I think they use witchcraft

The following came in the email today:

On Jul 7, 2018, at 12:58 PM, Submissions <submissions@**.co.in> wrote:

Hello Dr. Andrew Gelman,

I am Dr. ** [American-sounding name], Research Assistant for the ** Publishing Company contacting you with reference from our Editorial Board.

Are you tired of publishing your Manuscript in useless journals and get no impact for your hard work?

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Most of that sounds good, but I’d prefer not to be published by Harvard University, as that’s the place where the press agents think “The replication rate in psychology is quite high—indeed, it is statistically indistinguishable from 100%.” Publishing a statement like that could be bad for my reputation. Stanford, though, that would be ok. They did some cool experiment in a prison, right?

4 thoughts on “I think they use witchcraft

  1. I’ve seen something like this in action I think. There was that story not too long ago about how Bajau Nomads evolved large spleens, which explains their extreme diving abilities.[1] If you search it you could see every single stupid news site carrying the same story. And pretty much every aspect of this “news” was false.

    The spleens in question were actually smaller than usual, and much smaller than those of professional divers, and they only measured the spleens once even though they can vary by a factor of 10x in a day due to stuff like stress/exercise/disease, and there was no actual data collected about their diving ability, but what was said about their diving practice was something most people can do after a few months of training.

    [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-diving-genetics/large-spleen-helps-explain-deep-diving-skills-of-southeast-asian-sea-nomads-idUSKBN1HQ2G9

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