I should probably explain this, with context. Over several years we have caught MANY researchers playing silly buggers with artificial cutoffs designed to engineer group differences. (No one more so than the Vitamin D weirdos. One of the least reliable and most annoying areas of health research.)

So @jamesheathers.bsky.social & I answer the burning question: does Cake cause Herpes? No, but one can torture the data to give that impression, and that's a problem. Promiscuous dichotomisation in biomedical science hugely increases spurious findings, best avoided link.springer.com/article/10.1...

“The authors have informed the journal that an auditable replacement dataset has been prepared and will be made available to The BMJ. The BMJ will update this notice and make a decision about what post-publication change to the content is needed.” I am not enjoying the implications of this.

James Watson was so old that Sharon Begley had his obit ready to go. (She died herself in 2021.) I’m not rehashing all the ludicrous offensive shit he believed. You’ve heard it. www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/j...

These are mill papers. Further reading, @reeserichardson.bsky.social may have more: www.researchgate.net/publication/... ... and hilariously a 'bibliometric' analysis that doesn't mention paper mills: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Ok, just wow. If the content of this article is right, this is depressing. We're slowly reaching the point where ~100% of what I was taught in Social Psych was either innocently wrong or plainly frauded onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Someday I will not have to write about Sarepta Therapeutics and their ineffective drugs that never should have been approved by the FDA in the first place. This is not that day.

It’s early November and no I will not be providing context.

People often miss something about these headlines. 1. This is bone idle useless image manipulation - detectable, obvious after you learn to look for it. 2. It’s a lower bound. The phrase is “a minimum of 40% of this literature contains easily detectable image manipulation”. Sleep well.

Something this funny can't be inappropriate. It's just a concept made up by Big HR to funnel work to shiftless psychology graduates.

if you weren't supposed to invest in them then why are they named financiers

"Keep posting videos of me being vulnerable, and I’ll start posting videos of you eating your feelings."

I mean... @mehr.nz might have given the most based academic interview I've ever read

They were already suspended, now they're delisted. Cureus has had an outsized impact on the sheer volume of nonsense research for years, and I wonder if WoS felt like they had a choice. I won't miss it. retractionwatch.com/2025/10/27/e...

Aunt: [slaps him twice] Wicked child!Chairs are an invention of Satan! In our house, Nathaniel sits on a spike! Edmund: ... and yourself? Aunt: I sit on Nathaniel -- two spikes would be an extravagance.

“The authors considered a model’s answer to be sycophantic if it failed to detect the errors in a statement and went on to hallucinate a proof for it.” Well that is quite congruent with my experience. A question that starts with “is it possible to…” tends to devolve from “sure it is!” to “ahh no”

It feels to me like this happens more, and more, and more. Digital things just... snap. Everything is some weird combination of tough and fragile. I really don't need a growing sense of foreboding to go with my other... pre-existing growing sense of foreboding thanks.

NEVER!!! - dashare.zone ADMIN

Q-Collar studies are great for learning about confounding factors and here is why. www.linkedin.com/posts/mu-yan.... @jsmoliga.bsky.social @bachynski.bsky.social @isaacerbele.bsky.social

Cat updates. Cleanse.

“using any other threshold, including those that might be considered typically meaningful for blood glucose content (for instance, 3.9, 5.6, or 6.9 mmol/L) would destroy the cake-herpes illusion entirely” May we all have our chances to destroy the cake-herpes illusion in this grim life.

guess who got a paper published called... Cake Causes Herpes (well @drg.bsky.social did i just helped by taking out all the rude words)

A brief update: After founding inquisitivemag.org for HxA, I left that position and just took a new job as inaugural editor for the Center for Scientific Integrity’s Medical Evidence Project. Yes, I now work for the people who bring you @retractionwatch.com 😀

The meeting notes of this autumn's JUFO board meeting are out & can say these are the most interesting meta-science published every time they come out (highlights🧵) julkaisufoorumi.fi/sites/defaul...

I DON'T NEED TO SAVE TIME. I AM HERE SPECIFICALLY TO READ THE LONG DOCUMENT. STOP OPTIMIZING ME.

Hotshot Peasant Has Window

Why are the cowardly MSM not covering this vital question? 🤔

Free data resources in science are having the shit mined out of them to produce X,000's of bullshit papers. What should we do? (Warning: I sat on this draft for too long, and publishers are already doing some of it. That's what I get for engaging with the news.) open.substack.com/pub/jamescla...

MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ Awarded To Inventor Of Eatin’ Shirt https://theonion.com/macarthur-genius-grant-awarded-to-inventor-of-eatin-shirt/

Interesting! Long story behind this if you've read the various biographical bits and pieces of Donleavy. www.nytimes.com/1971/12/28/a...

Every time someone wants to decide something on merit alone

My article "Data is not available upon request" was published in Meta-Psychology. Very happy to see this out! open.lnu.se/index.php/me...

This is a fascinating story. A Lebanese team published a study showing massive benefits for apple cider vinegar in 2024. People immediately noticed it was problematic, and complained. BMJ asked the authors for the data, and they sent it through. The study has just been retracted and WOW 1/n

I'm sorry but I refuse point blank to believe that Philip Faircloth-Mutton is a real person.

OOOHHHHHHHHHHHHH

This is interesting - a forensic report that isn’t about science but about what they were originally designed for: money. Get ready for a whole lot of Benford analysis! taxpolicy.org.uk/2025/07/27/h... taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/u...

I’m looking at a specific paper mill in India. So far, I have detected 339 papers, 105 of which were published in 2025. Only the biggest publishers are being targeted. Only two papers have been retracted. This is the dashboard of a paper mill. lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/36... #papermills

Grey Sabbath My Life with the Thrill Kill Social Club Boyowar (Or Manoscuffle) Tin Maiden GCONFLICT Electric Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Simonsohn has now posted a blog response to our recent paper about the poor statistical properties of the P curve. @clintin.bsky.social and I are finishing up a less-technical paper that will serve as a response. But I wanted to address a meta-issue *around* this that may clarify some things. 1/x

Would p-curve work if you dropped a piano on it? datacolada.org/129

I fear somebody in the Australian government may have misunderstood the meaning of pull requests

About fifteen months ago, someone handed me a bad study. Today it was retracted. So far, so normal. But do I just want to yell at journals and publishers again? Hell no. What could they actually DO to be better at handling this sort of nonsense? open.substack.com/pub/jamescla...

People are making Rapture jokes like there's no tomorrow

GUESS WHAT WEEK IT IS

Bloomberg Defends NYPD's Controversial Stop And Kiss Program

Part of a broader movement within trash papers -- fast analyses from available datasets. We've made it so easy to write a real-but-bad paper that they're outcompeting industrial fraud production. However, they still leave great big obvious clues...

The Candlemass cover of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Bc why not. youtu.be/DvPCYdk0Q8Y?...