This new book, written by two psychology researchers, is an excellent counterpart to Lying for Money by economist Dan Davies, a book that came out a few years ago but which we happened to have discussed recently here. Both books … Continue reading
I just read “Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World,” by Dan Davies. I think the author is the same Dan Davies who came up with the saying, “Good ideas do not need lots of … Continue reading
Unfortunately, this is not an April Fool’s post. The story comes from Dale Lehman: In case you were wondering what happened to Dr. Sapan Desai (of Surgisphere fame), here is is. They claim to uphold the highest research standards! I … Continue reading
One of the fundamental lessons of political science is that politics is unavoidable. There is no political vacuum. Come to think of it, this is a fundamental lesson of just about any field of study. Economics? Yup. A fundamental lesson … Continue reading
A couple months ago we discussed a controversial study of rectal artesunate suppositories. In addition to issues with the analysis, there was concern because the data were unavailable. Following Dale Lehman’s suggestion, I went online on 10 Nov 2022 and … Continue reading
Lots of good ones here, I guess because I went on vacation for a week so the comments piled up. Jonathan suggests something amiss in the vote counting: How is Newton unseeded in Laws? There must have been a lot … Continue reading
This news article by Tiffany Hsu explains how the big bucks earned by Matt Damon, Larry David, LeBron James, etc., from Crypto.com, etc., did not come for free. These celebs are now paying in terms of their reputation. That’s all … Continue reading
Retraction Watch links to this post by Phil Davis, who writes: Even a casual reader of the scientific literature understands that there is an abundance of papers that link some minor detail with article publishing — say, the presence of … Continue reading
Johannes Haushofer asks: Later in the thread, the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) evaluations came up: I thought: 1. Our MVP evaluation says: The design was completed before endline data collection, and a peer-reviewed evaluation protocol was registered with The Lancet. … Continue reading
A colleague pointed me to this post by Phillip Magness reporting several cases of copying-without-full-attribution by history professor Kevin Kruse. I’d never heard of either of these people, but a quick google reveals that Mangess is an economist who studies … Continue reading
Following a series of links, I came upon The Complete Debarkle: The epic saga of how a culture war came to consume science fiction’s most famous literary award, by the pseudonymous Camestros Felapton. The book is 440 pages, which maybe … Continue reading
A couple days ago we talked about a crappy paper published by the journal Public Choice alleging massive election fraud in the 2020 election. As political scientists Andy Eggers and Justin Grimmer put it, the article in question was “riddled … Continue reading
Retraction Watch links to this news article by James Heathers, who writes: It’s not that, under such conditions [coronavirus], a few bad studies were bound to slip through the net. Rather, there is no net. Peer review, especially when conducted … Continue reading
Spam can be fun. This one came in today: Hi Andrew, I hope your week is going well so far! My name is Alister, and I work for a content marketing agency called **. I’m getting in touch with you … Continue reading
Last year my co-bloggers and I posted 565 entries on this blog. Here’s a list of all them, in decreasing order of number of comments. You can draw your own conclusions from all this. A tale of two epidemiologists: It … Continue reading
Here: [2022] Stacking for non-mixing Bayesian computations: The curse and blessing of multimodal posteriors. {\em Journal of Machine Learning Research}. (Yuling Yao, Aki Vehtari, and Andrew Gelman) [2022] Reconciling evaluations of the Millennium Villages Project. {\em Statistics and Public Policy} … Continue reading
When talking about junk science, or bad research, or fraud, or mixtures of these things (recall Clarke’s Law), we often talk about the role of scientific journals in promoting bad work (with Psychological Science and PNAS being notorious examples), being … Continue reading
Mark Palko points to this news article by Ed Cara with the above title and the following conclusion: While scientific fraud can be hard to root out, the authors [of a recent article pointing out problems with widely promoted research … Continue reading
You know how they’ll describe someone as a musician’s musician? Or a chef’s chef? There’s also the opposite: those people who to outsiders represent a certain profession, but who are not respected by their fellow insiders. Guy Fieri, perhaps? I’m … Continue reading
Someone who wishes to remain anonymous writes: I enjoyed your blog posts and eventual paper/demo about adjusting for diagnostic test sensitivity and specificity in estimating seroprevalence last year. I’m wondering if you had any additional ideas about adjustments for sensitivity … Continue reading