This empirical paper has been cited 1616 times but I don’t find it convincing. There’s no single fatal flaw, but the evidence does not seem so clear. How to think about this sort of thing? What to do? First, accept that evidence might not all go in one direction. Second, make lots of graphs. Also, an amusing story about how this paper is getting cited nowadays.

Posted on December 13, 2023 9:18 AM by Andrew

1. When can we trust? How can we navigate social science with skepticism? 2. Why I’m not convinced by that Quebec child-care study 3. 20 years on 1. When can we trust? How can we navigate social science with skepticism? … Continue reading →

Here are just some of the factors that have been published in the social priming and related literatures as having large effects on behavior.

Posted on November 25, 2023 9:03 AM by Andrew

This came up in our piranha paper, and it’s convenient to have these references in one place: Here are just some of the factors that have been published in the social priming and related literatures as having large and predictable … Continue reading →

Moving from “admit your mistakes” to accepting the inevitability of mistakes and their fractal nature

Posted on October 20, 2023 9:21 AM by Andrew

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 →

The authors of research papers have no obligation to share their data and code, and I have no obligation to believe anything they write.

Posted on September 10, 2023 9:52 AM by Andrew

Michael Stutzer writes: This study documents substantial variability in different researchers’ results when they use the same financial data set and are supposed to test the same hypotheses. More generally, I think the prospect for reproducibility in finance is worse … Continue reading →

Weggy time: A (conceptual) blast from the past

Posted on August 18, 2023 9:21 AM by Andrew

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 →

It was an open secret for years and years that they were frauds, but nobody seemed to care.

Posted on July 31, 2023 9:57 AM by Andrew

I love this story so much I’m gonna tell it again: I remember the Watergate thing happening when I was a kid, and I asked my dad, “So, when did you realize that Nixon was a crook?” My dad replied, … Continue reading →

It’s worse than you might think: Passive corruption in the social sciences

Posted on June 23, 2023 9:22 AM by Andrew

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 →

Manipulating a machine-learning method by feeding it doctored training data

Posted on February 22, 2023 9:38 AM by Andrew

A correspondent who usually prefers to remain anonymous points us to this article by Ilia Shumailov et al. which states: The data-driven nature of modern machine learning (ML) training routines puts pressure on data supply pipelines, which become increasingly more … Continue reading →

Why I don’t trust “libertarian paternalism,” part 65

Posted on February 20, 2023 9:49 AM by Andrew

In preparing some course material I came across this old post on the deterrent effect of the death penalty, discussing an article by John Donohue and Justin Wolfers, Uses and abuses of empirical evidence in the death penalty debate. Nobody … Continue reading →

Coral reef update: University vindicates whistleblowers

Posted on December 25, 2022 9:59 AM by Andrew

In May 2021 we reported on a controversy: Does ocean acidification alter fish behavior? Fraud allegations create a sea of doubt . . . [Biologist Philip] Munday has co-authored more than 250 papers and drawn scores of aspiring scientists to … Continue reading →

Pete Rose (2) vs. Isaac Asimov; Lisa advances

Posted on December 20, 2022 4:23 AM by Andrew

Raghu disagrees with my claim that bedtime books don’t work, and he suggests Matthew Walker as an adjudicator for a possible debate on the topic. I suppose that Walker would be unseeded in the “disgraced scientists” category—he can’t really compete … Continue reading →

What continues to stun me is how something can be clear and unambiguous, and it still takes years or even decades to resolve

Posted on November 5, 2022 9:26 AM by Andrew

OK, remember Wile E. Coyote when he makes the all-too-common mistake of stepping off a cliff, or standing on a cliff edge that breaks? He stands there in the air, unsupported by anything, until he realizes what’s happening—and only then … Continue reading →

Cheating in sports vs. cheating in journalism vs. cheating in science

Posted on October 17, 2022 9:27 AM by Andrew

Sports cheating has been in the news lately. Nothing about the Astros, but the chess-cheating scandal that people keep talking about—or, at least, people keep sending me emails asking me to blog about it—and the cheating scandals in poker and … Continue reading →

“MIT Built a Theranos for Plants” update

Posted on October 16, 2022 9:31 AM by Andrew

Remember this from a couple years ago? This news article by Tom McKay is hilarious: The prestigious multidisciplinary MIT Media Lab built a “personal food computer” that worked so poorly that demos had to be faked Theranos-style . . . … Continue reading →

Hey—what’s up with that method from 1998 that was going to cure cancer in 2 years??

Posted on September 23, 2022 9:17 AM by Andrew

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 →

The latest scientific fraud story: As is so often the case, people had been warning us about this guy for a long time but the people in charge weren’t listening.

Posted on August 28, 2022 9:39 AM by Andrew

I remember the Watergate thing happening when I was a kid, and I asked my dad, “So, when did you realize that Nixon was a crook?” My dad replied, “1946.” He wasn’t kidding. Nixon being an opportunistic liar was all … Continue reading →

“Is there any heuristic we might use to identify wholly inappropriate stats and flag questionable papers?”

Posted on August 26, 2022 9:24 AM by Andrew

A researcher who wishes to remain anonymous writes in with a question: I am reaching out to you regarding a weird phenomenon taking over the environmental science literature. The field has been flooded by papers that appear to me to … Continue reading →

The science bezzle

Posted on June 29, 2022 9:02 AM by Andrew

Palko quotes Galbraith from the classic The Great Crash 1929: Alone among the various forms of larceny [embezzlement] has a time parameter. Weeks, months or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a … Continue reading →

B.S. pseudo-expertise has many homes. (Don’t blame the Afghanistan/Iraq war on academic specialization.)

Posted on May 29, 2022 9:17 AM by Andrew

Bert Gunter writes: I have no opinion on this (insufficient expertise to judge), but thought you and colleagues might find it interesting if you are not already familiar with the notion. Couple of quotes: “Academia is in some ways nearly … Continue reading →

How junk science persists in academia, news media, and social media: Resistance to the resistance

Posted on April 22, 2022 9:37 AM by Andrew

In comments on our recent post, The so-called “lucky golf ball”: The Association for Psychological Science promotes junk science while ignoring the careful, serious work of replication, Jim asked why so many of these ridiculous and unreplicated results kept coming … Continue reading →

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

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