Science to Retract Study on Fish and Microplastics | Hacker News Reader

Science to Retract Study on Fish and Microplastics

retractionwatch.com

82 pointsbootload18 comments

Sadly there are too few retractions and proper responses when it comes to scientific fraud (as anyone that reads Retraction Watch knows all too well).

Some more reading about this development

Science Mag: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/paper-about-how-micro...

Another article: https://gizmodo.com/widely-reported-study-on-fish-and-microb...

(on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14244017)

> Lönnstedt has told Science ... she believed allegations to the contrary are fueled by jealousy.

Great, the head researcher responded to serious criticism with the emotional maturity of a child.

If i where a industry pr expert and had a product-palett to defend that contains a dangerous product- how hard would it be to find a researcher, willing to sell his/her credibility to torpedo upcoming regulations?

For the public - one retracted paper equals - retracting the whole fields status. Maybee, it shouldnt be called retracting. Rather suspended for re-evaluation.

I know just words, but words transport the state of the field as a whole.

There's an interesting video by Veratasium "Is Most Published Research Wrong?" (Clickbaity title to be sure.)

It shows, on the overall statistics of valid/invalid vs. published/unpublished papers, the arbitrary p-value threshold is wholy inadequate to prevent a sizable fraction of published papers from being false positives (invalid but published).

https://youtu.be/42QuXLucH3Q

Perhaps a more human-understandible criterion threshold for publishing would be logarithmic inverse p-value... the closer p gets to 0 (stronger correlation), the bigger log(1/p) gets. This of course is just one aspect of greater issues.

Worth noting that the particle physics community requires five sigma of confidence to consider a claim "legitimate", which is vastly higher than almost all other fields and has saved particle physics from making mistakes several times (like with the diphoton excess in 2015).

The significance of this retraction may be too late. Some governments have already banned microplastics.

I don't think this study was the one that triggered regulatory action. For one thing, this particular study seems to have been published in late June 2016. But U.S. regulatory action took place well before that:

http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/30/health/obama-bans-microbeads/

The negative impact of microplastics on the environment is not being contested in this retraction. This is not the only study of its kind, and the fact that it was fraudulent is not good evidence that the entire line of inquiry is.

Not to mention that the case for microplastics seems to me to be non-existent: I don't doubt manufacturers were interested in using them for marketing, but as a consumer, the prospect of putting tiny pieces of plastic in my toothpaste/soap/etc. instead of other more harmless - to me and the environment - abrasives leaves me cold.

It's not just deliberate use of plastics in stuff that gets designed to go down the drain. We're also shedding plastic fibers into the water by washing synthetic clothing: http://brenmicroplastics.weebly.com/project-findings.html

Absolutely - but I'm not aware of any sort of regulations limiting the use (or washing) of, say, microfiber polyester (unlike the 'microbeads' I was heaping scorn on). I have mixed feelings about microfibers, they certainly have justifiable uses, I wonder if what we need to solve is how to effectively remove them from the wastewater generated by laundering them.

The existence of a flawed paper claiming microplastic harm doesn't mean that microplastics are harmless.

Or that they aren't. It doesn't mean anything. There is no conclusion about the subject matter of the study which it is able to support, and that's why it was withdrawn.

Can you cite a study of similar import which tends to contradict this paper's null hypothesis?

A quick search will turn over dozens of years-long studies on the subject. You said it yourself: there is no conclusion on the subject matter based on this retraction, so really nothing to challenge here.

> It doesn't mean anything

That's not true. It is as an indictment of the scientific system that would allow fraud like this to get through because it fit the prevailing narrative.

To be sure. I meant more specifically in relation to the hypothesis it purported to test, but you're not wrong.

These are frightening times. Old certainties are crumbling around us and no one yet knows what new realities will rise to replace them. But we've been through worse times, and come out better in the end. We will do so this time, too.

speaking strictly about science, the community of science has never been in a time like this. To be fair, there have been 'arguably worse' times, but the difficulites of those eras were imposed on the scientific community from without. What is happening now is all from within.

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