once again, i found myself diving into the supplements of a recent mega-metastudy to track the numbers reported in a table in the main paper to the source and i am at a loss. there's no way of connecting the data summarized in the table to raw data. the supplements are a mess. reproduce if you dare.

The horse op-ed is an instant classic. I can't tell you how much joy this piece gives me. It should be taught in every introductory writing class in no small part because the horse arguments are so compelling. "I have noticed that human children get to eat cake. But I am bigger than the children."

How do we know if research is credible? In Abatayo et al., 86 of us combined evidence across the SCORE program including replicability, reproducibility, robustness, human and machine assessments to understand relationships among many potential credibility measures. 1/ Paper: osf.io/preprints/me...

"In the most extreme case, our model achieved the top rank on a standard chest X-ray question-answering benchmark without access to any images." Well this isn't good 😮 arxiv.org/abs/2603.21687

Updating my mixed-effects modelling slides... I have opinions... #statsmeme

A new contender for best headline

This oil painting is titled "Quartier Latin Paris - View of Place de la Contrescarpe" by the artist Mona Edulesco. It depicts a textured, post-impressionist view of the Parisian cityscape from a rustic interior window.

Question for the Bsky hive mind: what’s the most batshit pop Evolutionary Psychology study you’ve ever come across? Particularly interested in examples in the area of female parental investment, but I’ll take others too …

Every day is a good day for sharing one of the most useful papers about research data ever written. PLEASE get your people to understand and follow this advice. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

seems like it's currently almost impossible to get any funding for metascientific work without plugging in some *AI* somewhere or proposing to automate some scientific processes. so we know what kind of metascience will populate journals in the next five years.

YEAH OKAY NOW WE ARE COOKIN WITH GAS

"This is not efficiency... This is the systematic elimination of scientific stewardship at the world’s largest biomedical research funder. And most people have no idea it is happening." Destroying the research that will power future discoveries and violating the Constitution

Sadly, I think the CRediT taxonomy is being misused. Anyone can just make stuff up about paper contributions. Here we have an article where 5 authors were credited with "visualisation" in a paper with no figures. pubpeer.com/publications...

"Synergy between the credibility revolution and human development in Africa" online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art... We note places where the broader open science movement and the world of global development do and do not match. We also highlight barriers to research capacity & some interventions

Grammarly's AI-fueled edits -- using my name - suggested making up sources and writing vague insinuations. In my latest for @nytopinion.nytimes.com (gift link) I describe Grammarly's terrible edits in my name -- and call for a federal right of publicity. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/o...

Towards more reliable research: Today, together with @bihatcharite.bsky.social, we welcomed the 2025 #EinsteinFoundationAward winners: @simine.com, Maximilian Sprang, and the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative @redebrrepro.bsky.social. A recording will be available soon.

Busara’s journey toward becoming an Institutional Scientific and Ethics Review Committee (ISERC) continues to gain momentum. Last week, members of the Busara committee participated in an intensive five-day training facilitated by National Commission for Science and Technology (NACOSTI).

Maybe in hindsight not the greatest idea to brag about the sheer volume of MTurk studies you're conducting? P.S. For a second I thought that Malte added the MTurk thing himself as a joke, but no. It's right there on the website. Major "grad student who never said no" energy.

Scientists/science writers I found in Grammarly's 'expert review' system: David Spiegelhalter, Ivan Oransky, Mary Roach, Rebecca Skloot, Ed Yong, Melinda Wenner Moyer, Deborah Blum, Tom Knight, Michael E Mann, Corinne Le Quere. [pic: results of 5 trials w/ free burner acct]. No doubt many more.

You should also just read the article on disability dongles. The framework it lays out could be valuable for pushing back against a wide array of proposed "AI" use cases.

Fontana thinking his 6000+ experiments may not have been enough to feel confident in his conclusions in the 18th century while we expect our singular experiments and their standalone replications to do wonders some 250 years later... (excerpt from the intro of Jutta Schickore's About Experiment)

Finally this long-last meta-research is done! We examine the demographics of subject from 1000 Chinese psych journal articles & 27 big-teams science. Findings: these participant are not representative of the 🇨🇳population, in terms of sex, age, & edu. @btscon.bsky.social @sakshighai.bsky.social

This, from Ezra Klein, matches up with my experience. There are far too many journalists for whom this applies. Or to put it another way: I sometimes say my sole advantage, as a journalist, is that I am willing to go to the library. howiwrite.substack.com/p/ezra-klein...

the "Dune" series of books tackles the age-old question of "would you still love me if i was a worm", eventually arriving at the answer of "your petty imperialism will not withstand the endless light of islam"

"Synergy between the credibility revolution and human development in Africa" online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art... We note places where the broader open science movement and the world of global development do and do not match. We also highlight barriers to research capacity & some interventions

I'm a cognitive scientist with an interest in epistemic vigilance, and this essay that's been going around gave me pause. I don't think it's straightforward to apply the concept of epistemic vigilance to interactions with LLMs, as this essay does. 🧵/ sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...

SpaceX's 1 million AI satellites could cause "massive ozone depletion" and change the night sky forever - but the FCC has no requirement to check before approving them. Astronomers are now scrambling to submit their concerns. Story by me in New Scientist www.newscientist.com/article/2516...

This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions. It does not. It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed. 🧵 1/

1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology. We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.

"The benefits of and motivations behind large-team coordination in psychology" is finally out as preprint. In this paper, @lakens.bsky.social, Krist Vaesen, and I discussed the possible rewards of large-team collaborations that are common in coordinated research.

Guinea-Bissau "terminated a contentious hepatitis B vaccine trial bankrolled by the Trump administration following a sharp ethical rebuke from the WHO, which warned the study risked causing irreversible harm to newborns" "It's not going to happen, period," said Foreign Minister Joao Bernardo Vieira

"faster, reproducible science across disciplines through UKRI‑supported national AI testbeds and shared methods" Forgive me for expressing scepticism that AI will magically fix the reproducibility crisis.

stories like this will mention the AI "doomer narrative" (SkyNet will kill us all, often pushed by industry insiders), but not mention it pre-empts more realistic criticism (Grok's data center in Memphis is aiming its pollution directly at black people) the industry doesn't want to talk about

More evidence, as if more were needed, that academia is not in fact wholly controlled by the ideological left. An apparently respectable economics journal just published a paper which is pretty overtly promoting eugenic ideology (first two citations are to Francis Galton and Richard Lynn!)

✍️ New article: Tracking historical progress against slavery and forced labor: a long-run data view For much of history, forced labor was widespread and brutal. Tens of millions of people were made to work under the threat of violence or punishment. The situation today is very different.

Many are appropriately outraged by Altman’s comments here implying that raising a human child is akin to “training” an AI model. This is part of a broader pattern where AI industry leaders use language that collapses the boundary between human and machine. 🧵/

Paper on statistical power necessary for interaction effects doi.org/10.1177/2515...

(1/11) If you live in NY, you’ve probably started seeing a new warning: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” This mandatory disclosure went into effect late last year, and it’s the first attempt by a US state to grapple with a new generation of surveillance pricing.

This is blackout poetry to me

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

Wow this scoring chaos seems to be an extreme case of what I say about many ad hoc analyses: no derivation of method from a clear scientific theory, no assessment of statistical properties, and decades pass before someone notices. This happens in biology too, so let’s not pick on psychology only

Based on the amazing FReD replication explorer, I finally have some evidence for the claim that the observed replication rate is lower in social than in disciplines like cognitive psychology forrt.org/FReD-apps/ex... 1/

The FORRT Replication Database has received a massive overhaul (FReD 2.0): We double-coded and validated all data from scratch and extended it in the course of a one-year-partnership with the @cos.io. We just switched to a faster interface thanks to @lukaswallrich.bsky.social’s wizardry.

🚨 New Paper Alert! We investigated the developmental trajectories of intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic social norm acquisition among BaYaka and Bandongo in northern Rep. Congo, a community where inter-ethnic cooperation is common. We found that... journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

I'm trying out the Vivaldi browser - a descendant of Opera which was my absolute favourite browser in the 90s, and so far it's pretty cool! so far it's snappy and customizable, no AI slop in sight, blocks trackers etc, and unyokes me from Google and Apple. freeware run by Norwegians

One of the issues that has come up again and again in my reporting on misinformation and social media is the massive influence social media companies have on research in the field. Last night a preprint dropped that tries to get at this with some numbers. My piece in @science.org (and 🧪🧵 coming):

I've accepted a new role at @busaracenter.bsky.social: Senior Behavioral Scientist. In this role I will safeguard the quality of our work, identify places for behavioral science to play a role in development, and lead strategic partnerships. See my updated personal website: patrickforscher.com

I started reading up on the whole "loneliness pandemic" narrative because this seems like a literature where the age-period-cohort problem may be relevant (or maybe it isn't?). Here's data from Australia (HILDA), average agreement with the statement "I often feel very lonely" (SD of ca. 1.8).>

“This is another Tuskegee” is not hyperbole. good reporting from IM