One thing that struck me about this PACE scandal: if this study was so bad as all that, how did it taken so seriously by policymakers and the press? There’s been a lot of discussion about serious flaws in the … Continue reading
Here they are: What to think about in 2015: How can the principles of statistical quality control be applied to statistics education Stethoscope as weapon of mass distraction “Why continue to teach and use hypothesis testing?” Relaxed plagiarism standards as … Continue reading
Mon: Dan Kahan doesn’t trust the Turk Tues: Neither time nor stomach Wed: Reprint of “Observational Studies” by William Cochran followed by comments by current researchers in observational studies Thurs: Hey—Don’t trust anything coming from the Tri-Valley Center for Human … Continue reading
Here’s some summer reading for you. The schedule may change because of the insertion of topical material, but this is the basic plan: Richard Feynman and the tyranny of measurement A bad definition of statistical significance from the U.S. Department … Continue reading
Gabriel Marinello writes: I am a PhD student in Astrophysics and am writing this email to you because an enquiry about point null hypothesis testing (H0: Theta = Theta0 and H1: Theta != Theta0) in a bayesian context and I … Continue reading
Dan Kahan writes: I know you are on 30-day delay, but since the blog version of you will be talking about Bayesian inference in couple of hours, you might like to look at paper by Turing, who is on 70-yr … Continue reading
I do a lot of criticism. I’m sure you can think of lots of things that I like to criticize, but to keep things simple, let’s focus on graphics criticism, for example this post where I criticized a graph for … Continue reading
In a recent discussion involving our frustration with crap research, Daniel Lakeland wrote: I [Lakeland] really do worry about a world in which social and institutional and similar effects keep us plugging away at a certain kind of cargo-cult science … Continue reading
Mon: The hype cycle starts again Tues: I (almost and inadvertently) followed Dan Kahan’s principles in my class today, and that was a good thing (would’ve even been more of a good thing had I realized what I was doing … Continue reading
My talk today at the University of Michigan, 4pm at the Institute for Social Research Social research is not the same as health research: Macartan Humphreys gives new guidelines for ethics in social science research “The Firth bias correction, penalization, … Continue reading
Richard Morey pointed out the other day that this blog is 10 years old! During this time, we’ve had 5688 posts, 48799 comments, and who knows how many readers. On this tenth anniversary, I’d like to thank my collaborators on … Continue reading
Dominik Papies points me to this article, “Matched-Names Analysis Reveals No Evidence of Name-Meaning Effects,” by psychologist and data detective Uri Simonsohn, in collaboration with Raphael Silberzahn and Eric Luis Uhlmann, the two authors of an earlier study that this … Continue reading
The above title is my response to a discussion that began with this email sent to be by Steve Roth: Noah Smith had a great tweet recently, a real keeper for me [Roth]. Causation is correlated with correlation. I would … Continue reading
“False parallelism”—feel free to come up with a better term here—is when a graph has repeating elements that do not correspond to repeating structure in the underlying topic being graphed. An example appears in the above graphs from Dan Kahan. … Continue reading
Jessica Tracy and Alec Beall, authors of that paper that claimed that women at peak fertility were more likely to wear red or pink shirts (see further discussion here and here), and then a later paper that claimed that this … Continue reading
I had a brief email exchange with Jeff Leek regarding our recent discussions of replication, criticism, and the self-correcting process of science. Jeff writes: (1) I can see the problem with serious, evidence-based criticisms not being published in the same … Continue reading
I post (approximately) once a day and don’t plan to change that. I have enough material to post more often—for example, I could intersperse existing blog posts with summaries of my published papers or of other work that I like; … Continue reading
The other day on the sister blog we discussed a recent Pew Research survey that seemed to show that Republicans are becoming more partisan about evolution (or, as Paul Krugman put it, “So what happened after 2009 that might be … Continue reading
Following up on my entry the other day on post-publication peer review, Dan Kahan writes: You give me credit, I think, for merely participating in what I think is a systemic effect in the practice of empirical inquiry that conduces … Continue reading
In an ideal world, research articles would be open to criticism and discussion in the same place where they are published, in a sort of non-corrupt version of Yelp. What is happening now is that the occasional paper or research … Continue reading