Between 1970 and 1999, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) funded thirty large clinical trials that tested drugs or dietary supplements for the treatment or prevention of cardiovascular disease:
While more than half of the studies published before 2000 found a benefit, only two out of twenty-five published early in the twenty-first century did. It was as if some millennium bug had struck, and medicine stopped working.
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Beginning in 2000, “authors face greater constraints in reporting the results of their studies.” They had to restrict what has come to be known as “researcher degrees of freedom,” and that restriction caused a shift from mostly positive drug-trial results to mostly negative results.
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Wansink was a scientific star, making headlines and influencing policy—until a well-intended blog post he wrote in the fall of 2016 abruptly ended his academic career. It was titled: “The Grad Student Who Never Said ‘No.’ ”
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At the start of the post, Wansink mentioned a study in which diners at an all-you-can-eat buffet were charged different prices. He was disappointed that the study had “failed”—that is, had not supported whatever hypothesis he started with. But along came the industrious graduate student. Wansink handed her the data and told her to start looking for positive results. “There’s got to be something here we can salvage,” he told her.
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As Wansink wrote in his blog post: “Eventually we started discovering solutions that held up.”
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Because the grad student was doing such a good job at finding positive results, Wansink gave her data from other samples to work with. More headline-worthy results followed.
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Wansink’s blog post was openly explaining how he had encouraged the graduate student to do what is known as “HARKing”: Hypothesizing After the Results are Known.
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Since the year after his blog post, eighteen of Wansink’s studies have been retracted from scientific journals. In 2018, he resigned from Cornell.
Wansink’s work received coverage in the New York Times (and one of your favorite blogs).
Combined with the replication crisis, it appears that “Science!” Has died and been buried.
Vox Day’s anti-science diatribes are beginning to sound like the centrist, moderate position.
46 years of my life…