Reproducibility is the most fundamental yardstick in science. If a result can’t be replicated, it doesn’t count as science.
Yet in recent years, there has been much talk of a ‘replication crisis’. Many results that we assumed were robust simply cannot be replicated. The term is typically used in the context of psychology and medicine, though it may apply to other fields as well.
So how much of science is reproducible? One way of tackling this question is to select a large number of studies from a particular field and then attempt to replicate them. This has been done several times.
A 2012 paper was only able to replicate 11% of 53 studies from pre-clinical cancer. A 2015 paper was only able to replicate 36% of 97 studies from psychology. A 2018 paper did slightly better, replicating 54% of 28 studies from that field. A 2016 paper was able to replicate 60% of 60% of 100 economics experiments. Another 2018 paper was able to replicate 62% of 21 social science experiments.
These numbers are sobering. But there’s an important caveat: the ‘studies to be replicated’ were selected somewhat arbitrarily, so the corresponding percentage can’t be taken as representative of the entire field.
Another way of tackling the question above is to simply ask researchers what percentage of the studies in your field can be replicated – a sort of ‘wisdom of the crowds’ approach.
This was done in a 2016 survey by the journal Nature. They got 1,500 responses – the vast majority from currently-working scientists. Respondents were asked, “In your opinion, what proportion of published work in your field is reproducible?”
The highest figure – 72% – was found in physics. The lowest figure – 52% – was found in “other” (which I suspect is mostly social scientists). Environmental science and medicine had intermediate figures – both 58%. Chemistry was a little higher at 65%. (Answers did not differ substantially between students and working scientists.)
These figures are again sobering. According to researchers themselves, close to half of published work in medicine, social science and environmental science cannot be replicated. Unsurprisingly, more ‘objective’ fields like physics and chemistry are perceived to have higher rates of replicability.
Overall, the two methods yield similar findings: a large percentage of results in more ‘subjective’ – dare one say ‘politicized’ – fields are not reproducible.
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Education, Education, Education. University emperors all stark bollock naked in the privacy of their own kangaroos, crocodiles and discarded Pomeranians.
Niall Fergusson is on the case, “The treason of the intellectuals” Well worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMQSVp7NTg
Thank you for that link (and for the Machiavelli link posted yesterday).
You are welcome. It’s been going on in the USA for some time, they are fighting back by opening up new universities. Niall said that the ivy league universities are churning out people who are really not up to it. People like Jordan Peterson and many others are fighting to uphold decent academic standards.
there’s a good video where Jordan is being interviewed at the Oxford union. He was asked loaded questions and quite literally took them all apart. Let’s hope it’s not too late but the way things are going with the likes of Stasi Starmer and his bunch of henchpersons things could get much worse.
all is not lost but we have to up our game before it’s too late.
Edit: Here’s a good interview by Jordan about Africa, it does seem that the history of Africa has been completely misrepresented, in fact it’s quite shocking what’s been done to undermine the west. It’s long but there a shorter clips to be found.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHhPc7o7Jig
Personally, I’d prefer to be among the real crocodiles than the human ones.
University – lower education, a retrograde force. Quackademics – some of the most ignorant fascistic arselings you could ever meet. Useless in real life. Absurdly arrogant with their pretty happy dude degrees, conferring, it appears, a divine right to rule.
The author must have been happy to escape such a milieu with his sanity and scalp.
Quackademics is a very good one. Believe me, I’ve known a few.
What would this gentleman have made of it all, I wonder?
”Shan’ Hackett is remembered by his own and succeeding generations for a variety of achievements and attributes. A superb fighting soldier, he served with the Trans-Jordan Force, had fought through North Africa and was involved in the formation of the Long Range Desert Group, the SAS and Popski’s Private Army. He went on to raise 4th Parachute Brigade which he commanded with flair at Arnhem where he was wounded and captured. He escaped and got back to British lines. He rose to high rank filling key command and staff appointments in the British Army and NATO.
Always an intellectual, yet highly practical man, he retired to become Principal of King’s College London where he was revered by staff and students.’
https://www.casematepublishers.com/9781783036936/shan-hackett/
Only one suitable course of action for the current feeble-minded C.O.s of King’s College Unmilitary Academy – court martials all round and firing squad at dawn.
The glory days. Sadly, long gone.
Thanks to DS and the author for this valuable first hand account.
Defund (by which I mean withdraw public funding for) all universities now? Let them stand or fall on their own?
Yes, time to call an end to the university racket run by vastly overpaid Far Left chancellors that are often run as backdoor immigrant centres. Their presence denies vast amounts of cheap accommodation to those in need in the areas. Cut them by at least 50% and bring back vocational centres polytechnics to serve their local areas.
Thank you, Sir. And sage policy advice.
This is why the Supreme Court judgment on the reality of biological sex will be ignored by the woke institutions, such as universities.
The beauty of freedom of speech is that it doesn’t require any resources. It exists naturally. It is the stifling of free speech that requires resources.
So universities don’t need to put in “significant resources” to allow free speech. They just need to…. do nothing and allow it.
What may need resources is to fight people who try to stop free speech. You don’t need resources to promote free speech, you need them to fight its opponents, which I very much doubt King’s College is doing.
Well said.
Very good points. How indeed, do you devote ‘resources’ to uphold free speech. I doubt very much that KCL is doing anything to stand up to the opponents of free expression as you say.
Who’d have thought that ‘freedom of speech/expression’ would be such a complex and contentious subject? This man speaks for me and explains why he’s a proponent of free speech but not an ‘absolutist’;
”I’m likely about to touch on one of the most painful and controversial topics, one that inevitably raises a multitude of questions and debates—and on which no consensus exists. So, what exactly is freedom of speech? Let me state my position clearly. In my view, freedom of speech is the foundation of a free democratic society. Without it, basic human rights, the progress of scientific thought, the protection of minorities, and especially open debate—through which truth is born—would be unimaginable. Freedom of speech reflects humanity’s pursuit of excellence. It encompasses both heated arguments on difficult and unpopular topics and the formation of consensus through communicative practice. Yet the right to self-expression does not exist in a vacuum; it has its boundaries, dictated by common sense and the public good.
There is no single, universally correct global formula for freedom of speech that looks identical everywhere. In practice, no civilized society offers complete and unrestricted freedom of speech—although regulatory bodies can interpret its violations differently in each case. Some respected public figures argue that any moderation inevitably leads to censorship, and must therefore be avoided. But in my view, there’s no doubt that incitement, the provocation of interethnic hatred, and calls for genocide against any ethnic group do not fall under the category of free speech. You can try to challenge this, frame it in a specific context, or even justify such ideas—but in essence, this is a normalization of extremist narratives with far-reaching consequences.
Using freedom of speech to shield open aggression and acts of terror is a blatant violation of the very value of that freedom. Freedom of speech is not synonymous with permissiveness. Yet many interpret it exactly that way. This is a dangerous misconception—and it must be challenged.
Let’s return to the idea that many influential individuals believe even minimal restrictions on free speech mean it ceases to be “free.” But in practice, without a reasonable set of principles, this leads to the abuse of that freedom.”
https://mikelivschitz.substack.com/p/words-on-fire
I disagree wholeheartedly.
A vacuous, meaningless, abstract phrase that just sounds good.
Another one.
The public good as defined by whom?
A complete non-sequitur. The implication that free speech can lead to genocide (a questionable assertion) in no way answers the concern that moderation leads to censorship. (Moderation is just a soft, euphemistic way of saying censorship.)
The article is yet another version of the argument, repeated a million times already, that free speech allows people to advocate bad things that can end up happening.
The absolutist vs non-absolutist debate can be distilled into basically picking your poison.
Do you prefer the downsides of absolute free speech? Or do you prefer the downsides of censorship?
I’ll take the downsides of absolute free speech every day.
As I see it, the downsides of censorship are very real and evident everywhere and unquestionably horrible. I have yet to see the downsides of free speech materialise in any significant way. The arguments are always hypothetical, theoretical.
I standby to be proved otherwise.
”I have yet to see the downsides of free speech materialise in any significant way.”
So there’s people sat in prison for harmless tweets and memes while idiots protest on the streets ( pro-Hamas, transtifa loons etc ) using their ‘freedom of speech’ rights as a vehicle to spread hate, incite violence and advocate terrorism and you don’t see that as a ”downside”? The downside of free speech is the fact that thanks to ‘two-tier policing/justice’, the wrong people are being arrested/imprisoned, while the the ones abusing these rights are left well alone. You don’t get carte blanche to spread hate and threaten people, all the while dressing that up as ‘ exercising your right to free speech’, and if you want to call that ‘censorship’ go right ahead, but I call it having sensible boundaries of what will be tolerated in a civilized society.
Unless I’m missing something, people advocating terrorism (if that accurately describes what they are doing) isn’t what is getting people locked up for tweets.
It’s the state.- police, government, judges – that is locking them up.
Aren’t you sort of making my point for me by pointing out the sheer arbitrariness of censorship, that some calls for violence land you in jail but others don’t?
What are you advocating, a more fair and equitable form of censorship? More efficient?
People cannot moan about the anti-West/pro-terrorist mass gatherings or the Transtifa mobs threatening violence and death to anyone who opposes their ideology whilst simultaneously saying they’re proponents of free speech with zero caveats, because that demonstrates double standards. It’s hypocrisy. If I could I would ban these pro-terrorist/Anti-Jews/West mobs tomorrow. Does that make me ‘pro-censorship’? Maybe it does to you, to me it just demonstrates I’m not a free speech absolutist and I don’t want to live in a society where promotion of hate and the division of society is tolerated and enabled, because ‘free speech’.
Many of the people abusing the right to freedom of speech in the West are those coming from countries where this right doesn’t exist, thereby they’re taking advantage of it to push their agenda. Muslims advocating for Sharia Law, for instance. Would Christians promoting Christianity in majority Muslim countries be afforded such rights and protection under the law?
To be clear, I’m making the point above that ‘free speech’ certainly does have its downsides when people are persecuted or banged up for harmlessly sharing their opinions online but people doing far worse on the streets are treated with kid gloves.
“calls for genocide against any ethnic group” are clearly and obviously an example of speech. The question is always: are we better off knowing what people think? If someone wants to legalise cannibalism, it’s better to know that. You are more likely to survive if you know that someone wants to kill you and eat you. Free speech should be exactly that – free.
“open aggression and acts of terror” – there is a clear distinction between speech and action. Over the last 18 months, Jewish students have been harassed, kept awake, prevented from entering cafes and libraries at many universities. Clearly, the Hamas supporters have crossed a line between speech and action. The problem is first and foremost their desire to kill jews. Allowing them to say that they want to kill jews doesn’t change anything. Allowing them to engage in “direct action” should lead to instant expulsion.
Then we agree to differ because for me, the deal-breaker is when ‘free speech’ morphs into promotion of hate, threats, violence etc. And I get that this can sometimes be subjective but I think more times than not it’s blatantly obvious.
Take for instance this site, which is obviously advocating for the freedom of speech. But if it were a case of ‘anything goes’, because all comments fall under ‘free speech’, after all, there’d be no need for a moderator, would there? Their role would be redundant. But this site would be carnage as a result, I can guarantee it. So even on a site such as this there has to be a cut-off point, often at the discretion of the mod, but nevertheless.
If people wish for social cohesion they’re never going to get it as long as hate and division is enabled to be promoted ( with many recruited to these various associations, as a result ) on our streets under the guise of ‘freedom of speech’.
Well yes – we have a problem when there’s a large group of recentish incomers with a very different culture to ours. We have dug that hole and have to live with it. I would still fall on the absolutist side though. Our enemies are in my view pursuing a divide and conquer strategy, so agreeing to restrictions because of “extremists” is playing into their hands.
Which is all well and good but if you or anybody else ( and I remember there’s been many ) maintains this ‘absolutist’ stance but at the same time complains about these ‘tea-towel terrorist-supporters’ that have been hitting the streets and uni campuses en masse from 8th Oct 2023, with their ”death to Jews/ the West/America” etc chants and slogans and the general disruption they’ve caused, then that would make you an out and out hypocrite, wouldn’t it? Because you can’t have it both ways. And I seem to recall an awful lot of people moaning about these protests on here and not a single post did I read which said, ”But they’re just exercising their rights to free speech, just ignore them”, or words to that effect, in defense of these hostile, disruptive, anti-social haters.
And this is precisely what I refer to when I speak about the hypocrisy of the ‘pro-free speech brigade’. It’s rife and it manifests in different ways.
I don’t have much time for people who seem to hate this country and our values, and contribute little, but peaceful protest is something that should be allowed for all.
Who’d have thought that ‘freedom of speech/expression’ would be such a complex and contentious subject? This man speaks for me and explains why he’s a proponent of free speech but not an ‘absolutist’;
In plain English, this means he’s an opponent of free speech trying to hide this fact with handwaiving. Everybody ought to be free to say anything he agrees with but when people say something he considers really disagreeable, that’s obviously a different conversation!
But in my view, there’s no doubt that incitement, the provocation of interethnic hatred, and calls for genocide against any ethnic group do not fall under the category of free speech.
Is it provocation of interethnic hatred when people from Wales are denounced as sheep-shaggers? And what about calling Muslims goat-fuckers? The mass deportation of Armenians by Turks after the first world war is usually considered a genocide. But the mass deportation of Germans from eastern Europe by Russians isn’t despite it was organized in the exact same way and caused a similar, if not higher, number of deaths.
On the outside, this is obiously an All good people must agree with this! selection of categories but in practice, all good people don’t agree on what is precisely meant with each term. Livschitz probably has an idea what he’s referring to and this demand just amounts to him telling other people how they must interpret them. Want to say something in public? Ask Livschitz, he’ll tell you if you may!
That’s not a rule I agree with.
The Pharisees of the author’s former university must be adding to their file the ‘dark’ fact that owning Pomeranian dogs must indicate some sympathy with the militaristic Empire that once ruled this region from 1871.
The objective of his former colleagues just going along with it all, keeping their heads down, just to survive, is something that would be familiar to anyone having lived in the DDR or the USSR.
As Ben Cobley has observed in his interview with DS, while most people have never read the theories of DEI or similar, everyone ‘just knows the rules’. The software has become ossified into hardware. There cannot be any innovation that might result from free speech or open discussion.
Both such things would change the entire object of managerialism, which emphasises process over product. Just following the process removes both agency and responsibility from people, a necessity for keeping the software ossified. The final stage of a slow motion coup d’etat.
The colleagues in the meeting don’t wish you ill. They just wish that the ill didn’t fall on them by association. Disappearing down the corridor of self-preservation. While the scapegoat takes all the ‘sins’ out into the wilderness.
Yes, probably, my post-employment cycle profile has been updated to reflect my militaristic sympathies with Germanic canines.
I know the feeling.
I remember once at a drinks party, where I knew no-one, but fortified with Prosecco, opining that I found Jeremy Clarkson’s TopGear at times incredibly funny. Especially their failed celebrity picnic on an airfield.(My then young son and I always giggled our way through it).
I was then quizzed about what else I found funny. I listed Southpark (greatest comedy in history of mankind obvs) The IT Crowd, Blackbooks, League of Gentlemen etc all to an unsmiling lefty media editor cisfemale. Anyway, finding no joy being returned I sort out others to discus Scottish rugby and other pressing topics.
The next day my host informed my that I had “upset all the women” at the party. He had the grace to say “that’s normally what I do”. But clearly a little bubble of fart inner circle had fingered me as a wrong ‘un.
It sounds like you upset all the right people.
Blimey that is extreme snowflakery.
Thinking about this a bit more: I meet someone and we talk about stuff they like on TV. Let’s say they might love some show that I think is awful trash. That might contribute to me concluding that this is not a person I want to spend time with. But it does not “upset” me. This often seems to be the difference between people who love freedom and those that don’t – those that love freedom don’t have this compelling desire to make everyone else agree with them.
I once mentioned to a colleague in the interpreting booth that the Dutch seasonal-joy film Alles is liefde (which has a ‘blackface’ character that would give Americans heart problems, but which is also very funny and absolutely adorable) is one of my favourite films. Since then, I have been asked about this piece of trivia by different concerned-looking colleagues on separate occasions. This week I disagreed with another colleague’s view that Donald Trump is a dictator; let’s see how fast that one spreads in the almost uniformly right-thinking fortress that is my profession.
Most excellent article, so, the Universities are still upholding deportation then……
Thank you, Sir. Yes indeed. I would maintain that deportation was the best thing that ever happened to me. There’s a great deal to recommend it. Proof of concept.
What a terrible story. The writer is admirable in his strength and ability to not have let this ruin his life, others I suspect would have been ruined by this and these deeply unpleasant people.
It is shocking that they are going to get away with this, that they are being allowed to continue to “mould” young minds, and that dreadful things can be said and written about another person which deprives them of a livelihood and yet the perpetrators are allowed to cover up through redaction, and get on with their what appears to be very successful lives.
Is this the way we are to encourage people in academia to “get on”, to go up the ladder? by trampling on the lives and works of others?
Surely there is an opportunity here to expose these people so that the damage they have done and no doubt continue to do is stopped, in order to protect young people and other academics.
Thank you, and I appreciate the kind words. Sadly, I fear, one’s story is only too typical of what goes on in our so-called universities. The product of very weak leadership, careerism and ideological capture, I fear. But we must, as you suggest, not fear exposing the grotesque distortion of proper academic values.
Funnily enough, discussing HR matters in public in a cafe would be an instant constructive dismissal. He should have gone to a lawyer
Yes, I wish I’d known at the time. I was but a mere naif back in those days.
“a different reality. Not unlike East Germany: a closed system of thought” Indeed so. Those ‘academics’ – now in truth administrators of orthodoxy – live within a powerful and self-reinforcing hypnotic trance – see https://www.hughwillbourn.com/book
Thank you, and I really should get a copy of your book. It’s on my to do list.
In a zoom meeting with a professor in his university study a couple of years ago, discussing a proposed doctoral thesis, as he exclaimed, ‘you can’t say that!’ in response to some proposed heresy of mine, he actually checked over his shoulder with a panic-stricken look! Presumably his instinct was to ensure that no-one had crept into the room behind him and overheard the forbidden conversation! That was enough to decide it was pointless continuing.
Ah, the classic culture of ‘you can’t say that’. I first heard an academic say those words over 25 years ago. A wise decision you made by the sounds of it.
Eat your heart out David Lodge. This had me chuckling which is entirely inappropriate given the totalitarian slant to the story. The author rises above the tinpot tyrants with the humour of the free mind.
Thank you, one tries one’s utmost to make light.
Brilliant article and what a lovely sense of humour sadly lacking on the left side of politics where all we have is the po-faced.
Thank you.
Thank you, appreciate it.
King’s College, my Alma Mater, showed signs of this in 2016 when I was there. Clearly, it had only gotten worse in the years since.
Sadly, yes.
Sir.
Your central tenant, that Pomeranian dogs are disinterested in folk dancing, is blatantly wrong, as this image clearly evidences, and so indisputably reveals the shocking fragility of all your assertions.
Actually, my Pomeranians are far more interested in drill rap.