[andre]

Back in the old days science used to be about finding out how things worked. Scientists realized pretty good that those things -to find out- did not adapt their behavior to what we think of how they should behave. Therefore the most basic ehtical rule of science was about rigidity of reality. No fooling around, no flexibility whatsoever regarding the truth. A reason why Richard Feynman's legendary cargo cult lecture is inmortal (text).

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It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if
you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another. (...)

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist.

So that's the Feynman scientific ethics. I believe nowadays post modern ethics is more something like, it being dishonest if anything is challenged about AGW but that's not the point right now. Judith Curry found a great old gem in "Shall we tell the whole truth about climate change?"Apparantly there are purists (or maybe Feynmanists) and pragmatists (of maybe Schneiderists)

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We find evidence that scientists’ perceptions of the policy process do play a role in shaping their scientific practices. In particular, many of our respondents expressed a preference for keeping discussion of the issue of flux adjustments within the climate modeling community, apparently fearing that climate contrarians would exploit the issue in the public domain. While this may be true, we point to the risk that such an approach may backfire.We also identify assumptions and cultural commitments lying at a deeper level which play at least as important a role as perceptions of the policy process in shaping scientific practices. This leads us to identify two groups of scientists, ‘pragmatists’ and ‘purists’, who have different implicit standards for model adequacy, and correspondingly are or are not willing to use flux adjustments.

(...)But what explains why some climate modellers adopt a purist as opposed to a pragmatist stance? Below we identify four factors which we believe help account for the difference. The first is institutional mission and funding. The second, which is closely connected with the first, is the relationship of the modeling to policy making processes. The third is the relationship between the modeling and how the model output is used. The fourth is the ‘style’ of climate modelling, which relates to different disciplinary, institutional and personal career trajectory backgrounds.

So how can we get back to only one ethic species of scientists, the Feynmanists?

[John Mason]

TBH I think a lot of us maintain the Feynman principles, but there have always been those who, for reasons best known to themselves, have not. It's nothing new. One of the best-documented examples in my field - mineralogy - was the case of Arthur Kingsbury, a prolific generator of papers in journals like Mineralogical Magazine in the post-war years until his death in 1968. In the papers he documented many finds of minerals new to Britain. Despite the exertions of many other collectors, a lot of these finds were never repeated. It was only years after his death that the specimens were investigated and the shocking truth came out: he had been obtaining specimens from other parts of the world and describing them as British. This doesn't of course invalidate the principles of mineralogy but it did mean that in many cases, especially in the Lake District, major revisions had to be made to the mineralogy in terms of what occurs where and its implications.

The whole sorry story can be read here and I would recommend that people do read it:http://www.geocurato...tor/Vol6No9.pdf

As to his motivations, who can tell? It was clearly a one-man operation and none of his colleagues had the slightest suspicion that he was up to something. Many of his discoveries were genuine, but somehow that was not enough. Maybe he had a deep sense of personal inadequacy that drove him to doing the ultimate sin - scientific fraud - for someone who was once revered in mineralogical circles had through such actions fallen into permanent posthumous disgrace. If anything, I view the whole story as a great personal tragedy.

It's a good lesson to learn: in science a good reputation is like virginity: once lost it can never be regained!

Cheers - John

[andre]

Maybe there is more nuance or shade between Piltdown man type of plain scientific fraud and zero-tolerance, indicated with words like data mining, fudge factors, hiding the decline, honesty versus effectiveness, etc, etc.

[Peter H]

andre, on 09 March 2012 - 12:18, said:

Back in the old days science used to be about finding out how things worked. Scientists realized pretty good that those things -to find out- did not adapt their behavior to what we think of how they should behave. Therefore the most basic ehtical rule of science was about rigidity of reality. No fooling around, no flexibility whatsoever regarding the truth. A reason why Richard Feynman's legendary...

And this is a nice example of the problem! Indefensible behaviour.

This post has been edited by Peter H: 09 March 2012 - 13:42

[John Mason]

Yes I thought someone might flag that one up. Dana had a piece on SkS exploring the issues too: http://www.skeptical...-illusions.html

Andre, having 'hide the decline" in your list is not a good example as I'm sure you know. Could have been worded tons better i.e. if the guy had said "I've removed the well-known problematic part of the proxy dataset as discussed in (refs) and replaced it with the measured temperature record", there would have been little or no mileage to be had in it. One thing I always do when reviewing a blog-post on climate science is to encourage authors to pretend they are in the Opposition and to read their own work and consider how it could be twisted out of context, and if they find it could be, to tighten up their writing. It's unfortunate that this should be necessary, but events have shown that it is.

Cheers - John