José Duarte, PhD

Category: science

  • Thoughts on Gelman comment

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    I posted this comment in reply to Andrew Gelman’s post on his website. Neil Gross and Gelman have submitted a Comment to our upcoming BBS paper. I’ll have a lot more to say about our paper in the coming months, especially when it’s officially published:——————————————————————————————————————– Hi Andrew, Thanks for your Comment. A few thoughts:1) We…

  • Don’t be a skeptic / the noun problem

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    I don’t think you should be a skeptic. Not on the severity of human-caused warming, the safety of GMOs, or a few other things. Consider: 1. I’m a skeptic. — or — 2. I’m skeptical of the predictive power of climate science at this point. When you choose the noun, you’ve chosen membership in a…

  • How not to report science

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    I was disappointed to see this article by Gayathri Vaidyanathan in Scientific American: How to Misinterpret Climate Change Research. It’s an attempt to defang the recent surge of interest in Bjørn Stevens’ aerosol forcing estimates. To some people, those estimates imply a lower estimate of ECS, and a reduced likelihood of the more extreme future warming scenarios…

  • The “Hottest year on record” fallacy

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    2014 was the hottest year on record by some hundredths of a degree. It was not significantly hotter than 2005 or 2010. See the Berkeley BEST lab for details. Global surface warming paused or slowed down after 1998 – there is some dispute about whether to call it a pause or a slowdown. We’ll treat…

  • Why eight fingers would (probably) increase Type-1 error

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    In a comment on my post on Significance, I discovered that our rate of published Type-1 error in science would probably be higher if humans had eight fingers instead of ten. Type-1 error is when we wrongly reject the null hypothesis – when our studies seem to give us evidence of an effect or link…

  • p-values banned

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    This is so refreshing. The Journal of Basic and Applied Social Psychology has banned p-values. And confidence intervals. Their reasons are extremely good reasons, and well-articulated. I forgot to stress this point explicitly in the recent essay on the Lewandowsky fraud, but descriptive statistics always trump inferential. A p-value has no inherent substantive meaning, nor…

  • SPSP; data

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    I love SPSP, the conference for the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, the flagship professional organization for social psychology. It always messes me up, in a good way. Conferences and colloquia are pleasantly unpleasant for me. They’re extremely generative. Whatever a researcher is talking about always sparks a cascade of ideas for me. This…

  • On fraud

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    I’ve never had to think about scientific fraud until the last few months. It’s been an interesting journey. I’ve got a paper coming soon that focuses on this issue. I’m of two minds about the need to think about it. It raises interesting ethical and epistemological questions, and I’m deeply interested in both ethics and…

  • Methods

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    Let’s say you want to find out what climate skeptics think and why they think it. What’s a better method? 1. Find a registry on the blogosphere where climate skeptics have laid out their views in some detail, and how they came to those views, as well as their educational and professional backgrounds. Read these…

  • Structure of Malpractice 1: The Frog Jump

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    Here is a tiny preview of upcoming methodological work relevant to recent events: The Frog Jump You have two survey variables: Variable 1: ABVariable 2: CD AB: A and B are opposites sharing a 4-point scale (2 pts for A; 2 pts for B)CD: C and D are opposites sharing a 4-point scale (2 pts…