Preprint: "Fallibility in science: Responding to errors in the work of oneself and others", 2017, Dorothy V Bishop

https://peerj.com/preprints/3486/

 

interesting bit:

Seems to happen a lot in the psyc papers I read.

And this:

Old timers will remember that one example of those "red flags" offered in that 2016 paper was vexatious CFS patients with an anti-science agenda.

 

Why does this lady think she is in a position to lecture other people about getting things right when she is so good at getting things wrong herself?

Seems like teaching grandmothers to take the motes out of their eyes, to mix metaphors.

 

Publishing psychologists will be particularly aware of this consequence of ego over truth - won't they?

 

For those interested:

http://www.nature.com/news/research...2&spJobID=843636789&spReportId=ODQzNjM2Nzg5S0

Their 10 red flags are ridiculous, and seem to have been really thoughtlessly constructed too.

Here's the related Royal Society meeting they did on 'threats to science', featuring Crawley and White complaining about the mean people who do not trust them: https://figshare.com/articles/RS_scienceandsociety_September_2015_pdf/2061696

This is how COPE described that Bishop and Lewandowsky piece:

https://publicationethics.org/forum-discussion-topic-comments-please-6

I keep finding new annoying things related to this.

 

Yes, I found it rather patronising.

 

There were some nice comments here. I enjoyed this one:

This article, mentioned in the comments, was worth a read: https://politicalsciencereplication...9/getting-the-idea-of-transparency-all-wrong/. Some powerful bits:

 

I just saw that Esther Crawley's co-author, Jonathan Sterne, was promoting that Lewandowsky/Bishop piece to Andrew Gelman: http://andrewgelman.com/2016/05/19/will-transparency-damage-science/

There was also a discussion in the comments about Sterne's involvement in the Cochrane Statistical Methods Group discussion list, SMGlist. It seems that they don't like people being impolite.

That makes me feel worse about Cochrane.

 

Has Coyne seen this?

 

When the anti-transparancy stuff came out it seemed to me more about supporting academic careers than good science. There were arguments about those who collect data having 'rights' over the data to be the first to publish however slow. To me that seems unethical - permissions (and funding) were given to do research to further knowledge and help patients not to further academics publishing records and careers.

I think its interesting that in the comments that @Esther12 refers to there is a reference to the type of discussions that happen on the linux kernel mailing list which are much more robust. This would be more my experience of things. If something is broken then people point it out and expect it to be fixed. Working in a world of security people spend a lot of time trying to break stuff. Some of it makes our analysis of BPS papers seen unobsessive. I read a paper recently where someone had reverse engineered and AMD processor so that they could understand and adapt the microcode (really not an easy thing and involving expensive equipment and acid). Other people just go after the easy stuff where there are bug bounties. But companies acknowledge issues and fix them - no one thinks badly of a company with occasional issues as long as they respond well. Of course repeated issues do lead to bad reputations.

It seems to me that the world that Bishop lives in is somewhat different from the rest of the world and expects to be isolated. But may be they don't expect to do anything useful either? Just publish papers that no one will read or use.