It's OK to be wrong

This morning one of my Facebook friends shared a link to this blog post on Psychology Today, wherein a researcher goes on a rather embittered rant about the publication of a journal article that failed to replicate one of his lab's earlier findings. Now, he likely has some very valid points about differences in experimental procedures that influenced the results or explanations the researchers failed to consider. The problem is that he attacks the researchers and the journal in a completely unprofessional way that just makes him appear to be bitter that someone said he was wrong.

As someone who has been on both sides of the 'failure to replicate' debate, my advice to a researcher who feels that a replication attempt was not valid would be to 1) publish a (professional!) comment/reply in that journal or 2) Perform your own follow-up studies to provide further evidence for your position and publish a paper on it. Here the bitter guy claims that he had no choice but to scrutinize the article on his blog because he had never been asked to review the original article. The article in question, however, was published in PLoS ONE, which encourages post-publication review in the form of online comments and discussion. There are currently no comments on the paper on the PLoS ONE website. Instead of starting a professional, scholarly debate in an appropriate forum he just kind of made himself look like an asshole.

Professionalism issues and this specific incident aside, I think the more important point to be made here is that it's OK to be wrong.  Science isn't a static process where you prove something to be true and then it's true for all eternity. Science is about having a falsifiable hypothesis and testing it... which means the possibility of being wrong is built right into the scientific method!

Even the best and brightest, award-winning scientists have been wrong. Sometimes you're not totally wrong, you're just not entirely right. Sometimes you are shown to be wrong with the advent of new technology that allows us to look at things in a way that wasn't previously possible. Science isn't about being "right" or finding the "truth", it's about coming to a conclusion based on the best available current evidence. As that evidence changes over time with new technology and new ideas then our conclusions need to change too. Someone showing that your theory is wrong does not make you a bad or worthless scientist, it probably just means that you are doing something important enough for people to follow-up on! So let's stop thinking about who's right and who's wrong - we're all wrong, just in varying degrees of wrongness that may take more or less time to uncover. As long as the field as a whole is advancing and you are doing your part to contribute new knowledge, then you're doing science right.

UPDATE: Here is an example of how to proceed when someone writes an article disagreeing with your research and you want to follow up with some points on why you disagree:  http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(12)00053-8

impromptu rant

I just read a post about how faculty members were horribly upset by a group of graduate students who requested a workshop on, basically, how to be successful on the academic job market (full post here). I can't even begin to express how much this attitude annoys me. Good supervisors want their students to be successful. Good supervisors will make sure that their students have all the resources they need to be successful, even if that means getting information or assistance from other people. And good supervisors recognize that every good student they produce and help successfully procure a faculty position is going to help them procure funding and more good students. Everyone wins! I will give my future students whatever information I can, but my experience on the job market in 2011 may not be anything like what their experience will be like in (mental math...) 2018. So if they can get information from an expert that will help them I want them to, and I want them to share that information with me so that I can be better informed too.

This, a million times this:

Set your ego aside! Do what it takes to make sure your Ph.D.s get the training they need, whatever the source. (via http://theprofessorisin.com/)

changin' things up, keepin'em interesting

Now that I'm going to be moving on to a new job, I decided it was a good time to start updating my web presence to reflect my new position. Since I don't really know what "assistant professor style" is supposed to look like, this update is pretty much just changing my colour scheme (and moving the sidebar to the other side of the screen! so exciting! <sarcasm>). But hey, change is good, it keeps things from getting dull. Like maybe no one will notice that I haven't written anything interesting in a while because they'll be distracted by the new layout...

Next up will be overhauling my website, which is really a wonderful way to procrastinate without feeling like you're procrastinating.

New (actually interesting) posts soon, about new job stuff and grant writing and all sorts of fun things.