social sciences
Researchers: There is an inference crisis as well as a replication crisis
Physics envy is a terrible thing, especially in economists
Darwinian Jerry Coyne makes a good point about the social science hoaxes
Portland U prof who hoaxed social science journals to prove a point is punished
Can the history of medicine help social sciences out of their dark ages?
Jerry Coyne has another reason to be mad at Templeton
Social science hoax papers: Putting a respectable face on persecuting the hoaxers
Embattled “social sciences hoax” prof is not a hero, he’s a canary
Social science hoaxer’s job at risk for revealing “bias”
Talk about a perfect storm! Social science needs evolutionary theory?
Quillette: Young scholar denounced as “racist” by mob of 300 elders; evidence not cited
Probably not wanted either: The latest victim of an academic mobbing is 28-year-old social scientist Noah Carl who has been awarded a Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellowship at St Edmund’s College at the University of Cambridge. Rarely has the power asymmetry between the academic mob and its victim been so stark. Dr Carl is a young researcher, just starting out in his career, who is being mobbed for being awarded a prestigious research scholarship on the basis of his peer-reviewed research … Three hundred academics from around the world, many of them professors, have signed an open letter denouncing Dr Carl and demanding that the University of Cambridge “immediately conduct an investigation into the appointment process” on the grounds Read More ›
Evolutionary psychology: The cat among the pigeons!
Confession: Some of us never took evolutionary psychology (a discipline whose subject died a very long time ago but allegedly lives on in all of us) seriously enough to wonder if it could actually create controversies in psychology. Apparently so: In terms of the political bias among social psychologists, Buss and von Hippel found that 95 per cent were mostly liberal and left-wing in their views (also, among the US respondents, only 4 had voted Republican in the prior Presidential election while 305 had voted Democrat). Quizzing the social psychologists on their views of evolutionary theory, Buss and von Hippel found that they overwhelmingly accepted the principles of Darwinian evolution and also that it applied to humans, but when it came Read More ›
Half of social science replication studies failed under near-ideal conditions
It’s becoming harder to ignore the stench: The drive recruited labs around the world to try to replicate the results of 28 classic and contemporary psychology experiments. Only half were reproduced successfully using a strict threshold for significance that was set at P < 0.0001 (the P value is a common test for judging the strength of scientific evidence). Brian Owens, “Replication failures in psychology not due to differences in study populations” at Nature So why did so many classic studies fail? The account in Nature doesn’t say but that won’t The Atlantic, stop people wondering: Despite the large sample sizes and the blessings of the original teams, the team failed to replicate half of the studies it focused on. It Read More ›
Social sciences: The war on empirical fact and objectivity
Some of us have a perhaps unhealthy fascination with just how bad the social sciences have become. We hope we can justify our amazement (and hilarity) over the easy hoaxes and all that on the grounds that real science also faces a war on math (“say goodbye to x and y”). Watching what happens to the previous victim may be instructive, and here’s one analysis worth considering: Things are different now. I first got an inkling of this more than three decades ago. Sorting through some old papers, I found this quote from an unnamed British sociologist speaking at a talk in 1986: “Theories in science are not constrained in any way by empirical facts.” I noted that most of Read More ›