I didn’t think this still happened in 2018 . . . I opened my email to see 50 emails, from 50 different people, all with the same meaningless subject line. (In case you’re curious, it was “Re: Clerkships team.”) There was no initial email: All 50 of the messages were of the form, “Hey, this […] The post Reply-all loop appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
Asher Meir points us to this post by Christie Aschwanden entitled, “Can Teamwork Solve One Of Psychology’s Biggest Problems?”, which begins: Psychologist Christopher Chartier admits to a case of “physics envy.” That field boasts numerous projects on which international research teams come together to tackle big questions. Just think of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider or […] The post The “Psychological Science Accelerator”: it’s probably a good idea but I’m still…
Brad Groff writes: Thought you might find this post by Ferenc Huszar interesting. Commentary on how we create knowledge in machine learning research and how we resolve benchmark results with (belated) theory. Key passage: You can think of “making a a deep learning method work on a dataset” as a statistical test. I would argue […] The post Ways of knowing in computer science and statistics appeared first on Statistical…
Under the heading, “please blog about this,” Shravan Vasishth writes: This book by a theoretical physicist [Sabine Hossenfelder] is awesome. The book trailer is here. Some quotes from her blog: “theorists in the foundations of physics have been spectacularly unsuccessful with their predictions for more than 30 years now.” “Everyone is happily producing papers in […] The post When does the quest for beauty lead science astray? appeared first on…
(This is Dan) As conference season rolls into gear, I thought I’d write a short post contrasting some responses by statistical societies to the conversation that the community has been having about harassment of women and minorities at workshops and conferences. ISI: Do what I say, not what I do Let’s look at a different diversity […] The post One good and one bad response to statistics’ diversity problem appeared first…
Abigail Haddad writes: In The post Do women want more children than they end up having? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
Following on a post on Tom Wolfe’s evolution-denial trolling, Thanatos Savehn pointed to this obituary, “Jerry A. Fodor, Philosopher Who Plumbed the Mind’s Depths, Dies at 82,” which had lots of interesting items, including this: “We think that what is needed,” they wrote, “is to cut the tree at its roots: to show that Darwin’s […] The post A style of argument can be effective in an intellectual backwater but…
Palko writes: The postwar era (roughly defined here as 1945 to 1970) was a period of such rapid and ubiquitous technological and scientific advances that people naturally assumed that this rate of progress would continue or even accelerate. This led not just futurists like Arthur C Clarke but also researchers in the fields to underestimate […] The post We’re putting together a list of big, high profile goals that proved…
Bill Jefferys sends along this excellent newspaper article by Siddhartha Mukherjee, “A failure to heal,” about the necessity—and the difficulty—of admitting failure in research and clinical practice. Mukherjee writes: What happens when a clinical trial fails? This year, the Food and Drug Administration approved some 40 new medicines to treat human illnesses, including 13 for […] The post The necessity—and the difficulty—of admitting failure in research and clinical practice appeared…
Brandon Stell writes: The PubPeer Foundation will soon be launching a new scientific discussion project: “Peeriodicals”. As you will discover by following the link below, Peeriodicals are virtual journals with you as Editor-in-chief. I love this idea, in part because it reminds me of my proposal to replace journals with recommender systems. The only post […] The post “Peeriodicals”: A new system of virtual journals appeared first on Statistical Modeling,…
