Most scientists 'can't replicate studies by their peers'

Tom Feilden
BBC.com
Originally posted 22 Feb 17

Here is an excerpt:

The authors should have done it themselves before publication, and all you have to do is read the methods section in the paper and follow the instructions.

Sadly nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth.

After meticulous research involving painstaking attention to detail over several years (the project was launched in 2011), the team was able to confirm only two of the original studies' findings.

Two more proved inconclusive and in the fifth, the team completely failed to replicate the result.

"It's worrying because replication is supposed to be a hallmark of scientific integrity," says Dr Errington.

Concern over the reliability of the results published in scientific literature has been growing for some time.

According to a survey published in the journal Nature last summer, more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments.

Marcus Munafo is one of them. Now professor of biological psychology at Bristol University, he almost gave up on a career in science when, as a PhD student, he failed to reproduce a textbook study on anxiety.

"I had a crisis of confidence. I thought maybe it's me, maybe I didn't run my study well, maybe I'm not cut out to be a scientist."

The problem, it turned out, was not with Marcus Munafo's science, but with the way the scientific literature had been "tidied up" to present a much clearer, more robust outcome.

The info is here.

Strength of conviction won’t help to persuade when people disagree

Pressor
ucl.ac.uk
Originally poste 16 Dec 19

The brain scanning study, published in Nature Neuroscience, reveals a new type of confirmation bias that can make it very difficult to alter people’s opinions.

“We found that when people disagree, their brains fail to encode the quality of the other person’s opinion, giving them less reason to change their mind,” said the study’s senior author, Professor Tali Sharot (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences).

For the study, the researchers asked 42 participants, split into pairs, to estimate house prices. They each wagered on whether the asking price would be more or less than a set amount, depending on how confident they were. Next, each lay in an MRI scanner with the two scanners divided by a glass wall. On their screens they were shown the properties again, reminded of their own judgements, then shown their partner’s assessment and wagers, and finally were asked to submit a final wager.

The researchers found that, when both participants agreed, people would increase their final wagers to larger amounts, particularly if their partner had placed a high wager.

Conversely, when the partners disagreed, the opinion of the disagreeing partner had little impact on people’s wagers, even if the disagreeing partner had placed a high wager.

The researchers found that one brain area, the posterior medial prefrontal cortex (pMFC), was involved in incorporating another person’s beliefs into one’s own. Brain activity differed depending on the strength of the partner’s wager, but only when they were already in agreement. When the partners disagreed, there was no relationship between the partner’s wager and brain activity in the pMFC region.

The info is here.

Body Maps of Moral Concerns

Atari, M., Davani, A. M., & Dehghani, M.
(2018, December 4).
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jkewf

Abstract

The somatosensory reaction to different social circumstances has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here, we present a pre-registered experiment in which we examine the topographical maps associated with violations of different moral concerns. Specifically, participants (N = 596) were randomly assigned to scenarios of moral violations, and then drew their subjective somatosensory experience on two 48,954-pixel silhouettes. We demonstrate that bodily representations of different moral violations are slightly different. Further, we demonstrate that violations of moral concerns are felt in different parts of the body, and arguably result in different somatosensory experiences for liberals and conservatives. We also investigate how individual differences in moral concerns relate to bodily maps of moral violations. Finally, we use natural language processing to predict activation in body parts based on the semantic representation of textual stimuli. The findings shed light on the complex relationships between moral violations and somatosensory experiences.

UK ethical consumer spending hits record high, report shows

Rebecca Smithers
guardian.com
Originally posted 29 Dec 19

Ethical consumer spending has hit record levels in the UK, according to a new report that reveals the total market – including food, drinks, clothing, energy and eco-travel – has swelled to over £41bn.

Total ethical spending has risen almost fourfold in the past 20 years and outgrown all UK household expenditure, which has been broadly flat, according to the new study from Co-op.

The convenience retailer’s latest Ethical Consumerism report, which has tracked ethical expenditure year by year over the past two decades (adjusted for inflation) is a barometer of the extent to which UK consumers’ shopping habits reflect their concerns about the environment, animal welfare, social justice and human rights.

While back in 1999 the total size of the market was just £11.2bn, the report (which adjusts for inflation) says that, on a conservative basis, it has mushroomed to £41.1bn today. The average spend on ethical purchases per household has grown from a paltry £202 a year in 1999 to £1,278 in 2018. Over the same 20-year period, total general household expenditure has edged up by around 2% in real terms, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The info is here.

Why morals matter in foreign policy

Joseph Nye
aspistrategist.org.au
Originally published 10 Jan 20

Here is the conclusion:

Good moral reasoning should be three-dimensional, weighing and balancing intentions, consequences and means. A foreign policy should be judged accordingly. Moreover, a moral foreign policy must consider consequences such as maintaining an institutional order that encourages moral interests, in addition to particular newsworthy actions such as helping a dissident or a persecuted group in another country. And it’s important to include the ethical consequences of ‘nonactions’, such as President Harry S. Truman’s willingness to accept stalemate and domestic political punishment during the Korean War rather than follow General Douglas MacArthur’s recommendation to use nuclear weapons. As Sherlock Holmes famously noted, much can be learned from a dog that doesn’t bark.

It’s pointless to argue that ethics will play no role in the foreign policy debates that await this year. We should acknowledge that we always use moral reasoning to judge foreign policy, and we should learn to do it better.

The info is here.

In 2020, let’s stop AI ethics-washing and actually do something

Karen Hao

technologyreview.com

Originally published 27 Dec 19

Here is an excerpt:

Meanwhile, the need for greater ethical responsibility has only grown more urgent. The same advancements made in GANs in 2018 have led to the proliferation of hyper-realistic deepfakes, which are now being used to target women and erode people’s belief in documentation and evidence. New findings have shed light on the massive climate impact of deep learning, but organizations have continued to train ever larger and more energy-guzzling models. Scholars and journalists have also revealed just how many humans are behind the algorithmic curtain. The AI industry is creating an entirely new class of hidden laborers—content moderators, data labelers, transcribers—who toil away in often brutal conditions.

But not all is dark and gloomy: 2019 was the year of the greatest grassroots pushback against harmful AI from community groups, policymakers, and tech employees themselves. Several cities—including San Francisco and Oakland, California, and Somerville, Massachusetts—banned public use of face recognition, and proposed federal legislation could soon ban it from US public housing as well. Employees of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce also grew increasingly vocal against their companies’ use of AI for tracking migrants and for drone surveillance.

Within the AI community, researchers also doubled down on mitigating AI bias and reexamined the incentives that lead to the field’s runaway energy consumption. Companies invested more resources in protecting user privacy and combating deepfakes and disinformation. Experts and policymakers worked in tandem to propose thoughtful new legislation meant to rein in unintended consequences without dampening innovation.

The info is here.

Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think

Brian Gallagher and Kevin Berger
Nautil.us
Originally published 14 Feb 19

Here is an excerpt:

When it comes to misinformation, twas always thus. What’s changed now?

O’Connor: It’s always been the case that humans have been dependent on social ties to gain knowledge and belief. There’s been misinformation and propaganda for hundreds of years. If you’re a governing body, you have interests you’re trying to protect. You want to control what people believe. What’s changed is social media and the structure of communication between people. Now people have tremendous ability to shape who they interact with. Say you’re an anti-vaxxer. You find people online who are also anti-vaxxers and communicate with them rather than people who challenge your beliefs.

The other important thing is that this new structure means that all sorts of influencers—the Russian government, various industry groups, other government groups—have direct access to people. They can communicate with people in a much more personal way. They can pose on Twitter and Facebook as a normal person who you might want to interact with. If you look at Facebook in the lead up to the 2016 election, the Russian Internet Research Agency created animal-lovers groups, Black Lives Matter groups, gun-rights groups, and anti-immigrant groups. They could build trust with people who would naturally be part of these groups. And once they grounded that trust, they could influence them by getting them not to vote or by driving polarization, causing more extreme rhetoric. They can make other people trust them in ways that would have been very difficult without social media.

Weatherall: People tend to trust their friends, their family, people who they share other affinities with. So if the message can look like it’s coming from those people, it can be very effective. Another thing that’s become widespread is the ability to produce easily shareable visual media. The memes we see on Twitter or on Facebook don’t really say anything, they conjure up an emotion—an emotion associated with an ideology or belief you might have. It’s a type of misinformation that supports your beliefs without ever coming out and saying something false or saying anything.

The interview is here.

Examining clinician burnout in health industries

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Danielle Kress
Johns Hopkins Magazine
Originally posted 26 Dec 19


Here is an excerpt from the interview with Cynda Hylton Rushton:

How much is burnout really affecting clinicians?

Among nurses, 35-45% experience some form of burnout, with comparable rates among other providers and higher rates among physicians. It's important to note that burnout has been viewed as an occupational hazard rather than a mental health diagnosis. It is not a few days or even weeks of depletion or exhaustion. It is the cumulative, long-term distress and suffering that is slowly eroding the workforce and leading to significant job dissatisfaction and many leaving their professions. In some instances, serious health concerns and suicide can result.

What about the impact on patients?

Patient care can suffer when clinicians withdraw or are not fully engaged in their work. Moral distress, long hours, negative work environments, or organizational inefficiencies can all impact a clinician's ability to provide what they feel is quality, safe patient care. Likewise, patients are impacted when health care organizations are unable to attract and retain competent and compassionate clinicians.

What does this mean for nurses?

As the largest sector of the health care professions, nurses have the most patient interaction and are at the center of the health care team. Nurses are integral to helping patients to holistically respond to their health conditions, illness, or injury. If nurses are suffering from burnout and moral distress, the whole care team and the patient will experience serious consequences when nurses' capacities to adapt to the organizational and external pressures are eventually exceeded.

The info is here.

Nurses Continue to Rate Highest in Honesty, Ethics

RJ Reinhart
news.gallup.com
Originally posted 6 Jan 20

For the 18th year in a row, Americans rate the honesty and ethics of nurses highest among a list of professions that Gallup asks U.S. adults to assess annually. Currently, 85% of Americans say nurses' honesty and ethical standards are "very high" or "high," essentially unchanged from the 84% who said the same in 2018. Alternatively, Americans hold car salespeople in the lowest esteem, with 9% saying individuals in this field have high levels of ethics and honesty, similar to the 8% who said the same in 2018.

Nurses are consistently rated higher in honesty and ethics than all other professions that Gallup asks about, by a wide margin. Medical professions in general rate highly in Americans' assessments of honesty and ethics, with at least six in 10 U.S. adults saying medical doctors, pharmacists and dentists have high levels of these virtues. The only nonmedical profession that Americans now hold in a similar level of esteem is engineers, with 66% saying individuals in this field have high levels of honesty and ethics.

Americans' high regard for healthcare professionals contrasts sharply with their assessments of stockbrokers, advertising professionals, insurance salespeople, senators, members of Congress and car salespeople -- all of which garner less than 20% of U.S. adults saying they have high levels of honesty and ethics.

The public's low levels of belief in the honesty and ethical standards of senators and members of Congress may be a contributing factor in poor job approval ratings for the legislature. No more than 30% of Americans have approved of Congress in the past 10 years.

The info is here.