Jan

31

Decline Effect, from Jim Sogi

January 31, 2011 |

In a fascinating article in the New Yorker Magazine, Lehrer describes the inability to replicate significant scientific studies due to a decay in the significance of the underlying data. It might be caused by the publication effect, the bias toward finding significant results or hypothesis creep, or reversion to the mean. More insidiously he asks whether the scientific method is eroding or some underlying phenomenon is at work.

In market studies significant results tail off with time, and prior significant regularities do not guaranty similar results going forward. The changing cycles affect results. Is the data moving away from normality and are distributions changing or is there some other phenomenon causing this decay of the data previously found to have significance?

In an infinite series of randomly generated characters or events, our entire history, the works of Shakespeare, and the entire laws of physics will appear almost by definition, only at some point to erode to randomness. This is not logically consistent with the scientific method. In a series of a trillion to the trillionth power of 0's and 1, there will appear several sequences of all 1's a million long. Dr. Phil regularly reminds us that of 20 studies, 1 will appear significant purely at random and not signify some important regularity. Are one of these effects at work ? Is this the same problem Lehrer describes or something else?

Stefan Jovanovich writes:

In keeping with my obligation to continue to contest for the title of the site's most irritating contributor, I took the trouble to read the entire New Yorker piece. The "scientific" discoveries that were found to have become invalidated were these:

1. Anti-psychotics, specifically anti-depressants

2. verbal overshadowing

3. extrasensory perception

4. symmetry and sexual selection

Each of these phenomena is one where the measurements are determined soley by the observer's personal judgments; even in the question of symmetry the ruler takes second place to the a conclusive decision by the experimenter.

The article's conclusion gives away the real problem: "Even the law of gravity hasn't always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.) Despite these findings, second-generation antipsychotics are still widely prescribed."

Our present "scientific" world is one where a bedrock axiom of physics is considered equal in substance to the continuing prescription popularity of a class of drugs that zombifies otherwise troublesome people.

As Thomas Szasz– a professional pain-in-the-ass who puts this amateur to shame, has already pointed out, mental illnesses such as depression have no clinical markers that can be verified objectively as medical conditions. "Verbal overshadowing", "ESP" and "symmetry" are also equally free of any quantitative standards that can be replicated consistently. My, how much progress we all have made since education in America became successfully socialized. 

Gary Rogan writes: 

It's interesting that Global Warming was never mentioned. It was the first thing I thought of when I read "Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests", let alone documented massive pro-supporting-evidence discrimination in the selection of results. One shudders to think about what all of this means in the context of government-driven statistical findings where various labor statistics are a running joke, inflation measurement is a "science" in how to find the lowest inflation, and "saved or created" jobs are a statistic that can't possibly make any sense with the best data gathering, but especially when jobs in non-existing congressional districts, etc. are included.

 


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