Also this week: the best stats paper you’ll read this week was written in 1962, among-study heterogeneity vs. replicability, living is a way of life in Canada, the intuition behind carbon tax rebates, and more.
Also this week: disturbing survey on equity and harassment in economics, the emotion police, Darwin jokes, and more.
Possibly-weird question, inspired by this tweet: why are all zombie ideas simple? Why is it that, whenever many people working in a field believe X despite a lack of good evidence and arguments for X, or even despite good evidence … Continue reading
Also this week: nerd sniping Stephen Heard, what’s a better word for p-hacking, the latest modern aRt, worst zoo exhibit ever, and more.
How did I not know about this until now?! The above is from the 3rd (2014) Canadian edition of Manuel Molles & James Cahill’s Ecology textbook. “Zombie ideas”! In a textbook!
As regular readers know, I worry a lot about zombie ideas–ideas that should be dead, but aren’t. Zombie ideas are the most important failures of science’s self-correction mechanisms: they’re big, widespread errors or misconceptions that aren’t recognized as such. Over … Continue reading
Statistician Cosma Shalizi is a really sharp guy, who writes wonderfully on everything from technical statistical topics to philosophy of statistics to books about the Soviet Union. The notes for his undergraduate stats courses are online, and they basically comprise … Continue reading
Also this week: prediction markets vs. replicability, Photoshop vs. Bill Nye, Marc Cadotte on Chinese science, honest Student, what to get Rich Lenski, Meg, and Ben Bolker for Christmas, and more!
Also this week: “charging a cover” for students to attend lab, the (ridiculous) ecology of Tatooine, and Florence Nightingale vs. Twitter trolls. Oh, and I make fun of some pseudoscience. From Jeremy: Jerry Coyne argues that there are no ring … Continue reading
Yesterday at the ongoing American Society of Naturalists meeting in Asilomar there was a formal debate on the proposition “the house believes that species richness on continents is dominated by ecological limits.” Dan Rabosky and Allen Hurlbert argued for the … Continue reading
Dynamic Ecology 