Triangulation! The Egyptians used it to build their pyramids. The Greeks developed a branch of mathematics out of it. Until the 19th century whole countries were charted in this way. Far into the 20th century ships have determined their position with it. To determine your position by triangulation you only need a set square and a protractor, which the surveyors call a theodolite, as well as the coordinates of two visible landmarks. It’s that simple!

Could it be that triangulation is also an important methodological approach in biology? A cure even for the replication crisis? Munafo and Smith recently postulated this in a commentary in Nature. Sociologists call it triangulation when they use two or more different methods to investigate one particular research question. If the results converge at one point, i.e. lead to the same result, this increases validity and credibility. Don’t we do this routinely in the experimental life sciences? Does the knock-out mouse have the same phenotype as one in which the signalling pathway was pharmacologically blocked? Do transcript and protein expression correlate with the phenotype?

Thus, basic biomedical research is familiar with ‘targeting’ a goal with different methods grounded in already established knowledge (the landmarks of the surveyor!). Are the results converging? Bingo, we have located the biological mechanism! Therefore it leaves many of us cold, if spoilsports with gradschool statistics argue that most studies in biomedicine must be false positive despite significant p-value. Because we don’t just rely on ONE result. Instead we triangulate by means of different approaches! In order to validate results, this might even be superior to replication. If something is simply repeated, it is not unlikely that a systematic error will be repeated too. This would make the result reproducible, but still not correct.

Were the skeptics wrong when calling out a crisis in biomedical research? Are we already doing the right thing? Continue reading →

An article entitled “Growth in a Time of Debt” was published in 2010 by the highly respected Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. It dealt with the relationship between national economic growth and national debt. They reported on their discovery of an astonishing, globally observable correlation: As national debt rises, the economic growth of a nation initally also rises. If, however, the national debt exceeds 90 %, this ratio is reversed quite abruptly. Growth turns into contraction, and economic output then declines as debt rises further. The discovery of a “90 % debt threshold” hit like a bomb. Some suspect that the article was the basis for the European austerity policy after the 2008 financial crisis. What is certain, however, is that the paper was enthusiastically used by Western politicians to justify their restrictive fiscal policy. In 2013, Thomas Herndon, a student, reanalyzed the data of  the Reinhart-Rogoff paper as part of a semester assignment. After some back and forth, the authors had given him the original Excel spreadsheet. And lo and behold, in a few minutes he found a number of serious errors in it! After correction, the debt threshold disappeared, and the data now appeared to prove the opposite, a steady, positive correlation between government debt and growth across the entire range! What do we learn from this? Apart from the fact that the fundamental error of Reinhart and Rogoff is of course the confusion of correlation with causation: Excel is not suitable for the analysis of complex scientific data. Even more importantly, scientists make mistakes, which can have serious consequences. Continue reading →