I’m also sceptical that bug bounties will move the needle on grant proposals, in part for the same reason (people fool themselves, ~nobody thinks they’re doing shoddy work), but more because I think people don’t find *proposals* risky in that regard, only the actual research (and that comes later).
> new ERC rule selects more strongly on people’s *confidence* than the true quality of their proposals. Confidence will be correlated with proposal quality, but I think much more weakly than we’d like. And shoddy practices like excessive AI use in writing may even *increase* confidence in many cases
To be clear, of course I too believe that submitters have private info they’re trying to hide. I just think it’s more complicated than this sentiment suggests because people are very good at fooling themselves, and that doing so is part of how we fool others a lot of the time.
Basically, I think the
The first session of our Online Presentations week will be today at 12:00 (CEST)
Today, @karolinehuth.bsky.social will present on the need for reporting standards in methodological research, and Noam Tal-Perry will present on team compositions of research teams
Join forms.office.com/e/MkjYWqTvAw
I’m hiring a PhD student!
The candidate will work alongside @zefreeman.bsky.social, who is joining our research group as postdoc.
jobs.unibe.ch/job-vacancie...
New post on The 100% CI: Science needs downvotes.
www.the100.ci/2026/04/13/s...
In which I make the case that grant funders should add funding lines that include a module for bug bounties.
Most English speakers genuinely cannot pronounce the e at the end of my name the way it’s pronounced in German. In Dutch they pronounce the A slightly differently. I personally don’t see the point in insisting on the “correct” way, especially for names that genuinely exist in different languages.
We used one reaction-time example for illustrative purposes in this paper: academic.oup.com/psychsocgero...
It’s very simple but I still quite like it. In general, I think going to applied situations can help a lot with determining SESOIs.
We had a 'data forensics' lab meeting yesterday. We investigated everyone's close-to-submission datasets under the (false) assumption the data was faked & we had to find proof 🔍🧐
We found some mistakes & weirdnesses and it was such a good exercise in good data management! Highly recommend!
This is a good reminder that following the demise of bookdown.org, all of my ebooks are now hosted by quarto.pub. You can find the new links here: bsky.app/profile/solo...
Germany does not lack talent, and it does not lack funding. But we are trapping 21st-century minds inside 19th-century academic hierarchies. We are asking brilliant young scientists to build the future of the German economy, but refusing to give them the lab space, the job security, or the scientific independence to actually do it. If we want to reclaim our place as an industrial superpower, we have to stop the rat race of trying to keep every technology and structure alive that made us successful in the 20th century. Instead, we must fix our system that pushes our most ambitious scientists away. The money is there. The talent can be there. Now, we also need the courage to fix what’s broken.
“we are trapping 21st-century minds inside 19th-century academic hierarchies.” This essay gets a lot right about problems with German science. I would add that the hierarchies and precarious contracts lead also to systemic abuse and scientific misconduct. open.substack.com/pub/realimag...
Any sufficiently advanced file-drawer is indistinguishable from p-hacking
Excited to share a new paper with @jfischman, just accepted at JEL.
We argue that empirical research tends to be biased and overconfident due to a weakness in the dominant econometric framework: insufficient attention paid to humans “in the loop” with the research process. 1/
New post from me on The 100% CI. Think inside the box, part 1: The guy Euclidean distance told you not to worry about
www.the100.ci/2026/03/09/t...
Oh, to publish in a Nature brand journal about how *checks notes* the big math changes to small math.
Curious about how psychological theories are built, tested, and refined in practice? This summer, the Theory Methods Society is launching the very first edition of the summer school Theory Building in Psychology at the University of Amsterdam (July 6–10, 2026).
theorymethodssociety.org
> phase makes sense under the assumption that during this time, they’re constantly watched by their parents. But I actually wouldn’t be surprised if this had led to a selection for particularly dedicated parenting. And kids who were born extremely fussy probably just didn’t feed well enough.
I actually find neophobia and its development super cool and interesting in that context. It starts almost exactly around the time children can meaningfully move around on their own and reach stuff outside of parental supervision. Before that, they’ll eat virtually anything. The eat-anything >
wow
If you want to take your mind off awful politics and look at awful science stuff instead, this is a good read: www.sciencedetective.org/scientific-d...
bro just one more future study bro, bro I swear just one more future study and it'll fix the inference bro
One funny effect of pretending that methodological issues can just be ignored because of “future studies” is that it probably prevents those future studies from happening. Like why bother actually addressing hard issues when you can just get away with hand waving?
No. I played Oxyd Magnum on an Atari for quite a while though…
Screenshot of the "Does that use a lot of energy?" online app
Hannah Ritchie has built a fun little tool where you can compare energy usage of various products and activities.
This is super helpful imho, because it's so hard to develop intuitions even just about the scales involved here.
hannahritchie.substack.com/p/does-that-...
You know I’m no measurement expert, but that does sound like a Rasch-scale situation to me
Wow! In that case, thank god for her strong moral convictions.
That’s interesting. I guess the fact that you either can or can’t climb a route might do a lot of heavy lifting (sorry) here?
Thank god fairies are so smol and weak
"40% of papers about subarachnoid haemorrhage in animals contained manipulated images."
We have to face up to the fact that in some fields, over half of published science might be fake.
