1. The king and his memory There’s this stunning passage near the end of Josephine Tey’s classic The Daughter of Time. Most of the book is taken up with the main characters laboriously discovering the evidence that Richard III was … Continue reading
Here’s a post that’s suitable for the Thanksgiving season. I no longer believe in the Shangri-La diet. Here’s the story. Background I met Seth Roberts back in the early 1990s when we were both professors at the University of California. … Continue reading
The other day we talked about checking survey representativeness by looking at canary variables: Like the canary in the coal mine, a canary variable is something with a known distribution that was not adjusted for in your model. Looking at … Continue reading
OK, more on junk science. Sorry! But it’s been in the news lately, and people keep emailing me about it. For those of you who want some more technical statistics content, here are some recent unpublished papers to keep you … Continue reading
Part 1 Jonathan Falk points us to this parody article that has suggestions on how to p-hack. I replied that I continue to be bothered by the term “p-hacking.” Sometimes it applies very clearly (as in the work of Brian … Continue reading
If those chatbots had existed back in 2006, they would’ve made Ed Wegman’s job a lot easier. Say what you want about Brian Wansink, he had to come with the ideas for those experiments, even if maybe he didn’t actually … Continue reading
Nick Brown pointed me to a new paper, “The Impact of Incidental Environmental Factors on Vote Choice: Wind Speed is Related to More Prevention-Focused Voting,” to which his reaction was, “It makes himmicanes look plausible.” Indeed, one of the authors … Continue reading
Someone pointed me to a recent post by Nate Silver, “Polling averages shouldn’t be political litmus tests, and they need consistent standards, not make-it-up-as-you-go,” where Nate wrote: The new Editorial Director of Data Analytics at ABC News, G. Elliott Morris, … Continue reading
I happened to come across this cool article from 2001 by Daniel Robinson and Howard Wainer. It was published in the Journal of Wildlife Management, of all places—I didn’t know that Howard ever worked in that area!—but you can find … Continue reading
Palko points to a ten-year-old post on 3-D printing. Here he is back in 2013: We’re talking about people (particularly journalists) who have an emotional, gee-whiz reaction to technology without really thinking seriously about the functionality. [They] can be spotted … Continue reading
When I say “passive corruption,” I’m talking not about the people who directly cheat, but about those who know about cheating but don’t do anything about it, I suspect out of some mixture of the following motivations: 1. Not wanting … Continue reading
So, a few people emailed me about this story about fraud among high-profile business school professors. There was this news article by Stephanie Lee, who’s reported on some notable examples of bad research in the past. From her recent article, … Continue reading
We wrote about this last year in our post, PNAS GIGO QRP WTF: This meta-analysis of nudge experiments is approaching the platonic ideal of junk science and our followup PNAS article, No reason to expect large and consistent effects of … Continue reading
Jason Colavito writes: Next month Graham Hancock is getting a splashy eight-episode Netflix series to present his false claim that a lost Atlantis-like civilization was destroyed by a comet at the end of the last Ice Age. The series is … Continue reading
In statistics, there are two things we know not to do: 1. Keep screwing around with your data and analysis until you get the answer that you want. This is called p-hacking or researcher degrees of freedom or forking paths, … Continue reading
Our recent post about the non-existent Los Angeles tunnel reminded me of another bit of hype from the past: a claim by science hero James Watson in 1998 that cancer would be cured in two years. I was curious what … Continue reading
Here it is. This should interest some of you. Gaurav makes a convincing case that: 1. The main topic of the book—capriciousness in human judgment—is important, it’s worth a book, and the authors (Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein) have an interesting … Continue reading
We all make mistakes. What’s important is to engage with our mistakes and learn from them. When we don’t, we’re missing an opportunity to learn. Here’s an example. A few years ago there was a Harvard study that notoriously claimed … Continue reading
Back in 2015 we had a discussion with economist Douglas Campbell on evolutionary psychology in economics. Then in 2016 Campbell sent me this: So, Spolaore and Wacziarg have a new paper out, with a brand new measure of genetic distance … Continue reading
A few days ago we discussed a meta-analysis that was published on nudge interventions. The most obvious problem of that analysis was that included 11 papers by Brian Wansink and 1 paper by Dan Ariely, and for good reasons we … Continue reading