Dear Dr. Tavris:

I saw in a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement that you have been critical of the “chambermaid” study which purported to show that people were losing weight without changing their diet or exercise. I agree that this study did not show what it claimed.

Along these lines, you might be interested in two articles I recently published with Nicholas Brown:
– How statistical challenges and misreadings of the literature combineto produce unreplicable science: An example from psychology
– This is the reason for external replication

Also I looked you up and saw that you were a scholar of feminism, so you might be interested in my post from a few years ago, How feminism has made me a better scientist. Any thoughts on that would be much appreciated.

I was not able to find your email online–for some reason, it’s often hard to find email contacts for people without current university affiliations–so I’m posting this here on the hope that someone who has your contact information can forward it to you.

Yours,

Andrew Gelman
Professor, Department of Statistics
Professor, Department of Political Science
Columbia University, New York

P.S. I blogged the above because I couldn’t find Tavris’s email. But then someone found her email for me. So I emailed her directly. I’ll keep the post up because it could be of interest to others!