anthony Watts:
    We’re Doomed… Again! IPCC and Media Jump the Shark

    “Earlier this week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its AR6 climate change report. Expectedly, the report is defined by serial doomcasting and claims of impending catastrophe despite the growing mountain of failed predictions that are conveniently ignored.

    One of the most controversial claims made in the report is that anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main driver of temperature change. Real-world data has proven this false, yet it’s the main takeaway in each IPCC report.

    First released on Monday was the “Summary for Policymakers,” a section intended to guide policymaking decisions across the globe. The AR6 report continues to omit key information in favor of sensationalized claims that are easily refuted. For example, the 36-page summary doesn’t include a single mention of the logarithmic relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global temperature. Surely, policymakers should know that each unit of CO2 added to the atmosphere has a decreasing effect on temperature. The IPCC’s omission of this relationship implies that the warming effect of CO2 concentrations is linear, leading policymakers to overestimate the impact of CO2 emissions on global temperature and overcommit to emissions reduction strategies that are expensive and ineffective.”

    The truth is that we in the West are doomed….. if we give up fossil fuels before there is a workable alternative. The IPCC is composed of a bunch of bureaucrats at the UN, who are, IMO, working with the CCP to destroy the West.

  12. @ R2L > “I did see him say the reports intended for policy makers/ leaders were created by political folks, so they were clearly biased to political ends. I vaguely recall him saying (somewhere) that the policy report writers can totally ignore the qualifications and nuance provided in the technical reports and via the technical team leader reviewers; and those leaders really have no recourse.”

    Here is a comment I found on a recent post that jibes with your comment.
    Pielke’s article itself is worth reading.

    https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/has-the-ipcc-outlived-its-usefulness/comment/13881208

    Terry Oldberg
    Mar 23
    The argument that is made each climate model that is referenced by a Climate Assessment Report that has thus far been published by the IP:CC falsifies the Law of the Excluded Middle (LEM) and “unit measure” where the LEM is among Aristotle’s three Laws of Thought whereas “unit measure” is an axiom of probability theory and assumption of mathematical statistics. Consequently, the runs of these models convey nil information gain to a regulatory official about the conditional outcomes of the events of the future for Earth’s climate system, precluding regulation by this official of this system. A deductive proof of these assertions is available to anyone on Earth for critical review and comment by request sent to my email address. (See below).

    When the IPCC appointed me to the role of Expert Reviewer of the manuscript for its recently published Climate Assessment Rep;ort 6, I read the latest edition of this manuscript Based on what I had read I advised the editors of this document that to publish it without major revisions would be misleading to anyone who read it as it falsely implied that the LEM and “unit measure” were satisfied by the argument made by the model though were actually falsified by this argument. When these editors ignored me by proceeding on a path toward publication without the needed revisions to the manuscript, I wrote to the Chair of the IPCC and chief statistician of the United Nations in protest but neither of them responded to my letter. Thus, this thoroughly misleading document was published by the IPCC for public consumption and under the imprimatur of the United Nations.

    When I participated in a conversation with fellow Expert Reviewers, we found that we unanimously had found the IPCC to be devoted to pushing the narrative of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming though this narrative was unsupported by the facts.

    Terry Oldberg

    Engineer/Scientist/Public Policy Researcher

    Los Altos Hills, CA USA

    1-650-941-0533

    terry_oldberg@yahoo.com

    Since he doxxed himself, I think I will take him seriously.

  13. Direct link to Pielke’s post.
    https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/has-the-ipcc-outlived-its-usefulness

    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an important institution. I have often said that if it did not exist, then it would have to be invented. The IPCC is often referred to as a model for how to do a scientific assessment. Consequently, we should have the highest standards for evaluating its work, not least because climate change is important, and effective mitigation and adaptation policies are essential.

    Below I share a brief few critiques of the culminating report of the current IPCC cycle, called the Synthesis Report. The new report covers six IPCC reports published over the past 9 years.

    Before proceeding, it is important to understand that the IPCC is not a single entity or group of people. It is many different groups doing many different things, with many strengths — for instance, WG1 on extremes was particularly good. The IPCC also has some notable weaknesses — its reliance on out-of-date scenarios most obviously. The Synthesis Report was written by a small group of people. For better or worse, the work of this small group of people reflects upon the entire IPCC and the years of effort leading to this week’s report.

    If I were an IPCC participant not involved with the Synthesis Report, I’d be pretty upset. My view is that the IPCC has strayed far from its role to assess the scientific literature in support of policy making. Its has increasingly taken on a stance of explicit political advocacy and as it does so it has ignored and even misrepresented relevant science. The IPCC needs a complete overhaul.

    Below are some more detailed thoughts on the Synthesis Report.

    Couple more I found interesting this week.
    https://reason.com/2023/03/21/is-the-climate-time-bomb-really-ticking-toward-imminent-catastrophe/

    “The climate time-bomb is ticking,” declared United Nations Secretary-General AntĂłnio Guterres at the press conference on Monday launching the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) AR6 Synthesis Report. He called it “a survival guide for humanity.” The report is supposed to be a comprehensive summary of the scientific, economic, and policy findings of six earlier IPCC climate reports.
    …
    What is the supposed looming climate catastrophe? Exceeding the threshold in which global average temperature rises 1.5 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 baseline. That threshold was established in the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement, which aims to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” In order to have a 50/50 chance of achieving that goal, the new report calculates humanity must cut its greenhouse gas emissions (chiefly carbon dioxide) basically in half by 2030. Secretary-General Guterres asserted that the report shows that “the 1.5-degree limit is achievable.”

    Will humanity inevitably suffer a catastrophic fall if we go over the supposed 1.5 degrees Celsius climatic cliff in 2030? No, argues University of Cambridge climate researcher Mike Hulme in his October 2019 editorial introducing a special issue of the journal WIREs Climate Change devoted to the question, “Is it too late (to stop dangerous climate change)?”

    Hulme notes, “There is a long history of climate deadlines being set publicly by commentators, politicians and campaigners…and then of those deadlines passing with the threat unrealized.” As an example, he cites Secretary-General Guterres’ September 2018 assertion, “If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain us.”

    Hulme pointedly observes that “deadline-ism” as embodied in such claims “does not do justice to what we know scientifically about climate change.” Climate change prediction science reports “a range of possible values for future global warming. It is as false scientifically to say that the climate future will be catastrophic as it is to say with certainty that it will be merely lukewarm.” He adds, “Neither is there a cliff edge to fall over in 2030 or at 1.5°C of warming.”

    https://the-pipeline.org/stop-me-if-youve-heard-this-one-before/

    Steven F. Hayward • 22 Mar, 2023
    It is a fitting coincidence that the announcement of Greta Thunberg’s honorary doctorate in theology came the same week as a new report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that the world has less than a decade to stop “catastrophic climate change” by halting the use of fossil fuels. You can be forgiven for having a sense of dĂ©jĂ  vu all over again, since we have been getting “less than a decade to stop climate change” warnings for more than 30 years. Only someone who has assimilated climate catastrophism as a fanatical religion could fail to be embarrassed by this record of hysteria and goal-post shifting, which makes St. Greta of Thunberg’s theology degree ironically fitting.

    Yet the new IPCC report is not a report at all. It is merely a 36-page “Summary for Policy Makers” (SPM in the climate trade) ahead of a new “synthesis report” that will merely repackage the last complete three-volume IPCC climate change assessment from 2021. The new synthesis report, which will likely run a thousand pages or more, is “coming soon,” according to the IPCC’s website.

    In other words, the new “synthesis report” is not new at all, but is produced to keep climate agitation at a full boil. The SPM is released ahead of main report to generate headlines, which will then be repeated, Groundhog Day-style, when the full report is released later. The new SPM did the trick: the New York Times’s chief stenographer for the climate cult, Brad Plumer, produced a breathless story that can be written now by ChatGPT, declaring that “Earth is likely to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade.” This whole well-worn exercise is the climate cult equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.

  14. Does “pre-industrial” ‘mean Little Ice Age? Is that supposed to be good?
    How about a list of catastrophes from the Medieval Warm Period? Or the Roman Warm Period?

  15. Aesop Fan, thanks for the heads up on Pielke’s more recent substack item. In addition to Terry’s comment that you cite, I would add Ed Noonan’s:
    Ed Noonan Mar 23 [, 2023]
    “I have adopted the position that anyone who claims to be concerned about climate change but does not advocate for nuclear power is non-serious. … ”

    In trying to find that disconnect between technical and “policy” authors, I also rechecked my copy of Pielke’s older essay How to Understand the New IPCC Report: Part 1, Scenarios (8/10/21) at https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/how-to-understand-the-new-ipcc-report [and Part 2 discussing extreme events can be found easily enough].

    I have not followed him all that closely, but it appears that between 2020 or 2021 and 2023 the fog of naivety he seemed to have may now be lifting. His final comments in the post you cited suggest this, too.

    “Between the IPCC Synthesis Report’s evasion of the most recent literature on scenarios and the games it has played with loss and damage research and evidence, the IPCC is skating close to becoming a source of climate misinformation.

    It is time for a new approach.”

  16. On the difficulties of research with human subjects
    And on humans doing the research, or analysis, or reporting on that research.

    While reading the Pielke substack I noticed he is offering 1/2 off of his normal $80 cost for an initial years subscription. Which led me to think perhaps I would pay for that at that price, a price point that seems to work for me. I also subscribe to the NRO at $40 or $50/year, not their normal $99. And a few others. All of which led me to wonder just how many substacks or Federalists or City Journals or Bari Weiss’s we can afford to support, especially when they are still outside of the mass media distribution volume? Spreading my money around different topics of interest, such as hobbies, I could see justifying several at $40 to $100/year. Focusing on politics and related areas, can we become saturated with repetition? And yet part of the value of reading this and other sites is the mention by commenters of articles or resources that I would otherwise miss, if left to my own devices.

    And no matter how much or little they cost, there are still only so many hours in a day or week. And I probably have more free time than most. But sometimes I still feel inadequately informed or educated about certain events or topics. And Neo does a fantastic job with what she attends to, but also readily admits with her Roundups that she cannot cover them all. And she appears 10 times more productive than I feel that I am.

  17. Final query:
    Neo, I usually remember to buy stuff on Amazon via your portal at
    https://www.neoneocon.com/2012/07/20/amazon-portal/
    but lately I have gotten an error message
    “Your connection is not private
    Attackers might be trying to steal your information from http://www.neoneocon.com (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards).

    NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID
    Help me understand”

    Thus I have been leery of going forward beyond that page.
    Has your portal URL changed? Is perhaps something else going on?

  18. R2L:

    That’s my old blog. Try clicking on the Amazon widget on the right sidebar, under my photo and the “Donate” button. If you’re on a cellphone, the widget will be towards the bottom if you scroll down, under my photo and the “Donate” button. Thanks.

  19. Alex Priou, Public Discourse, “Leo Strauss and the Possibility of Political Wisdom”: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/03/88012/

    […] Notoriously, Strauss charged the new political science with “fiddl[ing] while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.”

    The basis of this accusation was Strauss’s assessment of the predominant approach in political science, positivism. Positivism attempted to model the social sciences on the natural sciences, which had enjoyed in modernity an uncanny advancement that had meanwhile eluded the study of political things. The primary concept the social sciences borrowed from the natural sciences was the distinction between facts and values. In taking his bearings solely from facts, and refusing to the best of his ability to make judgments of value, the social science positivist eschewed his basic task. Herein lies the fiddling, and the ignorance thereof: to busy oneself with surveys and the like while calling oneself a political scientist, a knower of the things pertaining to our communal life, is to fiddle; but since this accusation of fiddling is itself a value judgment, the political scientist cannot possibly know that he fiddles, nor can he know that he does so as Rome burns. The risk, Strauss shows us, is that the very discipline tasked with guiding the community will busy itself with trifles instead.

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