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Science

A collection of 31 issues

Peer to Peer

Peers are equals, except as reviewers, when they are more like capricious dictators. (Or when they are members of a peerage.) We review our peers’ work because we know that we are all fallible. And because we know that the single best way we can overcome our own limitations is

Motivated Citations

The best kind of insight is the ‘duh’ insight—catching something that is exceedingly common, almost routine, but something that no one talks about. I believe this is one such insight. The standards for citing congenial research (that supports the hypothesis of choice) are considerably lower than the standards for

The Case for Ending Closed Academic Publishing

A few commercial publishers publish a large chunk of top flight of academic research. And earn a pretty penny doing so. The standard operating model of the publishers is as follows: pay the editorial board no more than $70-$100k, pay for typesetting and publishing, and in turn get copyrights

Bad Remedies for Bad Science

Lack of reproducibility is a symptom of science in crisis. An eye-catching symptom to be sure, but hardly the only one vying for attention. Recent analyses suggest that nearly two-thirds of the (relevant set of) articles published in prominent political science journals condition on post-treatment variables (see here.) Another analysis

Stemming the Propagation of Error

About half of the (relevant set of) articles published in neuroscience mistake difference between a significant result and an insignificant result as evidence for the two being significantly different (see here). It would be good to see if the articles that make this mistake, for instance, received fewer citations post

Reviewing the Peer Review

Update: Current version is posted here. Science is a process. For a good deal of time, peer review has been an essential part of the process. When looked at independently by people with no experience with it, it makes a fair bit of sense. For there is only one well-known

Reducing Errors in Survey Analysis

Analysis of survey data is hard to automate because of the immense variability across survey instruments—differentvariables, differently coded, and named in ways that often defy even the most fecund imagination. What often replaces complete automation is ad-hoc automation—quickly coded functions, e.g. recoding a variable to lie within

It is 'possible' that people may warm up to the science of warming

In science we believe Belief in science is likely partly based on scientists’ ability to predict. As M.S. notes, climate scientists accurately predicted that temperatures were going to rise in the future in late 1980s. Hence, for people who are aware of that (like himself), belief in climate science

Causality and Generalization in Qualitative and Quantitative Methods

Science deals with the fundamental epistemological question of how we can claim to know something. The quality of the system, forever open to challenge, determines any claims of epistemic superiority that the scientific method may make over other competing claims of gleaning knowledge from data. The extent to which claims

Qualitative Vs. Quantitative Methods

Epistemology of Causality How do we know that something is the ’cause’ of something and how do we impute ‘causality’ through data? To impute causality in quantitative models, we rely on the argument that it is unlikely that the change in Y could be explained by anything else other than