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An insider’s view of science reveals why many scientific results cannot be relied upon—and how the system can be reformed.
Science is how we understand the world. Yet failures in peer review and mistakes in statistics have rendered a shocking number of scientific studies useless—or, worse, badly misleading. Such errors have distorted our knowledge in fields as wide-ranging as medicine, physics, nutrition, education, genetics, economics, and the search for extraterrestrial life. As Science Fictions makes clear, the current system of research funding and publication not only fails to safeguard us from blunders but actively encourages bad science—with sometimes deadly consequences.
Stuart Ritchie’s own work challenging an infamous psychology experiment helped spark what is now widely known as the “replication crisis,” the realization that supposed scientific truths are often just plain wrong. Now, he reveals the very human biases, misunderstandings, and deceptions that undermine the scientific endeavor: from contamination in science labs to the secret vaults of failed studies that nobody gets to see; from outright cheating with fake data to the more common, but still ruinous, temptation to exaggerate mediocre results for a shot at scientific fame.
Yet Science Fictions is far from a counsel of despair. Rather, it’s a defense of the scientific method against the pressures and perverse incentives that lead scientists to bend the rules. By illustrating the many ways that scientists go wrong, Ritchie gives us the knowledge we need to spot dubious research and points the way to reforms that could make science trustworthy once again.
A Macmillan Audio production from Metropolitan Books
4.5
Reviewer: Harvey Motulsky
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Wonderful overview of some huge problems facing science.
Review: The book is really well written and explains a bunch of problems facing science, from fraud to publication bias. Part of the problem is bad statistics, which is well explained. Much of the problem is a system with incentives to do the wrong thing. It ends with a review of various suggestions that have been proposed or tried.In addition to the big ideas, the book tells lots of stories that make it fun to read. The author is very thoughtful and never tries to overgeneralize.All scientists should read this book to get an overview of what the reproducibility crisis is all about. Nonscientists will find it interesting too. The author is careful to write in clear language and define technical terms. Although the author is a psychologist, he includes plenty of examples from biology and physics. The book is general about science, not just about psychology.I read it on a Kindle, which was fine. The tables and figures were all easy to read on a Kindle. One thing to know is that while most of the footnotes are simply citations, about a third of them are author notes, some quite lengthy. In fact, the notes fill close to a third of the pages.
Reviewer: Green
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: An excellent account of modern scientific fraud and malpractice
Review: What I appreciate about this book is that it does not just focus on dishonesty in science, but on the everyday problems created by its practice in modern societies. The heart of the issue is that while there are some objectively bad practitioners, in many cases it is the systemâs perverse incentives that are the problem.
Reviewer: Richard Cuper
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Become a skeptic
Review: This book was eye opening and disturbing. Anyone of my age (75) could intuit that there were issues in scientific studies. I have live through numerous cycles of eggs, coffee, wine, butter, bacon and other common items, and the good for you, bad for you studies that were humorous at times and extremely confusing in guidance. Like many other people, I now just read the studies for laughs and continue on with my life. But deep inside I really hope for some factual, valid insight on how to live a healthier life.The author states the problem succinctly. The nexus of money, prestige and tenure provides too great an impetus for the result of studies, not the actual findings which are usually dry and not totally conclusive. The issue of complexity and variance in individuals and populations is discussed as is the difficulty of choosing a study group. The author is honest in talking about the special difficulties in the soft sciences, psychology and sociology that has lead to some rather bogus theories that still circulate to the harm of the general public. And the author is also brutally honest about outright fraud.Like a good business person, the author doesn’t complain about a problem without providing a suggested solution. And of course, good luck with common sense ideas.Money, prestige and tenure will always win. Become an educated skeptic.I had no problem reading this book. I have taken courses in statistics which help in some of the details. but specialized knowledge is not really necessary. Author’s style was east to read.
Reviewer: E. Bernal
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Excellent book on some things wrong with modern science.
Review: Well written and many good illustrative examples. Includes a guide in the back on how to read a scientific paper, and gives examples on how to determine when a study may be flawed and the nature of the flaw. If you’re not mathematically oriented, you may need to read certain passages a couple of times to get what’s happening statistically. You learn that scientists are just like any other group of people and behave just as noble or ignobly. He does mention “Climategate”, but, oddly, to me, says not to use this to discredit all climate science. Well, no science should be discredited unless it is, in fact, discreditable. Any climate science should stand or fall on it’s merits, like any scientific field.
Reviewer: Nelson Amaya
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Science needs a reckoning. Good summary of a decade of writing on bad science.
Review: âhuman understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.â- Francis Bacon (1620)Something has been eroding, corrupting, a few scientific fields, particularly those that rely on weak statistical conventions, have a culture of hiding data or key parts of analysis, and deal with very noisy data. It is not exactly clear when this started, how it spread through different disciplines or how deep it goes. Science, Stuart Ritchie summarizes at the beginning of the book, “has become home to a dizzying array of incompetence, delusion, lies and self-deception” (p. 7). How did we turn the best tool humanity has conceived for learning about the universe into a sensationalist tabloid? Why did misbehavior by the scientific establishment become so prevalent in so many different areas –from psychology and economics, to chemistry and cancer research? Why are we throwing so much money away funding bad science?At the heart of this mess there are a few bad incentives within the scientific community that feed off each other. Ritchie writes “Perverse incentives work like an ill-tempered genie, giving you exactly what you asked for but not necessarily what you wanted” (p. 196). These incentives are more widespread than was previously recognized, creating a sort of “Black Mirror”, distorted-version-of-itself: instead of reliable, credible, non-obvious knowledge we got dangerous pharmacology, medical reversals, bad economic policies, corrupt researchers and paperback bestsellers brimming with lies.What are these perverse incentives? Ritchie shows how each of the Mertonian norms of science (universalism, communality, disinterestedness and organised skepticism) has, in actuality, been overshadowed with fraud, bias, negligence and hype. Instead of sound methods we have a flurry of fraudulent data (Dieter Stapel, Marc Hauser, or more recently Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino); widespread use of bad statistical practices (p-hacking, HARKing, publication bias); a blatant disregard for both clerical and fundamental errors (the Rogoff-Reinhart Excel mishap, non-replicable published research); and exaggerated claims from “latest study” syndrome (underpowered experiments inflated by TED talks, bad research featured in PNAS and Nature).Nowhere has this mixture been so evidently wasteful as in psychology, with decades of bad research and non-existing findings turning into a full-fledged epistemological crisis. (The crisis has a better description in C. Chambers’ (2017) “The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology”). Yet Ritchie reveals there is another field where bad practices are worse: anesthesiology. RetractionWatch, a registration of papers that are retracted from journals, shows the biggest are anesthesiology researchers.Two of the most insightful parts of the book come from demand-drive explanation for bad science: the demand for constant novelty and the drive from the public asking questions science is ill-equipped to answer. The latest-study syndrome, the consequence of assuming that new is better, improved or corrected, is not a bad heuristic to have if science operates well in the sense of constantly revisiting previous findings (the problem of induction never goes away). But there is also this attention-driver from media and the public of looking for answers in the wrong places. Ritchie writes “Perhaps the very scientific questions that the public wants to have answered the most – what to eat, how to educate children, how to talk to potential employees, and so on — are the ones where the science is the murkiest, most difficult, and most self-contradictory” (p. 169).Even if you have followed the discussions in blogs and articles on bad science by Andrew Gelman, Uri Simonsohn, Elizabeth Bik or Ben Goldacre, you’ll still learn a lot from this book. Highly recommended.
Reviewer: Renata Mancopes
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
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Review: Very nice reading for those who work at an academic environment!
Reviewer: Stuart M. Wilson
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
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Review: This is a superb account of what is increasingly going wrong with academic science. It explains how and why the importance and impact of many scientific advances are grossly overstated and why scientific fraud is becoming increasingly prevalent. Contains some excellent suggestions about how this situation could be remedied. An excellent book….read it in a single sitting!
Reviewer: Bardi Ugo
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
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Review: Great book. By all means read it. It will change your way of seeing the world
Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
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Review: This has to be one of the most important books I’ve ever read. While I was aware of some of the issues presented, I didn’t appreciate the scope and depth of the problems and I will no longer accept scientific findings without looking in depth at the studies that back them up. Next time someone tells to “Follow the science”, I’ll point them to this book.
Reviewer: james davey
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
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