One thing I’ve come to appreciate better in recent months is the constraints your own understanding can place on your historical research. We’ve all likely run into a preposterous claim–say, that Kant was the first to discover the incompleteness theorem–and rolled our eyes, having recognized there is some anachronistic reasoning going on here. But the…
Minority mentoring minority: just because I did it doesn’t mean I know how to do it
This post is inspired by a Chronicle Vitae piece on advice on mentoring minority students. While I’m not at all close to an “advisor” role yet, I do have some experience helping students more junior to me. This post records some reflections on the difficulties associated with it. One thing that caught my attention and…
The statistical, the scientific, the social, and p-values
My best effort searching online dates the use of the term “crisis” to describe worries concerning replication failure to an editorial piece by Pashler and Wagenmakers in 2012. The worry was voiced in the context of priming studies in social psychology, triggered by a number of unfortunate events unfolded in 2011: the Diederik Stapel fraud…
Measurement as coordination
This post is going to be more like a reading report. It’s hard to have super exciting ideas every week; sooner or later I’ll have to write something mundane. However, as Jeff Berrett (a faculty at LPS and member of my dissertation committee) says: a good paper just needs to elicit one interesting thought in…
Academia and bad posture
In more recent discussions of health in graduate school and academia, much of the emphasis has seemed to fall on mental health. This is undoubtedly a good thing. However, I haven’t seen anyone discuss the (sometimes nasty) side effects of sitting and reading/typing all day, so I figured I’d mention a few things I’ve run…
On failure to find a cure and the disease model of mental illness
I read a popular article (linked below) by the philosopher of science/statistics, Jacob Stegenga, on the lack of evidence on the effectiveness of antidepressants in treating depression. He presents and explains a number of major problems plaguing this kind of research: industry-funding, publication bias, low study quality, placebo effect combined with blind-breaking, lack of validity…
A maybe-interesting feature of Sapolsky’s method
This year I’ve been running a reading group I’ve called “Effective Interdisciplinarity.” In my less professional moments I have been describing its concern as this: how does one avoid doing shitty interdisciplinary work? By “shitty” I mean to include not only the more obvious truth-y stuff–e.g., accurately representing the research of a non-native discipline–and methodological…
On social engagement and being strong
“What made you decide to start a blog?” As I recruit more friends to join me at this blog (we will soon have Emma, Marian, and Margaret joining as authors!), they often ask me this question. If the blog does well in the future, people may ask me this question again. I do have an…
What I hope to get out of blogging
I want to start my first post by thanking Kino for actually getting this thing started. We’d been discussing it off-and-on for a while now, in vague terms, but several weeks ago she actually started one and asked me to join her. I’m a little late to the actually joining her part–having taken forever to…
Spearman’s g and what cross-culture tells us
Saw this today. There exist many similar studies. They seem to say a lot. They seem to say nothing. I’ll comment on some moving parts below. Spearman’s g Found in 31 Non-Western Nations: Strong Evidence That g Is a Universal Phenomenon Abstract Spearman’s g is the name for the shared variance across a set of…