Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
So why trust science? I would say I am a proud supporter of scientism, crude versions aside. Naomi Oreskes is a prominent science historian who mostly writes history books attacking climate skepticism and Big Capitalism. But now she has a new brief book defending science. Actually, some of the main content is about attacking how…
Continue ReadingA new preprint is out on a massive many teams study. In this design, a single dataset (or database) is given to a bunch of researchers, and they are asked to answer some questions (research hypotheses). They are left to their own choices in how to deal with the data, transformations, outliers, models, and so…
Continue ReadingNeuroscience enjoys a good public perception of scientific rigor. Unfortunately, it’s undeserved. Statistically speaking, a scientific field cannot be rigorous when it is underpowered and has a high researcher degree of freedom. This combo is exactly what neuroscience has, so we get stuff like: Button, K. S., Ioannidis, J. P., Mokrysz, C., Nosek, B. A.,…
Continue ReadingAaron Panofsky (Associate Professor in the Institute for Society and Genetics, Public Policy, and Sociology, UCLA) is your typical history focused Jewish, anti-racist academic. Some years ago, he wrote an interesting book, Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics (2014), a history on behavioral genetics. Although hostile, it contains a lot of interesting…
Continue ReadingSee also Sesardić’s conjecture, a related idea. Publication bias as normally considered is really positive publication bias, i.e., the bias is away from zero, towards finding larger than reality results. There is another form, however, more rare, called reverse publication bias, or negative publication bias, where published results are biased towards the null. This pattern…
Continue ReadingBeing on Twitter you quickly run into some people calling themselves scientists, but who seem to not be doing much science at all and instead spending their time on politics and self-promotion, not to mention book sales. Some years ago, some economists did some numbers on this and came up with the Kardashian Index (original…
Continue ReadingGunnar Myrdal, who was Swedish, expresses an early version of the views the media repeat endlessly these days. To give some examples: White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually…
Continue ReadingA common comment on bias in scientific peer review is that reviewers don’t usually say openly they are applying double standards. Instead, they just silently increase their standards. If their bias against some finding is strong, the evidential burden to meet goes to infinity, making sure that nothing is rigorous enough to pass review. A…
Continue ReadingSpier, R. (2002). Peer review and innovation. Science and Engineering Ethics, 8(1), 99-108. This little read paper from 2002 is worth quoting at length. It underlines the inability of peer review to identify important studies, and its role in guarding the status quo in the field. Based on such thinking, some people have come to…
Continue ReadingThere’s a lot of evidence for left-wing dominance of academia. One study (Langbert 2018) looked at registered voters and finds quite unbelievable differences: In this article I offer new evidence about something readers of Academic Questions already know: The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty…
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