Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
Neuroscience 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…
Continue ReadingIn the interest of keeping the scientific enterprise towards finding truth, it is important to reduce the impact of problematic studies in the scientific literature. Studies can be problematic in many ways (e.g. lacks a control for genetic confounding in social science), but one relatively simple problem to automatically identify is low precision due to…
Continue ReadingScience is a set of related methods that aim at finding true patterns about the world. These methods are generally designed so as to remove noise from random circumstances (the traditional focus of statistics) and human biases. Current practices are currently not very good at the second part due to the innumerable ways human biases…
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