Also this week: scientific content on social media has been nerfed, wizards vs. prophets, memes vs. reproducibility, and more.
I’m a bit late to this, but here’s Dorothy Bishop’s excellent post on what it takes to make a line of scientific research stop. Totally agree as to a part of the problem: when a scientific audience sees a null result, their first response is to dream up reasons why some non-null result might have been overlooked. Pursuing those reasons provides a rationale to continue studying the topic, rather than switching to studying something else. Andrew Gelman also comments.
Erik Hoel argues that scientific content–really, all non-political content–on social media has been nerfed. I wouldn’t really know, since I haven’t done any research on this and I’m not on social media myself. Part of me wonders if it’s not that science content on social media has been nerfed, but that it was never not nerfed. I would be curious to hear from scicomm/outreach folks on this.
Wait, at least some NSF staff have been told that it would be illegal for them to reveal the funding rates for various NSF programs? I have no idea what to make of this; funding rates for many NSF programs are right there in NSF’s annual reports.
Matt Clancy reviews what little is known about the effects of scientific training programs targeted at low- and middle-income countries.
Jane PSmith reviews The Wizard and the Prophet. I bought it years ago, but never got around to reading it.
John PSmith reviews Einstein’s Unification. Makes for an interesting counterpoint to The Knowledge Machine (that last link goes to my review of The Knowledge Machine).
Good news: Notre Dame cathedral is about to reopen, five years after a devastating fire. Here’s hoping that certain environmentalists with large platforms don’t shoot their own cause in the foot by talking about the reopening the same way they did about the fire (another example).
“Is your analysis fully reproducible, son?” 🙂