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Research that’s just too good to be tested
China cheated Teddy Locsin Jr.
Megan McArdle
BLOOMBERG VIEW
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E know what happens when science is “politicized”: Think of global warming. Politicizing science leads both sides to retreat into bunkers, hurling insults at each other, and trying to cut each other off at the knees by any means necessary.
But what happens when science isn’t politicized? Part of the answer may be: the epidemic of replication failures we now seem to be seeing. A recent paper from the Federal Reserve argues that economics has problems similar to those recently found in psychology: A lot of research results are getting published, and a lot of the interesting findings can’t be replicated, often because key data or instructions aren’t available. Now, that is not, by itself, necessarily a problem. As I’ve written before, “finding an interesting result that fails replication” is an important part of science. We should not expect every paper to get a replicable result, not even papers that are meticulously done to the highest research standards. The outliers, the coding errors, the unforeseen model weaknesses—these we will always have with us. But “the authors did not provide enough data to replicate their work” is not a problem science should ever have; neither is “a weak result lived on in the literature for years before anyone tried to repeat it.” I read these papers about replication failure and think, “Aren’t scientists supposed to be competitive? Why aren’t these guys trying to destroy each other? Or at least provide a reality check? How has this gone on for so long? Why do so many journals allow authors to publish without providing the necessary tools to replicate their work?” Of course, many scientists do some of this. But the recent spate of broad replication failures suggests that they’re not trying to do it nearly enough. And cases I can think of where the system worked are often political. Take Neumark and Wascher’s attack on Card and Krueger’s work on the minimum wage. The debate is hardly resolved. Partisans of both sides are still confidently declaring that the other side’s proposition about the minimum wage has been “debunked,” even as the research goes on. The debate has often been uncivil. But it is a robust debate in which scientists are hunting for problems in other scientists’ work. Other relatively recent cases in economics include Levitt’s paper on abortion and crime, the housing-based critiques of Piketty’s book, and the coding error that was discovered in Rogoff and Reinhart’s work on debt dynamics. We might wish that the volume of the debate was turned down a notch. But at least there’s serious science happening—and even better, that science is making its way to the news media and the public. In too many cases, this does not seem to be happening. One can cite any number of reasons for this: to get tenure, and grants, one needs publications, and it is hard to get published if you’re replicating a previous study; meticulously replicating someone else’s work isn’t nearly as much fun as designing your own research; people who invest a lot of time and effort in developing a data set aren’t eager to share it so that far-flung researchers can free ride on their work. But I’d like to advance another issue now being aired by the folks at Heterodox Academy: politically, science is becoming narrower, and that is making science weaker. A few years back, a friend who is a securities lawyer, and therefore very interested in books on the financial crisis, asked me a very good
Science is going to need to do something about publication bias, and by extension, about the way that tenure and research funding are handed out. A new study intended to test a past conclusion is not unoriginal; it’s essential. We should respect and demand that kind of rigor across the sciences, not only for politicized topics. question: How does journalism guard against the possibility of false facts entering the data stream? These tomes are extensively reported, and each has its nuggets of new information gleaned from many hundreds of hours of interviews. Often interview subjects are hard to get to sit down, much less to go on the record. What happens if those interviews yield false information? Journalists do, of course, attempt to guard against that sort of thing, for example by getting multiple sources. But we also get things wrong sometimes. And it would be folly to think that these errors are always exposed. When they are not, these “facts” get repeated until they are heard as facts. There is one area, however, where a robust response is guaranteed, and that’s in politics. Publish something that makes one side of the political spectrum look bad, and you can be sure that the next day, there will be hordes of interns, reporters and political staffers devoted to exposing every last weakness in the argument. Had Rogoff and Reinhart published a few years earlier, it seems unlikely that they would have attracted the level of attention that they did from outside the slightly stuffy world of international public finance wonks. As it was, their work became the focus of a heated debate over stimulus, government spending and deficits—and their coding error quickly became big news. When almost everyone in your field leans toward one side of the political spectrum, that reaction— that teeth-grinding, hair-pulling, eye-rolling “That can’t be right!” —gets blunted. Of course, it’s no fun having your work under attack by political partisans. I know: I’ve spent the last 15 years of my career in the fray, knowing that much of what I publish is going to get someone’s blood boiling, and their eyes scanning for mistakes. And yet, for the profession as a whole, this is a good thing. It makes us more careful, and more important, it means that our inevitable errors are not immortal. Journalism has a lot of ways to protect against errors before publication, and it needs them all. Journalism also benefits from the hordes of folks who check us after we’ve done every check we can think of—because the cognitive biases to which all humans are prey mean that there are probably some checks we couldn’t think of. Similarly, science is going to need to do something about publication bias, and by extension, about the way that tenure and research funding are handed out. A new study intended to test a past conclusion is not unoriginal; it’s essential. We should respect and demand that kind of rigor across the sciences, not only for politicized topics.
Free fire
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hina cheated at the Fiba game. China cheated with the connivance of Fiba, that too was clear as day. Never mind that the Chinese were 6'8", we were not badly off in that department. We’d just beaten the Iranians, just as tall, but with manners. It was that eight times at least the Chinese blocked a throw. This is fine. But the two Chinese referees chose to ignore them rather than give the Philippines two free throws for every foul by China. That’s 16 points right there. To be sure, the Philippines missed 11 free throws. They’d
have handily sunk them but for the maniacally howling Chinese. Even our Australian coach told our players don’t bother with inside shots, take them outside. Yet, even those were blocked illegally. Home-court advantage is fine but rigging the bus taking the
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
players to the game, stealing the tickets for coaches and staff, scalping them? Hey, I know the Chinese are business-minded but that’s fencing and woe, low. To be sure, low is western allies giving Mindanao to Malaysia after forging a request for a Muslim homeland and mailing it to themselves, this on top of dropping our Sabah claim. Chinese were not that low but came close. Picking two Chinese when international rules ban referees from competing countries, now that’s a new low. To be sure, bribing world sports organizations is now the rule rather than an objection, after Fifa sold the next games to Russia. On the other hand, our players scratched their balls and Chinese referees blew their whistles so hard that if they gave blow jobs they’d blow the tops off their clients’ heads.
This is worse than game fixing, which is discreet. And the loser goes away with money, like Filipinos signing up for the Bangsamoro basic law (BBL), for a share of the $500 million, still missing from the Malaysian PM’s $1.2-billion stash. But doing it au naturelle out in the open for the cheated to see it being done to them, that pierces the envelope of kababuyan. Now there are many ways to deal with China on the South China Sea dispute, but two things are out of the question. One is fighting China to protect the freedom of navigation of allies who sold us downriver in the BBL they forged. The other is sitting down with China to talk at all. They will turn off the microphones and lip sync our “yes” to their demands in the officially released veedeeyoooo. Keep well.
In defense of Meryl Streep–and of history
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By Johanna Neuman | TNS
ritish suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst was, to put it kindly, a rebel. Some, not so kindly, have called her a terrorist. On her watch, members of the Women’s Social and Political Union in England threw rocks at 10 Downing Street, set fire to post boxes, smashed windows in Knightsbridge’s luxurious shops, treated golf courses with acid, damaged the painting Rokeby Venus by Velasquez, bombed Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s house and started a fire at the orchid house in Kew Gardens. A single-issue reformer, Pankhurst was, with her daughter Christabel, given to provoking violence, declaring at a speech at the Royal Albert Hall in 1912, “I incite this meeting to rebellion.” A year later she proclaimed, “I would rather be a rebel than a slave.” That quote has provoked anger among those who rail at the racial insensitivity in the sentiment. When Meryl Streep, who portrays Pankhurst in the new movie The Suffragette, and costars Carey Mulligan, Romola Garai and Anne-Marie Duff wore the quote on T-shirts in a promotional pose for Time Out London, the backlash was immediate. Civil-rights activist Deray McKesson argued that Streep should have known better “and if not, her publicist should have.” Noting that suffragettes often invoked the image of slavery to “ramp up the feelings of disenfranchisement,” historian Jad Adams concluded, “It’s certainly an inappropriate thing to have four white women wearing slavery T-shirts.” Writer Jamilah Lemieux may have best summed up the outrage when she tweeted, “White women have said a lot of terrible things over the course of history, doesn’t
mean you wear it on a shirt.” There is no doubt that American slavery was the original sin of a nation founded on declarations of freedom, an evil that imprisoned millions of men, women and children. That British women in the 19th and early 20th centuries felt they too were chattel—without property rights, without rights over their children, without the opportunity to get educated or pursue careers, and without the power of the ballot—is also unquestioned. That some, like Pankhurst, gave moral equivalency to the two conditions is the real nub of the complaint. In fact, the quote and the backlash serve to underscore what was real racism in the suffrage movement in the United States and Britain. Alice Paul, who imported some of Pankhurst’s tactics—though not the violence—to America’s Congressional Union (later the National Women’s Party), banned black suffragists from marching in the 1913
Civil-rights activist Deray McKesson argued that Streep should have known better “and if not, her publicist should have.” Noting that suffragettes often invoked the image of slavery to “ramp up the feelings of disenfranchisement,” historian Jad Adams concluded, “It’s certainly an inappropriate thing to have four white women wearing slavery T-shirts.”
parade in Washington. A valiant Ida B. Wells-Barnett traveled from Chicago and defiantly joined the Illinois delegation, marching alongside white activists. The visceral racism of white suffrage leaders goes back even further, to 1869, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony campaigned against the 15th Amendment that enfranchised newly freed black men, criticizing Republicans for ignoring the rights of 15 million women while empowering 2 million black men who, as Stanton put it, “do not know the difference between a monarchy or a republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book.” As Anthony noted in a letter to The New York Times, “The Republican Party has elevated the very last of the most ignorant and degraded classes of men to the position of master over the very first
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and most educated and elevated classes of women.” It is true that the women’s movement grew out of abolitionism, which itself was an emotional and oratorical summoning of the religious revival called the Second Great Awakening. Abolitionism—framed in moral terms, led by Quakers and fueled by the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau—coincided with growing international sentiment to banish first the slave trade and then slavery itself. Britain banned slavery by legislative action in 1833. In America it took until 1865, after a Civil War that claimed more than 620,000 lives and devastated the economic and actual architecture of the South. These wrenching changes to the national psyche did not make feminists any less prone to racism. Many women fought to abolish slavery, and then, in their quest for rights of citizenship, trod over those they had just championed. But criticizing a film—and, by extension, its stars and its marketing—for portraying the passion of the times, however illphrased, seems an attempt to erase a past that discomforts those of us in today’s audience. Historians have a word for all of this. They call it “presentism,” an assertion that current values should be reflected in the telling of the past. The line in the film and on the T-shirts that so offended so many is a choice of perspective, not a sin, one based on a slice of the past that is inevitably our collective history.