scientific validity Archives - Page 2 of 3

How not to report science

Apr 23, 2015

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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

Mar 5, 2015

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in climate change, scientific validity

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…

p-values banned

Feb 26, 2015

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in scientific validity, social psychology

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

Feb 24, 2015

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in scientific validity, social psychology

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…

Structure of Malpractice 1: The Frog Jump

Feb 19, 2015

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in scientific validity, social psychology

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…

Methods

Feb 19, 2015

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in climate consensus studies, ideological bias, scientific validity, Social Science

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…

Significance

Feb 15, 2015

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in scientific validity, Social Science

I was struck by this quote from a Forbes piece on the secondhand smoke research. “there’s no such thing as borderline statistical significance. It’s either significant or it’s not.” It’s attributed to a journalist named Christopher Snowdon (I don’t know who that is.) It’s false, and I think it’s important for us to convey a…

Comment on Verheggen et al.; climate consensus research

Feb 13, 2015

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in climate consensus studies, scientific validity

Here’s my recent Comment on Verheggen et al. in Environmental Science & Technology. Their core argument in their Reply is that all the non-climate scientists who were invited to participate in this survey because of their climate-related papers – all the psychologists, sociologists, Marxists, economists, palladium experts, etc. – would deny having done any climate-related…

I was denied admission to a PhD program because of my perceived political views: reflections of a sellout; how diversity would strengthen social science (Updated)

Feb 10, 2015

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in academia, ideological bias, Social Science

Some of my mentors advised me to take down the post from July 22, 2014 about discrimination because it would hurt me in the job market – that hiring committees would discriminate against me (again) for my perceived political views, or would discriminate against me for documenting past discrimination. So I took it down last week.…

How one paleo-participant can change the outcome of a study

Jan 6, 2015

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in ideological bias, scientific fraud, Social Science

Lewandowsky, Gignac, and Oberauer (2013) authored “The Role of Conspiracist Ideation and Worldviews in Predicting Rejection of Science” in PLOS ONE. (Paper here.) This study has many of the same features as their Psychological Science scam. In that study, they falsely linked belief in the moon-landing hoax to climate skepticism when in fact only three participants…

Category: scientific validity