Let's Hear It For Honesty!

There's a great new article in the September issue of The Atlantic Magazine entitled The New Science of Bad Science. There has been a surge of retractions and a wave of examinations of published findings. The Atlantic article cites study after study, including the Andrew Wakefield study linking Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccine to Autism, which is the poster child for the anti-vaccination crowd (think Jenny McCarty).

There are many reasons why retractions are on the rise. New software can scan the data and model whether the data fits an expected distribution. Plagiarism-detecting software is more commonly used by journals, prior to publication. A number of researchers have been trying to replicate findings - with disastrous results. In 2012, a team at Amgen tried to reproduce 53 landmark cancer studies, and could replicate just 6 (11%). A news report in Nature attempting to reproduce the findings of 100 psychology papers has managed to replicate the results of only 39 of them (39%) - the results are still under peer review, where they may or may not be accepted or retracted.

And while we are talking honesty, let's hear it for the Republicans, and their attempt to rewrite the story of the Iraq war. Every Republican candidate, with the exception of Rand Paul, is in a hurry to put American boots on the ground in Iraq to battle ISIS, and it all stems from the fallacious notion that the surge won the Iraq war and that Obama's withdrawal of US troops caused ISIS. It is erroneous, dishonest, fallacious. It is also very appealing to voters, who simply don't know history. It is also appealing to the media, which makes no attempt to do fact checking. It has happened before.

There was a rumor started by Melvin Laird, Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense, that Congress cut of all aid to South Vietnam and that this was the cause of their defeat in 1975. "Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975." In the late 1970s, the legend - and it was a legend; Congress reduced, but never cut off funding to South Vietnam - spurred the hawkish revival that helped to elect Ronald Reagan. In 2016, the legend of the surge is playing a similar role for republican candidates.

The legend of the surge is this era's equivalent of the legend that America was winning in Vietnam