David Hogg pointed me to this post by Gary Marcus, reviewing this skeptics’ all-star issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science that features replication culture heroes Jelte Wicherts, Hal Pashler, Arina Bones, E. J. Wagenmakers, Gregory Francis, Hal Pashler, John Ioannidis, and Uri Simonsohn. I agree with pretty much everything Marcus has to say. In addition [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Miscellaneous Science category.
The blogroll
I encourage you to check out our linked blogs. Here’s what they’re all about: Cognitive and Behavioral Science BPS Research Digest: I haven’t been following this one recently, but it has lots of good links, I should probably check it more often. There are a couple things that bother me, though. The blog is sponsored [...]
Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences
James Druckman and Jeremy Freese write:
Recently and not-so-recently in the sister blog
Pushback from the elites Insides and essences: Early understandings of the non-obvious
Likelihood Ratio ≠ 1 Journal
Dan Kahan writes: The basic idea . . . is to promote identification of study designs that scholars who disagree about a proposition would agree would generate evidence relevant to their competing conjectures—regardless of what studies based on such designs actually find. Articles proposing designs of this sort would be selected for publication and only [...]
Recently in the sister blog
1. New Italian production of Life on Mars. 2. Psychological essentialism in everyday thought.
Watership Down, thick description, applied statistics, immutability of stories, and playing tennis with a net
For the past several months I’ve been circling around and around some questions related to the issue of how we build trust in statistical methods and statistical results. There are lots of examples but let me start with my own career. My most cited publications are my books and my methods papers, but I think [...]
Why big effects are more important than small effects
The title of this post is silly but I have an important point to make, regarding an implicit model which I think many people assume even though it does not really make sense. Following a link from Sanjay Srivastava, I came across a post from David Funder saying that it’s useful to talk about the [...]
Science is science communication
This was a comment I made in response to a post from mathematician and science writer Jordan Ellenberg: In many ways, science is science communication. Our first audience is ourselves. It’s no joke that “writing it down” is often a key step in understanding. And anyone who’s tried to write a textbook or expository article [...]
A must-read paper on statistical analysis of experimental data
Russ Lyons points to an excellent article on statistical experimentation by Ron Kohavi, Alex Deng, Brian Frasca, Roger Longbotham, Toby Walker, Ya Xu, a group of software engineers (I presume) at Microsoft. Kohavi et al. write: Online controlled experiments are often utilized to make data-driven decisions at Amazon, Microsoft . . . deployment and mining [...]
That claim that Harvard admissions discriminate in favor of Jews? After seeing the statistics, I don’t see it.
A few months ago we discussed Ron Unz’s claim that Jews are massively overrepresented in Ivy League college admissions, not just in comparison to the general population of college-age Americans, but even in comparison to other white kids with comparable academic ability and preparation. Most of Unz’s article concerns admissions of Asian-Americans, and he also [...]
Why waste time philosophizing?
I’ll answer the above question after first sharing some background and history on the the philosophy of Bayesian statistics, which appeared at the end of our rejoinder to the discussion to which I linked the other day: When we were beginning our statistical educations, the word ‘Bayesian’ conveyed membership in an obscure cult. Statisticians who [...]
Psychology can be improved by adding some economics
On this blog I’ve occasionally written about the problems that arise when economists act as amateur psychologists. But the problem can go the other way, too. For example, consider this blog by Berit Brogaard and Kristian Marlow (link from Abbas Raza). Brogaard and Marlow give several amusing stories about ripoffs (a restaurant that scams customers [...]
How Open Should Academic Papers Be?
Richard Van Noorden reports in Nature that 95% of the authors submitting to the Nature Publishing Group choose more restrictive open-source licenses, CC-BY-NC-SA or CC-BY-NC-ND, even when given the opportunity to use a much more open license, CC-BY. (I include their data below.) How open should papers be? Should authors own their work or should [...]
When are complicated models helpful in psychology research and when are they overkill?
Nick Brown is bothered by this article, “An unscented Kalman filter approach to the estimation of nonlinear dynamical systems models,” by Sy-Miin Chow, Emilio Ferrer, and John Nesselroade. The introduction of the article cites a bunch of articles in serious psych/statistics journals. The question is, are such advanced statistical techniques really needed, or even legitimate, [...]
“Confirmation, on the other hand, is not sexy”
Mark Palko writes: I can understand the appeal of the cutting edge. The new stuff is sexier. It gets people’s attention. The trouble is, those cutting edge studies often collapse under scrutiny. Some can’t be replicated. Others prove to be not that important. Confirmation, on the other hand, is not sexy. It doesn’t drive traffic. [...]
“If scientists wrote horoscopes, this is what yours would say”
David Hogg points to this excellent science-based news article by Martha Gill. It’s not about astrology at all; rather, Gill alludes to scientific findings correlating different attributes with time-of-year of birth. At least, I assume this is science-based. It’s possible that Gill is just making it all up (or, for that matter, that the author [...]
Recently in the sister blog: Brussels sprouts, ugly graphs, and switched at birth
1. Congress vs. Nickelback: The real action is in the cross tabs: Conservatives are mean, liberals are big babies, and, if supporting an STD is what it takes to be a political moderate, I don’t want to be one. 2. How 2012 stacks up: The worst graph on record?: OK, not actually worse than this [...]
The lamest, grudgingest, non-retraction retraction ever
In politics we’re familiar with the non-apology apology (well described in Wikipedia as “a statement that has the form of an apology but does not express the expected contrition”). Here’s the scientific equivalent: the non-retraction retraction. Sanjay Srivastava points to an amusing yet barfable story of a pair of researchers who (inadvertently, I assume) made [...]
Somebody listened to me!
Several months ago, I wrote: One challenge, though, is that uncovering the problem [of scientific fraud] and forcing the retraction is a near-thankless job. That’s one reason I don’t mind if Uri Simonsohn is treated as some sort of hero or superstar for uncovering multiple cases of research fraud. Some people might feel there’s something [...]
“The scientific literature must be cleansed of everything that is fraudulent, especially if it involves the work of a leading academic”
Someone points me to this report from Tilburg University on disgraced psychology researcher Diederik Stapel. The reports includes bits like this: When the fraud was first discovered, limiting the harm it caused for the victims was a matter of urgency. This was particularly the case for Mr Stapel’s former PhD students and postdoctoral researchers . [...]
Not so fast on levees and seawalls for NY harbor?
I was talking with June Williamson and mentioned offhand that I’d seen something in the paper saying that if only we’d invested a few billion dollars in levees we would’ve saved zillions in economic damage from the flood. (A quick search also revealed this eerily prescient article from last month and, more recently, this online [...]
A statistical model for underdispersion
We have lots of models for overdispersed count data but we rarely see underdispersed data. But now I know what example I’ll be giving when this next comes up in class. From a book review by Theo Tait: A number of shark species go in for oophagy, or uterine cannibalism. Sand tiger foetuses ‘eat each [...]
Bayesian brains?
Psychology researcher Alison Gopnik discusses the idea that some of the systematic problems with human reasoning can be explained by systematic flaws in the statistical models we implicitly use. I really like this idea and I’ll return to it in a bit. But first I need to discuss a minor (but, I think, ultimately crucial) [...]
Analyzing photon counts
Via Tom LaGatta, Boris Glebov writes: My labmates have statistics problem. We are all experimentalists, but need an input on a fine statistics point. The problem is as follows. The data set consists of photon counts measured at a series of coordinates. The number of input photons is known, but the system transmission (T) is [...]