An epidemic of healthy women dying in childbirth raged in 1840's Europe. A young Hungarian physician, Ignaz Semmelweis, working in Vienna as an assistant to the professor of the maternity clinic, observed that women in hospital with a physician had a higher death rate than women giving birth at home. After watched physicians repeatedly come from autopsy to the maternity clinic he concluded that physicians were the probable cause of the high rate of puerperal (childbed) fever in hospital. In 1847 he instituted a policy of handwashing with chlorinated lime water by interns going into clinic. Handwashing immediately dropped the rate of fever from 10% to 1-2%.
Semmelweis’ hypothesis, that there was only one cause, that all that mattered was cleanliness, was extreme at the time, and was largely ignored, rejected or ridiculed. He was dismissed from the hospital and harassed by the medical community in Vienna, which eventually forced him to move to Budapest.
Yesterday BMJ published an editorial on science fraud in the manipulated study that found a purported link between child vaccination and autism. The editorial starts with an important quotation on the nature of science, then applies it to the case of fraud.
"Science is at once the most questioning and . . . sceptical of activities and also the most trusting," said Arnold Relman, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, in 1989. "It is intensely sceptical about the possibility of error, but totally trusting about the possibility of fraud."1 Never has this been truer than of the 1998 Lancet paper that implied a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and a "new syndrome" of autism and bowel disease
Science is a self-correcting process of searching for the truth. Different scientific disciplines use different approaches to problem solving but the essential common element is full and honest reporting of results and methods. Error is expected. Errors will be revealed and corrected over time by scientific review, theoretical analysis, confirmatory research and parallel lines of evidence. Falsification of data, however, is not expected. Falsification of data is a crime against science because it undermines the scientific method.
Yesterday a recommended diary about the BMJ editorial was posted by a scientist here.
That diary is apparently quite sensible on first glance.
This diary is about the dangerous strategy of running with conclusions. And what I mean by that is something we can actually learn from the Wakefield debacle.
Nothing can be learned by cherry picking observations to fit a preconceived conclusion. It's an intellectual dead end filled with climate change deniers, creationists, anti-vaccination fanatics, wild-eyed conspiracy theorists and Republicans.
Then the diary takes a right turn.
• Crap science and conspiracy theory has real consequences. In this case children are dying from infectious disease. It may not always be that dramatic, but running off on crank conclusions can be harmful in many ways. It distracts from finding real causes, and wastes time and energy.
• People who are critical of your conclusions can make you stronger--if you have good data to stand on. If you have crap, you will be mocked. And you deserve it.
It's a long jump from falsification of data to "crap science". What exactly is "crap science and conspiracy theory"? Is it like the SCOTUS definition of porn, "I know it when I see it" ?
The diarist is using the debating technique known as the Houle Hoop.
This is where you take advantage of the Houle Hoop's Incredible Adjusting powers! As seen in Figure 3, you contract the Houle Hoop so that you can say that your criticism -- which applies to "most" critics of Obama -- was never directed at the particular Legitimate Critic in question at all! So: there's no need to argue the substantive point!
Figure 3: "Why did you assume I was talking about you, you idiot?"
But you don't want to stop there: you have to make the Legitimate Critic (or person you're willing to pretend was one, still without bothering to address the substance of the criticism) feel stupid so that they won't come after you again. Even after you've spent by far most of your diary discussing people who belong in the "most" category, be sure to emphasize that you did mention that the "some" category existed (even if pretty much only as an aside) and that if someone didn't realize that the Houle Hoop wasn't intended to include them, it must be because he or she is an idiot, "incapable of reading a diary," or being intellectually dishonest. (Note: Invective, Invective, Invective! Don't give up that home field advantage!) Also be sure to remind them of how brave and ground-breaking it was for you to state in effect that "some criticism of Obama is legitimate and some is illegitimate."
Evidence strongly supporting the Houle Hoop hypothesis is found in the very next bullet in the diary.
If you have crap, you will be mocked. And you deserve it.
Science is built on debate, constructive criticism and discussion of ideas, but not on mockery and personal attacks.
Is this image evidence of a universe that preceded the universe we live in?
Should we mock the scientists who think this image is evidence of an earlier universe. Is this crap?
Abstract Conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) posits the existence of an aeon preceding our Big Bang B, whose conformal infinity I is identified, conformally, with B, now regarded as a spacelike 3-surface. Black-hole encounters, within bound galactic clusters in that previous aeon, would have the observable effect, in our CMB sky, of families of concentric circles over which the temperature variance is anomalously low, the centre of each such family representing the point of I at which the cluster converges. These centres appear as fairly randomly distributed fixed points in our CMB sky. The analysis of Wilkinson Microwave Background Probe’s (WMAP) cosmic microwave background 7-year maps does indeed reveal such concentric circles, of up to 6σ significance. This is confirmed when the same analysis is applied to BOOMERanG98 data, eliminating the possibility of an instrumental cause for the effects. These observational predictions of CCC would not be easily explained within standard inflationary cosmology.
Has Roger Penrose gone nuts?
I don't think so. He may be wrong but this is the work of a genius. Perhaps in his later years he has gone off course, but even if it's "crap" this draft paper will stimulate other cosmologists to think about new ideas. Science deals effectively with error because it is
intensely sceptical about the possibility of error.
Dr. Semmelweis belonged to a community of physicians that believed in mocking "crap science" and "conspiracy theories", very unlike the community of cosmologists that welcomes bizarre new ideas from its members. Dr Semmelweis was driven out of medicine.
The pain of knowing women were dying needlessly of a disease caused by dirty hands drove Dr. Semmelweis to desperate efforts to get someone to listen. His desperation convinced his wife and his associates to conclude he was insane. He died 14 days after being committed and the epidemic of puerperal fever continued after his passing.
Semmelweis was outraged by the indifference of the medical profession and began writing open and increasingly angry letters to prominent European obstetricians, at times denouncing them as irresponsible murderers. His contemporaries, including his wife, believed he was losing his mind and he was in 1865 committed to an asylum (mental institution). Semmelweis died there only 14 days later, possibly after being severely beaten by guards.
Semmelweis’ practice only earned widespread acceptance years after his death, when Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease which offered a theoretical explanation for Semmelweis’ findings. Semmelweis is considered a pioneer of antiseptic procedures.
Today scientists have identified a number of developing environmental crises that threaten millions of people. They must speak out and risk being wrong.