ColumbiaXY

"Maduro es un déspota, un tirano!"

On the Bullshit & pseudo-research dominating nearly all Social Sciences and the Media

"If you're Math is wrong, I don't care about the carefully crafted storytelling in your 'research' paper! It's not your rhetorical skills that should be evaluated!"

Today's office-journalists and the pseudo-scholars inhabiting the social sciences -including psychologists,macro-economists and sociologists- are probably some of the most dogmatic people you can hope to find. They pull threads together from very weak evidence and draw grand conclusions based on them. They’re ironically very predictable from week to week. For example, if you know the subject that some journo or whatever is writing about "you don’t have to read the column. You can kind of auto-script it. They're people who have very strong ideological priors that are governing their thinking. They’re not really evaluating the data as it comes in, not doing a lot of [original] thinking. They’re just spitting out the same column every week and using a different subject matter to do the same thing over and over. It’s ridiculous that they undermine every value that these organizations have in their newsrooms. It’s strange. I know it’s cheaper to fund an op-ed columnist than a team of reporters, but I think it confuses the mission of what these great journalistic brands are about." (NS)

The greatest weakness of conventional journalism: hiring blogger-material journalists that have beautiful English language skills and NO math skills.

A few great reads on the replication crisis:

• Science's 'Replication Crisis' Has Reached Even The Most Respectable Journals, Report Shows
• Why 'Statistical Significance' Is Often Insignificant. Researchers who want professorships are sometimes driven to publish suspect findings.
• 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility (Nature magazine)
• On systematic research fraud and research misconduct (Nature magazine)
• P-values are just the tip of the iceberg. Ridding science of shoddy statistics will require scrutiny of every step, not merely the last one. (Nature magazine) "Arguing about the P value is like focusing on a single misspelling, rather than on the faulty logic of a sentence."
• Stop ignoring misconduct. (Nature magazine) Efforts to reduce irreproducibility in research must also tackle the temptation to cheat"

"Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias." (John P. A. Ioannidis)

Tips

° Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman on pseudo-science and how to become an "expert" that The Guardian, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed or Fox News can quote authoritatively.

° Recentism is a huge wikipedia problem. It's what makes wikipedia more tabloid, less informative and more of a waste of time in general. A real encyclopedia should not be the place where you read the most recent gossip, junk research and journalist opinions.

° Behavioral studies show discussions are typically wastes of time. That applies to wikipedia too! Voting is what matters. Be concise but don't waste too much time debating and vote! It will make wikipedia better.

° When are research findings less likely to be true? An incomplete list of hints from Stanford's Prevention Research Center John Ioannidis

• when the studies conducted in a field are smaller
• when effect sizes are smaller
• when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice involved
• when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance
• when there is a greater number and lesser pre-selection of tested relationships
• where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes

On Bullshit Culture

Obama's speechwriter Jon Lovett said it best: “One of the greatest threats we face is, simply put, bullshit. We’re drowning in it. We’re drowning in partisan rhetoric that’s just true enough not to be a lie, in industry-sponsored research, in social media’s imitation of human connection, in legalese and corporate double-speak. It infects every facet of public life, corrupting our discourse, wrecking our trust in major institutions, lowering our standards for the truth, making it harder to achieve anything.”