There are no shortcuts to knowledge
As many of you know, right before the election I made a $50 bet with Hank Campbell that Nate Silver would get at least 48 out of 50 states correct for the 2008 presidential election. I also got one of Hank’s readers to sign on to the same bet. Additionally, a few readers and Twitter followers […]
Iterating science, supercharged
Science is about “updating” with new information. But people are attached to their propositions, and shifts in paradigms can take a very long time, often dependent more on human lifespans than the constellation of the data. But please see this post by Luke Jostins’ over at Genomes Unzipped. He has “updated” his own view of […]
Richard Lewontin against the age
Richard Lewontin’s fame rests in part on his pioneering role in the development of the field of molecular evolution, and secondarily due to his trenchant Left-wing politics. Several readers have already pointed me to his rather strange review of two new works in The New York Review of Books. The prose strikes me as viscous […]
A dangerous man
I was a little sad when I heard my friend Steve Hsu had accepted a position at Michigan State some months back. My reasons were two-fold. First, I swing by Eugene now and then, and I wouldn’t have the opportunity to drop in on his office. Second,…
The real end of science
Fifteen years ago John Horgan wrote The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age. I remain skeptical as to the specific details of this book, but Carl’s write-up in The New York Times of a new paper in …
A social science of the obvious
I’m reading Jim Manzi’s Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society right now. No complaints, though that’s no surprise, as I’m familiar with the broad outline’s of Manzi̵…
Peer of myself
Dr. Joe Pickrell has a follow up to his widely discussed post on updating scientific publication for the 21st century. One section jumped out at me, not because it was revolutionary, but because it made explicit a complaint that I had often heard:
The …
How to get beyond bias in science?
Here’s a comment which is interesting, if hard to actually engage with because of the difficulty of the subject matter:
You’re obviously aware of the arguments employed by feminists in the critique of the philosophy of science; that cultural va…
arXiv! arXiv! arXiv!
Over the Nielsen Group blog, Time to jump into the arXiv?:
There is one other drawback to the arXiv that makes me, as a potential submitter, very nervous: being scooped.
A paper is “scooped” if someone else publishes the same (or very similar) conc…
The art of science
Over at Scientific American Blogs Maria Konnikova posts Humanities aren’t a science. Stop treating them like one. The whole write-up leaves me scratching my head, because I don’t really get what the whole point of all the prose is. This is a t…
Why you shouldn’t publish in PNAS
Update: It’s online.
Well, maybe the title is hyperbolic. But it’s been frustrating for years that PNAS seems to have some of the most backward post-publication delay policies/patterns in the business. So, for example there’s a new pa…
On Jonah Lehrer
Since Jonah Lehrer came up in the open thread last week, I’m going to mention it. First, I’ll preface this by saying that my interactions with Jonah, who I labeled the “boy king of cognitive neuroscience” jokingly at one point, …
Deceiving with data
Matt Yglesias on the enthusiasm for data mining in economics:
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers hail the way increases in computing power are opening vast new horizons of empirical economics.
I have no doubt that this is, on the whole, change for the…
Biology discovers arXiv (sort of)
Last year when Dr. Joseph Pickrell posted Why publish science in peer-reviewed journals? at Genomes Unzipped many of the responses naturally turned to criticism of such a system which overturned the conventions of publication in biology. The critiques …
The punch first culture
Dr. Daniel MacArthur has a nice write-up in Nature, Methods: Face up to false positives:
Few principles are more depressingly familiar to the veteran scientist: the more surprising a result seems to be, the less likely it is to be true. We cannot know …
You can’t scoop someone else’s brain
arXiving our papers:
I, and I’m sure other people, have worried about being scooped and beaten to publication due our arXived papers. But really this is silly as we’ve usually given talks, posters, etc on them at big conferences, so the idea that p…
More on jobs & Ph.D.s
First, I’m sure that the blue-collar readers of this weblog are thinking “cry me a river.” Yes, American scientists (perhaps excluding engineers, and to a lesser extent pharmaceutical researchers) are generally Left-liberal, but the c…
It’s science, not math
My post below elicited this response:
Here are a couple of cases which seem to defy easy classification.
A “chimera”. This is a person who has cells derived from two zygotes. It can happen if two fertilized eggs merge very early in development. Th…
Bias in psychology
Ed Yong has a piece in Nature on the problems of confirmation bias and replication in psychology. Yong notes that “It has become common practice, for example, to tweak experimental designs in ways that practically guarantee positive results.̶…
Types of genetics
Molecular genetics
Developmental genetics
Population genetics
Quantitative genetics
Phylogenetics
Thoughts? Recently had a discussion whether phylogeneticists considered themselves geneticists (qualified “no”). Quantitative genetics really…