Journal Entries

Are decisions made by scientists one century ago still with us and weigh down science? One decision involves the rules scientists play by when it comes to statistical significance, and more specifically, the rule that results fall below a .05 threshold to count as significant. The point of this threshold is to help minimize false positives. But .05 is consistent with at least 33% of results being false...or worse!

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Paper Quotes

"Ronald Fisher understood that the choice of 0.05 was arbitrary when he introduced it. Since then, theory and empirical evidence have demonstrated that a lower threshold is needed. A much larger pool of scientists are now asking a much larger number of questions, possibly with much lower prior odds of success. For research communities that continue to rely on null hypothesis significance testing, reducing the P value threshold for claims of new discoveries to 0.005 is an actionable step that will immediately improve reproducibility."

Special Guest: Edouard Machery.

What, if anything, does "fake news" or "post truth" actually mean? Are they thinly veiled political strategies that do as much harm to democracy as the things they attempt to describe? And if so why did so many academics and philosophers get caught up in using a series of terms with such serious problems?

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Paper Quotes

According to all these diagnoses, communication using ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ is problematic. If the terms are nonsense, any communication using these terms simply fails. If they are contested we face problems with talking across contexts, and if they are contested, we face the possibility of mistaking metalinguistic disputes for first order disagreements. ‘Fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ are perhaps better off than ‘bryllg’ – we do at least have some sense what kinds of things might constitute their extensions – but they are very different from established terms with clear meanings like ‘cat’ and ‘blue’. Some basic questions about the extensions of these terms are up in the air. I haven’t come down on which diagnosis is correct – people with different views in the philosophy of language will be attracted to different diagnoses – but I think that because it is the worst outcome, we should take extremely seriously the possibility that ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ are nonsense. This suggests a short argument for abandonment: if we want to be sure that we are saying something by our sentences, we should avoid using ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’.

Special Guest: Joshua Habgood-Coote.

"Nietzsche was friends with Wagner, Copperfield with Steerforth, Rick

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Paper Quotes

"I think that this gets right to the heart of where our individual goes wrong in

Special Guest: Jessica Isserow.

Can the absense of something ever be a cause? For example, image you forget to water your plants and your plants all die. Did your failure to water them cause the plants to die? Many people report the intuition you obviously have caused your plants to die, but shocking as it may at first seem, could this intuition actually be wrong?

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Paper Quotes

"The causal history of the world is a mass of causal processes: events linked by a vast and complex web of causal relations. In order that the causal history of the world should look the way it does look, rather than some other way, there must have been no extra events impinging on it - for those extra events would have had effects that would have changed the causal history of the world in various ways. If Godzilla had impinged upon the causal history of the world, that causal history would have gone very differently. We might even, if circumstances demanded it, want to explain happenings in the world by citing Godzilla’s absence (though it’s hard to imagine that we should ever want to do so). But I see no need to think of Godzilla’s lack of impingement as a kind of causation."

"There just isn’t any objective feature that some absences have and others lack in virtue of which some absences are causes and others are not. So any definition of causation by absence which seeks to provide a principled distinction between absences which are and are not causes is bound to fail: no such definition will succeed in carving nature at its joints."

Special Guest: Helen Beebee.