Seven of the greatest academic works of satire of all time

May 26, 2023

1) What do you do when a predatory journal keeps spam emailing you to get you to make a submission? Submit this paper to their journal: 2) To succeed in academia, you need lots of publications. But the order of authors' names on a paper impacts who gets the credit. Thankfully, there's a technological solution to make every author the first author: 3) As much an insightful look at academic practice as it is a work of satire, this paper&nbsp...

Demystifying p-values

December 31, 2022

There is a tremendous amount of confusion around what a p-value actually is, despite their widespread use in science. Here is my attempt to explain the concept of p-values concisely and clearly (including why they are useful and what often goes wrong with them). — What's a p-value? — If you run a study, then (all else equal, aside from rare edge cases) the lower the p-value, the lower the chance that your results are due to random chance or luck. More precisely: a p-value is the probab...

Importance Hacking: a major (yet rarely-discussed) problem in science

December 19, 2022

I first published this post on the Clearer Thinking blog on December 19, 2022, and first cross-posted it to this site on January 21, 2023. You have probably heard the phrase "replication crisis." It refers to the grim fact that, in a number of fields of science, when researchers attempt to replicate previously published studies, they fairly often don't get the same results. The magnitude of the problem depends on the field, but in psychology, it seems that something like 40% of studies i...