Hello. Below you’ll find your monthly injection of cynicism about the world of scientific research. Remember: it’s only by knowing about this stuff that we can do anything about it (but also it’s fun, in a true-crime kinda way). Here we go:

The links

• This would be a great article on bullshit business school “science” even without the twist ending.

• 7-17% of sentences in computer-science peer reviews are estimated to be written by AIs. Going by some of the slapdash reviews I’ve had in the past, I can’t help thinking this is in some ways a good thing…

  • But seriously: at this point letting an AI do the whole review is a dereliction of duty. But given how good they’re getting at spotting errors, doing your review without the “extra eyes” from an AI might soon be a dereliction of duty too.

• The least surprising RCT result ever: after years of fraud accusations and fines for misleading investors, Cassava Sciences finally released the results for its Alzheimer’s drug simufilam and… it doesn’t work at all. Obviously.

  • As ever, you have to wonder whether the field of Alzheimer’s research has a disproportionate level of bad science, or whether it’s just getting disproportionate attention and all fields are like that.

• I enjoyed this metaphor of the scientific literature being like an unsafe lab where you have no ability to label the faulty equipment to protect your colleagues.

• A very annoying aspect of papers getting retracted (for whatver reason) is that the retraction note doesn’t fully explain what went wrong with the article, and uses vague language about “errors” or similar. Here’s a rare instance of an inadequate retraction note getting rewritten.

• It’s still the case that effectively nobody publishes replication studies. “Based on these findings, we argue it would be premature to declare that psychology’s replication crisis is over”.

  • And on that same topic, a useful preprint on what scientists should do when they fail to replicate a result—should they try to replicate it again?

• Room-temperature superconductor fraudster finally fired. No, not that room-temperature superconductor fraudster. The other one. No no, not that one either! The one at Rochester!

• It’s been well over 100 years since the Piltdown Man hoax, so we were in need of another big scandal in palaeontology (or palaeoanthropology I guess). Here it is!

• Jesse is right here: Scientific American’s (now-departed) editor turned it into something not very scientific at all. Glad she’s gone.

  • The response when you point this out is often something like: “Scientific American isn’t a science journal! It’s just a pop magazine! Who cares if it publishes political stuff?”. But a lot of people look up to it, the same way they do to New Scientist here in the UK, which also isn’t a journal. It’s bad if stuff that’s associated with science becomes politicised, full stop.

• Sokal-style testing-the-boundaries hoax paper? The work of someone with psychosis that nevertheless got published in a “serious” journal? Whatever it is, you’ll surely join me in saying “WTF” at “Practice of neurosurgery on Saturn”.

• Coercive citation is a real thing: “As strongly requested by the reviewers, here we cite some references [[35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [40], [41], [42], [43], [44], [45], [46], [47]] although they are completely irrelevant to the present work.”

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P.S. The Studies Show

You can never predict what’ll be popular: this month people went crazy for our podcast episode on collider bias. So I guess we’ll do more stuff on weird statistical phenomena in future, and to make sure you get them in your inbox you should subscribe to The Studies Show!

P.P.S. “The other place”

Yes I know it’s cringe and all that. But it does seem like a lot of scientists have moved over from Twitter/X to Bluesky now, so to be able to keep tabs on stuff for this newsletter, I opened an account which you can follow if you want: stuartjritchie.bsky.social.

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With infinite apologies for it being a couple of days late (my excuse is that I’ve been moving house), here’s your update of all the maddest goings-on in the world of bad science for the month of October 2024.

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The links

• Whenever there’s a case of scientific fraud, you always feel terrible for the colleagues of the fraudster: innocent people who co-authored work where the data subsequently turned out to be fake. This article tells one such tragic tale.

• And you wonder how the colleagues of this guy feel: a chemist who’s been found to have faked data in 42 papers. If they all get retracted, he’ll end up as the 14th-most-retracted researcher of all time, which is a pretty decent showing.

• Then again, that’s nothing compared to what El Pais is calling “the biggest scandal in Spanish science”: 75 papers to be retracted from a computer scientist who seems to have obsessively and fraudulently manipulated the citation system for years. That’ll make him the 8th-most-retracted of all time.

• Latest “Jonathan Haidt vs. Social Media” update: Matt Jané, god bless him, isn’t content just to be a critic on the sidelines, and is setting up an open, transparent meta-analysis to try to provide some high-quality analyses on this question (“does social media cause mental health problems?”) at last.

• Researchers do a long-term study of the effects of puberty blockers, find that they aren’t beneficial to mental health, and then… decide not to publish the results in case they’re “weaponised”. Seems extremely bad, if you ask me.

• Do you remember when Daniel Kahneman made a big thing of having done an “adversarial collaboration” with another researcher who he disagreed with, for some research on whether money makes people happier? Turns out the article they wrote together was, er, not very good.

• Article about an intriguing new tool to spot papers that are at “high risk” of being fake (and the journals that publish a lot of them). A big “yikes” in these results for the mega-journal published by Springer Nature, Scientific Reports.

  • And while we’re on Scientific Reports, a bunch of data sleuths got together to try to give the editors a collective shake: this journal is absolutely chock-full of terribly flawed and probably fake research, and you’ve got to wonder if there’s any quality control happening at all.

  • I mean… just look at this example. Or this one. I remember when this journal first appeared, and everyone treated it like a serious outlet! Now it’s a joke.

• Remember the classic story of the scientific fraudster who coloured in the fur of a mouse with a black pen to try to claim he’d successfully done a skin graft? Well, here are some other scientists who seem to have gotten creative with a marker pen.

• If you’re a UK researcher interested in meta-science, you can now apply to get access to administrative data from the government’s main research funder.

• Couple of things about this news article in Nature about C-sections and feeding babies shit (yeah, you read that right):

  • One: why on Earth is Nature reporting on an n=31 “pilot” study that isn’t even published in readable form anywhere and was only presented at a conference?

  • Two: “Gendered language is used in this piece for clarity and to reflect the language used in the research, but Nature recognizes that not all people who give birth identify as mothers, and that not everyone who gives birth takes on the mother role”. What?!

• While we’re on the topic of woke Nature, you might’ve seen the most-ridiculed scientific article of the month: the one that urges Northern Hemisphere scientists to be more inclusive by avoiding saying things like “Summer Conference” or “Winter Meeting”, because the seasons are different below the Equator. Look, I know it’s boring to go on about this. But it’s funny that Nature seems to be stuck in an eternal 2020, long after everyone else has realised how cringe all this stuff is.

• “Can the retraction of articles endanger the mental health of researchers?”. Awww, did that big bad wetwaction hurt your widdle feewings? Try being someone with Alzheimer’s whose treatments were slowed down for years because fraudulent academics didn’t retract their fake results.

• “…we show that rhesus macaques, who have no knowledge about political candidates or their policies…”—just imagine writing that in a scientific article. Imagine it and then imagine just giving up being a “scientist” and instead getting a job that actually provides some value to society. Which is what the authors should immediately do in this case.

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P.S. The Studies Show

Our podcast episode about Philip Zimbardo (who died this month) and his Stanford Prison Experiment is one of our best yet, if I do say so myself. We also did a silly episode on psychic mediums for Halloween, as well as much more serious one on the science around surrogacy, and one on the Ig Nobel Prize-winning research debunking “Blue Zones”.

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Hello. Every month that I send this newsletter out, I think “wow, a lot of stuff happened this month!”. That’s just because there’s a never-ending series of stories about frauds and sloppy researchers ruining science—and also of people doing their best to keep science honest.

If you want to keep up, the only way is to subscribe. You can do so below—and I’d also love it if you shared or forwarded this newsletter to someone you know who might also enjoy it.

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The links

• You know how much I support the science reform movement—people doing replication studies, advocating pre-registration, all that kind of thing. It makes it all the more embarrassing, then, when prominent members of that movement collectively shit themselves in public.

  • The whole thing is such a catastrophic mess—a years-long process of bad study design, lack of transparency, backtracking, over-claiming, and eventually retraction—that you’ll probably have to read multiple articles to understand it. You can find a summary by Andrew Gelman here and one by Stephanie Lee here.

• This month’s massive new fraud story. This Alzheimer’s/Parkinson’s researcher was the head of the US National Institute on Aging’s Neuroscience Division, and is highly influential—“one of the most cited scientists in his field”. Now 132 (one hundred and thirty-two!) of his papers have been found to have suspicious images. As one interviewee put it: “There had to have been ongoing manipulation for years.”

  • And as Derek Lowe puts it: “Fraud, so much fraud”.

• More fraud, I’m afraid. An obstetrics and gynaecology researcher has had loads of his papers flagged for data integrity concerns—a “mere” 130 of them this time. And this time it’s for numbers that are suspiciously similar across multiple tables. As ever, fraudsters leave behind blatant evidence of their misconduct, if you know where to look. Or at least, the incompetent ones do. Don’t think too much about the ones who are good at covering up their misdeeds…

• This, however, is great news on the fraud front. You’ll recall that Harvard professor Francesca Gino tried to sue critics who pointed out fraud in her work. If she’d won that $25m case, it would’ve been very bad news for data sleuths and those who want to promote scientific integrity—you’d always be at risk of financial ruin if you dared to highlight fake findings. That’s why it’s fantastic news that her case against the critics was dismissed this month.

  • There’s a great summary of the story and a directly-reported account of the court hearing in this new New Yorker article.

• Relatedly, given he was one of Gino’s co-authors: “another shoe just dropped in the ongoing Dan Ariely scandal”. He seemed to think the whole thing was over; now his most-cited paper has an editorial expression of concern.

• This is cool: a database where you can match original findings from psychology with their replication attempts.

• Oh, and on that topic… yet another in a long line of attempts to discover the underlying psychological reasons why some people are liberal and some people are conservative—the idea that right-wingers have a “negativity bias”—fails to replicate.

• We knew about this one already, but the idea of “stereotype threat” on women’s maths performance doesn’t replicate either, and this has just been confirmed in a very high-quality study.

• Replication crisis “not just in psychology”, exhibit 981,345: there are big problems in the literature on using AI to solve partial differential equations (very important for understanding and modelling all kinds of physical phenomena from aircraft flight to the climate; in this case focused on fluid dynamics). Figure 1, showing reality vs. what we see in the scientific literature, is brutal.

• Famous study says black babies have better survival prospects when they’re cared for by black, as opposed to white, doctors. Re-analysis comes along and controls for low birth weight, which wasn’t included in the original analysis. The effect almost entirely goes away: there’s very little, or no, impact of the race of the doctor. More good news! The world is actually a bit less unfair and racist than we thought.

• Amusing (or would be, if it wasn’t so depressing) further investigation into the work of dodgy-as-hell researcher Nicholas Guéguen. It is unbelievable that people have to spend time debunking this obviously fake stuff posing as scientific research, when supposedly professional reviewers and editors couldn’t see it.

• You might’ve seen that there’s been an antitrust case filed against some of the biggest scientific publishers. Generally scientists hate the publishers, for many good reasons, so lots of people were saying “yeah! Awesome! Take them down!”. But Dorothy Bishop explains why the case doesn’t make sense—it attacks the publishers for doing stuff that isn’t actually bad.

• Newspapers and news websites get rightly criticised for doing “stealth corrections”—changing an article they’d previously published but without acknowledging it anywhere. Well, turns out scientific journals do exactly the same thing.

• A nice summary of the problems with science publishing and some of the tools to spot dodgy publications.

• This is bad: the Institute of Physics trying to push back against “unprofessional” reviews that hurt the feelings of the scientists who get them. Sure, it’s normally best to avoid being nasty for the sake of it, but I predict that many scientists will just use this as an excuse to shrug off genuine criticisms of their work.

  • Some of the “nasty” reviews they highlight aren’t even bad at all: “I do not like the paper as written”?! Are we supposed to feel sympathy for the poor soul (read: high-powered professor; Australia’s Chief Scientist) who received this horrifically insulting remark?

• This one is really baffling. There are dozens of papers out there that just carelessly use the wrong name for a drug used in pregnancy, replacing it with one that hasn’t been tested and could be dangerous. Who knows how many doctors have given their patients the wrong drug based on all the confusion?

• Feeling a bit lazy this month? Sorry to make you feel bad: here are the scientists who have “published at least a paper every two days in 2024”. What’s stopping you from engaging in this frankly absurd, literally unbelievable level of productivity?

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P.S. The Studies Show podcast

Quite a few people have found our podcast on the scientific publication system—how it works in theory, how it works in practice—quite useful. There are also episodes where we talk about Jonathan Haidt vs. social media, the effects of alcohol, and why I’m a toxoplasma truther.

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WHAT? It’s a list of links about bad science—fraud, error, poorly-designed studies—that I’ve collected over the past month.

WHY? If we don’t understand how bad things can get, we won’t be able to find realistic ways to make them better.

WHERE? It’s right below. Just scroll down a bit.

WHEN? In your own time. You’ve got T-minus one month before the next one.

WHO? I don’t really understand the question, but if you want to tell other people about this newsletter, I certainly won’t stop you. Look, there’s a special “share” button and everything. Go wild:

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The links

• A meta-analysis found that in those experiments where people are made to stay off social media, there’s not much evidence of improvements in mental health. Jonathan Haidt then did a re-analysis, claiming that the experiments do in fact show a causal (negative) effect of social media on wellbeing. But, as Matt Jané convincingly shows here, Haidt messed up the stats, and his re-analysis shows nothing of the sort.

  • On that same topic, here’s another critique of a bad “social media effects” study.

• Richard Van Noorden’s stuff is always worth reading. This article, on the bizarre papers where up to 60% of the citations are to retracted studies, is no exception.

• Another useful survey study where scientists are asked if they’ve ever used any “questionable research practices” like coming up with their hypothesis after analysing the data or selectively reporting data. Predictably, large numbers say they have.

• Here’s a strange one. Turns out that a quarter of studies that use a scanning electron microscope misidentify the microscope—that is, they include the wrong manufacturer or model name (the study authors liken it to having done all your analysis in R, but writing in your paper “we did all our analysis in Python”). Why would this happen? Well, one possibility is that the studies were never done in the first place, so all the information in them is just garbled nonsense.

• Another example where—perhaps for political reasons—peer-reviewers criticise a study because of its results, not its methods. Doing work on racial discrimination is a total minefield, and it seems to me that basically every study should be a Registered Report (journal commits to publishing the study on the basis of the methods before any data are collected).

  • TBH, I think basically every study in every field should be a Registered Report, so I’m not making an exception here really.

• Part 2 of an ongoing series from James Heathers describing “the biggest screwup in the entire history of academic publishing”: how a big, “respected” publisher (Wiley) acquired a smaller publisher (Hindawi) for $298m… and didn’t notice for nearly two years that their journals were stuffed full of entirely fake, fraudulent papers.

  • They never learn: here’s a story of pretty much the exact same thing (though on a smaller scale) happening at Sage.

• More good stuff from Chris Said, this time a pithy little post on compensating scientific whistleblowers.

• In Vox, Kelsey Piper describes a case of scientific fraud from 2014 (which, I have to admit, I hadn’t heard of!) that might’ve killed many thousands of patients.

  • A nice reminder that it’s not just an epistemic insult when someone fakes research data: if those data start getting included in medical meta-analyses, the consequences become very real.

• Nice to see even more pushback against what might be called the “naive view” of misinformation (held by many highly-credentialed researchers!).

• A biology professor who was the head of a department at University of Maryland was found to have faked data in 13 papers and 2 grant applications. His punishment: he’s not allowed to work for the government or apply for grants for 8 years, and he has to retract the papers that haven’t already been retracted. Look, I don’t want to get into “cancel culture” or anything, but… fire this guy ASAP!

• Causal estimation methods are taking something of a beating this month: a paper on the many issues with using the classic instrumental variable of rainfall; a paper discussing the many issues with difference-in-difference analysis.

  • And this isn’t formally a regression discontinuity analysis, but it is kind of, and it’s still fun to read Andrew Gelman’s post where he calls it “absolute crap”.

• A paper complains that PubPeer comments about scientific misconduct are leaving universities with a “paralytic burden” of investigations. How about criticising the scientists, and not the people pointing out their fraudulent work?

• This is kind of a positive retraction story: some quantum physicists had their own paper retracted from Science because they found that they’d inadvertently made errors in the analysis, and were honest enough to admit it and correct the record. Big respect for that—but the retraction note that explains the errors is extremely terse and I feel like readers deserve a much more detailed explanation of what went wrong.

• And finally… if, like me, you enjoy the absurd things scientists write when their result doesn’t quite reach statistical significance, you’ll love this one.

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P.S. The Studies Show

Look, if you don’t subscribe to my podcast with Tom Chivers, you’re missing out. There have been multiple reports that a certain moment in our recent episode on the marshmallow test caused listeners to literally “LOL”. Loads more good stuff on the site, too.

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Look, I know you’re not interested in reading this first paragraph. You’re here for the links, right? You know it, I know it. So let’s just get to it: July’s best bad science links are below.

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The links

• “A new type of fraud”! Sneaking citations to your own previous papers into a new paper’s metadata - they don’t appear in the text but still cause your citation count to go up. You’ve almost got to respect the level of ingenuity here.

• “Can names shape facial appearance?”. I don’t wish to be dismissive, readers, but this is a result that just can’t possibly be true, and I knew that before reading beyond the title (it turns out to be full of totally unconvincing stats, so I was right to be sceptical). Still - it got into PNAS, so, uh, good on them…?

• We’ve had evidence of this before, but here’s a new paper that appears to close the book on the whole thing: “Marshmallow Test performance does not reliably predict adult outcomes”. Quite embarrassing for psychology, one might suggest!

• I can’t believe I’ve only just discovered the Twitter account of Mu Yang, another researcher with a great eye for spotting dodgy graphs in published scientific papers. I chuckled aloud at the impossible “back bend” in this one — and Yang has tweeted many many more examples.

• As more information appears about the Francesca Gino case, it allows data sleuths like the guys at Data Colada to be even more forensic with their fraud investigations. Remember that the authors of this post are—absurdly—being sued for defamation by Gino.

• Why zombie theories stick around: a nice summary/recap of the problems in the scientific system.

• Another glaringly obvious AI-generated scientific diagram in a published paper, raising questions about what on Earth the reviewers and editors at this seemingly-respectable journal were doing. Looking out the window?

  • And remember: this stuff is bad, but the real problem begins when AI-generated pictures are good enough to be indistinguishable from real ones. It won’t be long!

• Bizarre scenario where a scientist is sent a paper to review, and upon reading it notices that it’s “100% plagiarised”… from his own work. Several months pass, and then a respected journal in the field… publishes the plagiarised paper.

  • Worse, several other researchers pop up on Twitter to say the same thing happened to them. What on Earth is going on here?!

• Here’s a “monkey’s paw” scenario. You want scientists to calculate statistical power for their experiments? Well, lots of them do! But [monkey’s paw curls] they calculate it using a totally shite piece of software called G*Power which is based on clicking buttons rather than writing code - and thus the power calculations can only rarely be reproduced (and the default settings make them prone to errors).

• Paper claiming to do a “reversal of autism symptoms” in two kids goes viral. It’s in two kids. It doesn’t have a control group. It’s crap. It should be ignored.

• A controversy over a well-known set of experiments on honeybees and their little “waggle dance”. It looks like the papers are riddled with strange-looking data and what are euphemistically called “irregularities” in this Science article. The original author denies it all, of course.

  • As always, you’ve got to wonder how much more stuff like this is, ahem, buzzing around in the scientific literature.

• There’s a policy in the US (and elsewhere) called “ban the box”, where ex-convicts are helped to get jobs by stopping employers from requiring a “do you have a criminal record” checkbox on job applications. A prominent 2020 paper said this policy backfires and actually worsens the prospects of young black men (because employers just blanket-discriminate against them). A new reanalysis says no: actually, once you correct some errors in the 2020 paper, there’s no such backfire.

• And talking about re-analysis: here’s a detailed critique of one of my own papers from 10 years ago. As I’ve said many times, I agree with the “stay in school” message, I believe that education raises IQ (indeed, I wrote the meta-analysis confirming this), and I think the author might just misunderstand my views. Still, there are some very valid technical criticisms here.

• In genetics there’s the idea of “balancing selection” - genes for certain traits stick around even though they’re negative in some situations because they’re advantageous in others (e.g.: schizophrenia genes don’t disappear despite their obvious disadvantages, because they might cause creativity sometimes). Here’s a new and very strong critique of that idea for psychological traits.

• And to come back, full-circle, to manipulated citation counts: here’s an article about the world’s highest-cited cat, called Larry.

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P.S. The Studies Show

Our angriest podcast episode yet: on “misinformation”, and the shocking level of nonsense spoken about it (by people who should know better). That’s for paying subscribers; free listeners can hear some apocalyptic stuff on asteroids, nuclear winter, and air pollution.

I have posted
the links
that are about
scientific integrity

and which
you had possibly
missed
during June

Forgive me
they are depressing
so grim
but so important

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The links

• I’ve long argued that we need much more serious punishment for scientific frauds. So I was very pleased to see Chris Said arguing “the case for criminalising scientific misconduct”. If a fraudster fakes research on say, cancer, that’s not just wasting money and effort (bad as it is to waste money and effort). It’s also slowing down progress towards a cure, meaning a lot of life-years are lost to sufferers. Lock them up!

  • And as if on cue, a scientist has been charged with defrauding the US Government out of millions of dollars after an FBI investigation. Innocent until proven guilty of course, but it’s nice to see this kind of thing being taken seriously.

• The largely bullshit field of “misinformation” research continues to take a very justified beating:

  • First, an article in Nature debunked three of the main beliefs of those who bang on about online misinformation (that the average person sees a lot of it; that it’s caused by algorithms, and that it causes polarisation);

  • Then, a prominent misinformation researcher who claimed that Meta put pressure on Harvard to fire her turns out to, perhaps, be spreading misinformation herself (described in a long article with a killer final section);

  • Then Matt Yglesias wrote a great article about how the studies tend to focus only on one narrow type of misinformation anyway;

  • Then, after the Trump-Biden debate this month, one of the most clownish adherents of the “misinformation” worldview descended into self-parody. These people are very silly and they deserve far more scrutiny!

• Another month, another major Alzheimer’s paper retracted for doctored images. This one was in Nature.

  • Incidentally, this will be great: Charles Piller, whose top-tier investigative journalism helped expose loads of fake Alzheimer’s research, has a book on the topic coming out next year.

• Talking about Nature retractions: here’s a stem cell paper that was published in Nature in 2002, had its integrity questioned in 2007, went on to be cited more than 4,400 times… and was only retracted in 2024. “This is fine”, as they say.

• Fake scientific images made by generative AI that can’t be detected as fake. This gave me that horrible “game over” feeling.

• My friend Ruben looks into more of the papers cited by Jonathan Haidt in his Anxious Generation book, and finds them wanting.

  • Same again, in a second thread.

• Professional org for trans healthcare commissions independent researchers to do a review of the evidence… and then won’t let them do their research without interference.

• Usually questions in article headlines are automatically answered with “no” - but here’s a rare exception. “Is science’s dominant funding model broken?”

• A big bust-up over a study that claimed that educational programmes in prison can reduce offending. The original debate is about whether the effect is causal, but Andrew Gelman adds to it, pointing out the uncertainty about the magnitude of the effect, too (it’s what he calls a “Type M error”).

• The “emotional dot probe” task is very commonly used in clinical psychology research, especially in people with anxiety. Turns out… well, you can probably guess how it turns out.

• Eternal sunshine of the… terrible study?

• A re-analysis of some of the work underlying the idea of “superforecasters” - people who are extremely good at predicting future events. A study from a decade ago appeared to find some of the reasons for why they were so capable - but this new analysis finds the whole thing to be a lot muddier.

• Good news, for a change: Stuart Buck from the Good Science Project writes about some important changes that are being suggested at the National Institutes for Health in the US (a major government research funder) that might make its funded research more reliable.

• We’ve all at some point written “casual” when we meant “causal”. But how many of us have left the typo in a published paper? Oh. Quite a lot of us.

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P.S. The Studies Show

My favourite episode of the podcast from the last month is the paid one, on Viagra. Every other podcast seemed to be advertising mail-order penis pills, but we thought we’d do an episode on the science behind them. See also episodes on peanut allergy, addiction, and forensics.

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You know how there’s loads of stuff on the internet about how science is cool, and great, and awesome? Well, this is the opposite of that. Here’s your monthly collection of links about scientific fraud, retracted research, and erroneous studies. Hope you “enjoy” it!

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The links

• Fraudulent anaesthesiologist Joachim Boldt is not only the most retracted researcher of all time, but has now hit the milestone of two hundred papers retracted. In fact, he’s exceeded it - he’s up to 210! Congratulations…? Imagine faking that many studies! Just imagine. You almost have to respect it.

• Talking about retractions: one particular Egyptian researcher in obstetrics and gynaecology has already had seven papers retracted, so some data-integrity researchers looked at all 263 papers he’s published (many within a very short period of time). They concluded that 43 had “impossible” results, 67 had “unlikely” results, and 11 had mistakes. Oh dear.

  • One amusing example: “…the authors claim that the mean age of the physicians surveyed was 42.6, and their mean number of years in practice was 26.4. Using these numbers, the average physician surveyed must have started practising at 16.2 years old.”

• There was a TikTok influencer called “Lab Shenanigans” who did videos about being a neuroscientist and who had 525,000 followers. Turns out he falsified loads of data in his research. I mean… are we surprised by this? The clue was in the name…

• I didn’t know there was a journal called Trial and Error that exists to publish null results. As with previous such things I expect it won’t solve the problem (i.e., that people are only interested in positive findings), but it’s a well-meaning idea. It’s covered in this Nature News article on negative results.

• To err is human. To set up an error-checking service for science, which I mentioned here a few months ago but which now has its first report, is divine.

  • There’s also a Nature article about the whole thing. More of this, please!

• You might’ve heard that there’s been a huge increase in maternal mortality in the US over the past couple of decades. Horrible! In such a rich country, too! Except, the whole thing is due to changes in recording and maternal mortality hasn’t actually increased at all.

• A meta-analysis on the effects of psilocybin (from magic mushrooms) on depression, published in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal). Sounds good, right? Well, it looks like the authors mixed up the standard error and the standard deviation when coding some of the studies, leading them to grossly overestimate (like, by 500%) the effect of psilocybin. How can you not notice that you’re including effects that are bigger than basically anything else in the whole field of medicine?

• You know I love sharing articles about how “hard” sciences like physics are just as subject to the sorts of replication-crisis problems that are known in the social sciences. Well, here’s another one, on the increasing awareness of dodgy research in condensed matter research.

  • (Just to be clear: I don’t “love” this, really. It’s very bad and depressing. But it’s always good to be reminded that it doesn’t just happen in psychology).

• Useful Science “policy forum” article on the uncertainties surrounding the effects of preschool on longer-term outcomes. We need better research on this, ASAP.

  • See the letter at the bottom for an alternative perspective.

• Critics of antidepressants publish a review that questions the biological basis of depression. They are reprimanded by psychiatrists, including for not citing a meta-analysis of depression and tryptophan. Someone re-analyses that meta-analysis. It’s crap.

• Paper in the Journal of Environmental Psychology claims that the best place to relax is near water. A general finding about all humanity? Well… it turns out all the participants (and there were only 32 of them) were members of a swim team. Come on, man!

  • Adam Grant’s tweet where he promoted the study has, at the time of writing, 4.1m views, sadly not just because everyone is ridiculing it. Something something “truth gets its boots on” - you know the quote.

• Authors of a review on lithium and suicide make an objective, study-ruining error where they mix up rates and ratios. There’s no argument about this: you can’t combine those. The results are complete nonsense. The paper needs to be corrected or (more likely) retracted. But the journal editor doesn’t seem to realise, politely thanks the critics for their letter pointing out the problem, and… leaves the study in place and doesn’t do anything about it. Jolly good!

• The publisher Wiley just closed down nineteen journals (having already closed down four) because they’d become flooded with fake “paper mill” papers.

  • And, closer to home (for me), the Scottish Medical Journal retracted 13 papers at once because they were also the products of paper mills.

• You know “cupping”? The weird alternative-medicine treatment that leaves people covered in round suction bruises? A recent paper claimed that your psychological state could help heal those bruises quicker. But the whole thing is a nice lesson in unreliable statistics and flawed readings of the scientific literature, according to Andrew Gelman and Nick Brown.

• As if we wouldn’t already be highly sceptical of a paper that claims that a specific kind of Iranian honey is an “amazing preventive and therapeutic agent” against Alzheimer’s disease (that’s a quote from the title BTW), the paper had some strange-looking images and has now been retracted. Please enjoy this very funny exchange with the authors who describe the findings as “completely real” and thank critics for their “kindness and love”. Aww.

P.S. The Studies Show

Calling all podcast fans: this month you can hear me and Tom talking about Vitamin D, as well the effects of lead paint/pipes/petrol on your brain and on crime rates. And our paid episode this month was on the scientific writings of Johann Hari (you might be able to guess the conclusions we draw there).

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Bad science links! Get your bad science links right here! As usual, over the month I’ve collected all the most interesting stories about meta-science, crap research, scientific fraud, the broken scientific publishing system, and related topics - and I’ve posted them below.

Enjoy. And please do subscribe and share the newsletter with your friends and colleagues if you haven’t done so already.

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The links

• Another month, another Nobel prizewinner (this time from Stanford) who’s had to retract and correct several of his papers due to “errors” in the images. So it’s not just the ex-President of that university who was making these “errors”!

  • See also the note at the top: even more errors were found in the same scientist’s papers after the news article appeared. Oops!

• The data sleuth who noticed the problems in the above papers, Elisabeth Bik, successfully gets two other papers retracted… a mere nine years after she pointed out the problems. Science is self-correcting… sometimes, eventually.

  • I can actually go one better: here’s a paper (by the President and CEO of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, no less) that was retracted this month after concerns were raised about it ten years ago.

  • And in other Elisabeth Bik news, the BS harassment complaints thrown at her after she criticised the research of powerful French scientist Didier Raoult have, happily, been thrown out by a court.

• In last month’s newsletter I mentioned the disgraced superconductivity researcher Ranga Dias. Since then, journalists have seen the report his university (University of Rochester) commissioned into his misconduct. Fabrication, falsification, plagiarism - it’s all here.

  • Incidental detail for metascience fans: the investigations of Dias were kicked off by a complaint from Jorge Hirsch, the materials physicist who also—for better or worse—came up with the h-index.

• Oh, and talking about plagiarism - you’ll never guess what someone discovered in the work of Harvard prof and very-credibly-accused-fraudster, Francesca Gino. So it’s not just the ex-President of that university who was plagiarising!

  • Gino’s erstwhile colleague, Dan Ariely, this month posted an update to the effect that his university have investigated his research, given him a slap on the wrist for “faulty data”, but taken no further action. He’s “putting this matter behind him” now. Jolly good!

• One of those large-scale reproducibility attempts, covering 110 papers from economics and political science. The results are a mixed bag: a high proportion (85%) of papers had computationally-reproducible results (though, c’mon, it’s not that high when you think about it), but a quarter of papers have a substantial coding error, and just over half exaggerate their effect size. Lots more interesting results in there, too.

• Do more diverse companies do better financially? Consulting firm McKinsey says yes; these academics who’ve re-analysed the data say no.

  • From the re-analysis paper: “we commit to posting the data and code by 31 December 2026”. This is stupid. What if you get run over by a bus before that date? Just post it now!

• A refreshingly open and honest discussion from the editors of a reproductive health journal on their process of dealing with fraud allegations and retractions.

• Remarkable article by a scientist whose paper was retracted for entirely spurious reasons (in actual fact it seems to have been done at the behest of a publishing company the paper identified as a predatory outfit).

  • Seriously - read the retraction note. It’s Kafkaesque. The “regression analysis didn’t have a control group”? What are you talking about?

• Ruben Arslan finds a paper on subliminal priming (cited in Jonathan Haidt’s new book) where it was physically impossible that the stimuli were shown to the participants, even “subliminally”, because of the refresh rate of the monitors they used. And yet they still found effects! Psychology really is magic.

• “What is the prevalence of bad social science?” Dunno. But there are some interesting examples and discussions here.

• You know that thing where albums suddenly disappear from music streaming services, meaning that if you haven’t got the tracks downloaded to your computer, you can’t listen to them any more? Well, that - but for scientific journals.

• Rare example of a female (alleged!) scientific fraudster (though of course cf. Gino above): researcher at the University of Toronto is accused of fabricating data, as well as getting her husband to pretend to be participants in her psychology study. She’s had her PhD revoked, and seems to have lost a new job at Northwestern University, too.

• You think you’ve seen it all, and then along comes “co-authoring a paper with your own alter ego”.

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P.S. Invisible College

Are you aged 18-22? Are you around the UK on 26-31 August this year? You should consider attenting Invisible College, the residential programme in Cambridge run by Works in Progress magazine.

It’s all about Progress Studies - understanding how and why things get better over time. I’ll be giving a series of talks on the topics covered on this Substack: bad science, how to spot it, and what we can do about it. The week will also include loads of other interesting talks on topics like the history of technological progress and how public policy works.

If you’re interested (or you know someone who might be), you can find more details and the application form at this link. See you in August!

P.P.S. Metascience grants!

If you’re a researcher at a UK research org who’s interested in making science better, you need to take a look at these new meta-science grants (up to £300,000 each), co-funded by the UK Government and Open Philanthropy.

P.P.P.S. The Studies Show

More of my opinions on science-related matters, should you wish to hear them, are available on my podcast, The Studies Show. For understandable reasons, the biggest episode we’ve done recently was on the Cass Review and youth gender medicine. You’ll have to become a paid subscriber to The Studies Show for that one, but free subscribers can still listen to new episodes on microplastics, the history of probability, and whether depression really exists.

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One year! That’s how long I’ve now been doing these link-post newsletters on the Science Fictions Substack. I do hope you’re finding them interesting and/or useful.

If you know someone who might appreciate this newsletter—a monthly list of the best links to do with bad science, with my opinions left in—please do share it with them! Post the link in a group chat, tweet it out - whatever works to spread the word. I’d be very grateful indeed. Okay, here we go…

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The links

• RIP Daniel Kahneman. Do I feel bad that over the years I trashed both of his pop-science books, the first (Thinking, Fast and Slow) for being packed full of uncritical citations of bad research, and the second (Noise) for being interminably boring? No. But do I think that overall he still had a positive effect on the public understanding of science? Also no.

  • His actual scientific work in the 1970s and 80s with Amos Tversky was genuinely great, though!

• A disappointing update on a study I shared here a few months back. It was authored by some of the leading lights in the Open Science movement, and apparently showed that techniques like preregistration improved the replicability of research. The authors claimed the study was itself preregistered… but now it looks like it wasn’t. This is extremely bad, and the way the authors have now said that they’re “looking for the preregistration document” is embarrassing for everyone concerned.

  • The lesson: trust no one. Not me, not your co-authors, not your Open Science heroes. No one.

• The Francesca Gino debacle continues. This month Harvard unsealed their 1,300-page report on their fraud investigation into her work. Here’s a brief summary, including mention of Gino trying to scapegoat another professor for falsifying the data.

• On a similar topic, the story of the “slow-motion downfall” of Didier Raoult (who you might remember as the hydroxychloroquine-for-COVID guy, but there’s so much more to it than that) is a must-read.

• …as is this article, also on a similar topic, about the superconductivity researcher Ranga Dias and the swirl of misconduct allegations around his lab and retractions of his research. After the last year, I feel really bad for all the scruplous, high-integrity superconductivity researchers out there - your field is getting a very bad reputation!

  • Here’s Derek Lowe’s additional commentary on the story, noting that too many senior researchers browbeat their students into doing bad science, and too many universities aren’t interested in getting to the bottom of it.

• Informative YouTube video on David Sinclair, the anti-ageing researcher with a history of massive claims… and unreplicable research.

  • Yes, the style of the channel is a bit too “I am hyper-optimising for YouTube” for my taste, but I promise the content is good.

• Paper comes out claiming that banning prositution in Sweden led to an increase in rape rates. Almost immediately, a re-analysis shows the result is not real, and just due to an error in the statistical analysis code. Oops!

• “A Columbia Surgeon’s Study Was Pulled. He Kept Publishing Flawed Data.” One of the top cancer surgeons in NYC has been accused of perpetrating a particularly lazy scientific fraud where he used the same images across multiple papers, claiming they were all from separate experiments.

• I’ve rarely read any pop-science article that makes as many dubious (or just plain ridiculous) statements as this one on “how the climate crisis affects our brains”.

  • The worst thing is finding out at the end that the author has apparently written an entire book on this stuff. Groan.

• Cool to see that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is no longer putting up with the extortionate “article processing charges” required by Open Access journals, and is now mandating that research it funds be posted online as a free preprint by default.

• And more good news: the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal but it now just goes by the initials - what’s that all about?) is now mandating data and code sharing for all articles published there. Should’ve been the case a long time ago, but credit where due.

• A sudden and vast increase in the times the word “delve”—which happens to be a favourite of ChatGPT for whatever reason—is used in medical papers, starting in 2023. Pretty good prima facie evidence that scientists are using ChatGPT to help write their papers… and I really do hope it’s “help write” rather than “churn out filler text which they then thoughtlessly copy and paste”.

  • You know… like this. And this.

• “Given that it was arguably Beethoven’s skills as a musician and composer that made him an iconic figure in Western culture…”. The only place you’d see a mind-numbing sentence like that is, of course, in a scientific paper.

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P.S. The Studies Show

The podcasts continue apace. I was particularly pleased with our recent episode on the trouble with meta-analysis - discussing the pros and cons of a technique we perhaps rely on a little too much.

And we’re now doing short episodes in addition to the main, hour-long ones! The first one is on emotional intelligence. Please do give it a go, and subscribe on The Studies Show page if you like it!

Image credit: DALL-E

February might be the shortest month, but there’s been no shortage of bad science. Here are the most interesting links on that topic from the past month (and by the way, scroll to the bottom for a job ad that might just be of interest to readers of this Substack).

Enjoy - and don’t forget to become a subscriber if you aren’t already!

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February’s best bad science links

• Okay, let’s get it out of the way. You’ll only have missed this one if you happen to have had your internet cut off for the past fortnight. It is, of course, the AI-generated picture of a rat with an enormous penis, published in a supposedly serious peer-reviewed scientific journal. This went mega-viral, the paper rapidly got retracted, and it’s a portent of what we’re going to see much more of in the coming years: fake AI pictures, text, and data making it past scientific gatekeepers who are sleeping on the job.

• “Cognitive dissonance” is a great phrase, but it was also supposed to be an empirical discovery about people’s behaviour made by psychologists in the 1950s and 60s. How does that empirical work hold up? According to this very large new replication attempt, not particularly well.

• A fun preprint on how Google Scholar citations can be (and are being) gamed. The researchers develop the c-index, which is like the h-index, but about the number of papers that cite a given scientist multiple times. Most scientists are only cited once or twice in a given paper. But when there are at least 45 papers that cite you at least 45 times? Either you’ve founded your own field of study, or something funny’s going on.

• A feelgood study on how children who got vaccinated in India had higher future wages receives a pretty devastating critique: “the study is really measuring the effects of passage of time”.

• “Nature Medicine recently corrected a figure after my PubPeer comment and email. The ‘corrected figure’ contains a different version of the same error.” Remind me: what’s the point of scientific journals?

• You might’ve seen the study that claimed that women hunt in 79% of hunter-gatherer societies. If that was true, it would mean the general wisdom on the gender split in these societies is totally wrong. Well, it turns out the study was fatally flawed, so no need to update your views this time.

• Here’s a tip. If you want to get an article in Science where you demand that students be taught things for which there’s no good evidence, like transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, just make sure it’s in an article that’s filled with buzzwords like “equity”, “social justice”, “problematic”, and “power and privilege dynamics”.

  • Another way of getting an article in Science: write about how “indigenous knowledge” is “complementary” to science. The same way herbal medicine is “complementary” to actual medicine, I’m sure.

• Depressing story of how one guy’s fraudulent research on curcumin (a chemical compound that can dye things yellow-orange but probably has no health effects) has spawned a whole supplement industry - and even more fake research.

• Excellent paper on how to think about statistical power analysis and effect sizes in the research you’re planning. ~Everyone in psychology research, and many other fields besides, should read this.

• A weird one: the Dean of the School of Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno runs his own pay-to-publish journal that’s full of complete gibberish. Imagine he was your boss! Andrew Gelman has a suitably baffled article on it.

  • The Retraction Watch article on the case notes that “the pages of the journal were also filled with articles from [the Dean’s] wife, his son, his students and the current editor-in-chief”. Help me understand why this exists!

• The Nobel Prize-winning medical scientist Gregg Semenza has just had his eleventh paper retracted due to data integrity concerns. Nothing to see here, everything fine, no big deal.

• Let’s end on a positive note: there’s a very cool new initiative to encourage people to spot and report errors in scientific papers. It’s like what I did for my book: if you find a mistake, you get paid - and bigger errors mean bigger payments. You can sign up to become an error-checker on their site. Do your bit for a slightly less error-strewn science!

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P.S. A job at GiveWell

GiveWell, the amazing organisation that rates charities as to their cost-effectiveness (and thus makes charitable donations much better at saving lives), is looking for a Head of Communications.

The job will involve the sorts of things that readers of this Substack enjoy, like sorting good scientific studies from bad ones, and writing and talking about (meta-)science to a wide audience. And that’s all in a job where you really know you’re making a direct, positive difference in the world. If you think you might be a good candidate, you should definitely apply - all the info is right here.

P.P.S. The Studies Show

Psychotherapy! Climate models! A big episode on whether phones and social media cause mental health problems! These are just some of the recent topics we’ve covered on my science podcast with Tom Chivers, The Studies Show. If you become a paid subscriber you can get access to the recent episodes on male and female brains and the Hans Eysenck affair, too.

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It feels a little late to be saying “Happy New Year”, but - welcome to a new year of monthly bad science links!

The unscrupulous, sloppy, and low-quality researchers out there haven’t turned over a new leaf for the new year. In fact, not only do they continue to publish rubbish science at an alarming rate, but there have been some major high-profile screwups uncovered in the past month. So there’s plenty for us to talk about.

BTW, if you aren’t already subscribed to this newsletter, now’s your chance:

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January’s best bad science links

• If you follow stories on scientific fraud at all, you’ll already have seen the big scandal at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. It’s, shall we say, rather bad PR for them: as I write this, 6 papers published by their researchers are being retracted and 31 corrected after a data sleuth found tons of evidence of image manipulation. It’s mostly the photoshopping of images of western blots, and whereas some of it might be in error… lots of it is obviously fraud. There might be more to come. It is, to quote Derek Lowe, “a disgrace” - and that’s at one of the top research institutions in the US!

• The latest on the long-running Dan Ariely “did-he-didn’t-he” story, and a profile of the man. You’ll likely have to sign up for a (free) account to read this article, but it’s worth it.

• I think that AI holds big promise for scientific research (and fraud-spotting: it was used to help identify some of the faked images I just mentioned above). But as with every new tool, someone’s going to come along and fumble it. In this Twitter thread, a claim that AI had helped “revolutionise inorganic materials discovery” (the words of the scientists in question) and helped discover many new compounds in just a few days, is brutally taken apart. Doubtless we’ll see a lot more of this kind of AI-overclaiming (overclAIming?) in 2024.

  • Relatedly, here’s a new study showing how clinical prediction models can be amazingly predictive within the dataset they were trained on… but are then totally useless at predicting out-of-sample. It’s overfitting all the way down.

• Now we have evidence that “paper mills” (shady groups who fill scientific journals with fake papers, presumably selling the authorship to scientists who want to boost their CVs with zero effort) are bribing journal editors to allow them access. As the guy (almost) put it in Season 1 of The Sopranos: “Bugging, bribes. I don’t know. Sometimes I think the only thing separating [scientific publishing] from the mobs is fuckin’ whackin’ somebody”.

  • Happily, there’s now a coalition of publishers and others who are going to campaign against the paper mills and help identify their shoddy products. The coalition is called “United2Act”, which is a bit cringe and makes me think of “Fired4Truth” (remember that guy?). But otherwise, this is a very good thing and I wish them the best of luck.

• Just a study (from last year, but new to me) where 53.7% of medical residents surveyed in Southwest China said they’d committed some kind of scientific fraud. Seems… extremely bad? Even if it’s off by a factor of ten it’s still grim as hell.

• Cool: the Institute for Replication teams up with the journal Nature Human Behaviour to systematically replicate/reproduce their papers published from 2023 onwards.

• As a psychologist, it’s very amusing to see physicists—from the acme of exacting, precise, hard science!—grappling with uncertainty and measurement error.

  • And just as an interesting example of psychologists finally getting around to proper measurement validation on one of their common tests: the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test”, often used to assess autism-related traits, might not actually be very good.

• A sad story of the reputational damage (to their co-authors) and general mess that scientific fraudsters can leave in their wake.

• You might think that it would be really easy to replicate simulation studies. After all, it’s all just computer code, right? It’s all in silico! You don’t have to fiddle around with a pipette or, god forbid, deal with living human beings! Well - often it’s not that easy, according to this study. It includes some tips on how to make your simulation study better.

• Great preprint with reams of useful data on “the strain on scientific publishing”. Ultra-crappy publisher MDPI takes a well-deserved kicking.

• Huge review of decades of interventions in criminology concludes that basically none of them work, in the sense of having a long-lasting beneficial effect. “It suggests that a dominant perspective on social change—one that forms a pervasive background for academic research and policymaking—is at least partially a myth.” Gulp.

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P.S. The Studies Show

If you’re a podcast listener and you haven’t yet checked out The Studies Show… where have you been? It’s me and Tom Chivers chatting every week about all kinds of scientific controversies - just this year we’ve covered personality tests, male vs. female brains, and the idea of statistical significance. We’re about to release one on “Is it the phones?” - that is, what’s the evidence that phones (and social media) are causing a mental health crisis? You can subscribe right here:

The Studies Show Podcast

A weekly podcast about the latest scientific controversies, with Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie

By Tom Chivers

P.P.S. Science Fictions (the book) in Japanese!

私の本、「サイエンス・フィクションズ」は水曜日に日本語で発売されます！こちらで予約注文ができます。

P.P.P.S. New job!

You might’ve seen that I have a very exciting new job at the AI startup Anthropic. I’m working on research communications, helping to share their (really excellent, genuinely world-leading) science with the world. I’m sure you’ll hear more from me on that in future, but to those of you who’ve asked, never fear: I’ve no plans to change the Science Fictions newsletter (except, I guess, to note if it wasn’t obvious that everything that’s published on this Substack in the past or in future is my own opinion, not that of my new employer).

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Here’s an early Christmas present for you: a selection of the most interesting “bad science” stories from the past month! If you’re looking for good (though perhaps quite dispiriting) stuff to read over the festive period, you’ve come to the right place.

(By the way, are you looking for something to listen to during that same festive period? Do check out my podcast The Studies Show, where we now have more than 20 episodes, each trying to get to the bottom of a controversial scientific issue!).

And so, to the links. If you haven’t already subscribed and you want more like this, do add your email address below. It’s free!

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December’s best bad science links

• Presidents of major US universities are, er, not exactly looking great recently. But although much of the action has been on the East Coast, we shouldn’t forget that the ex-President of Stanford has been busily retracting his papers from Cell, Science, and (now) Nature due to “integrity issues”.

• One of the most unpleasant people I’ve ever interacted with on social media is Sander van der Linden, a psychologist and “misinformation expert” at Cambridge. Have any mild disagreement with him and you’ll be subject to a barrage of idiotic smears and sophistry. This is not a guy who appears to care about what’s true! So it’s been good to see some serious pushback against his absurd research on “inoculating” people against misinformation, firstly from philosopher Dan Williams, and secondly from biologist Ruxandra Tesloianu.

  • And if you were in any doubt that research on “misinformation” has become irredeemably political and should all be defunded immediately, take a look at this risible tweet.

• Remember the very embarrassing episode in the early 2010s (which has a Wikipedia page for some reason) where scientists claimed that conservatives were higher in “psychoticism” than liberals, but then realised they’d got the variables the wrong way around and actually liberals were higher? Well, something similar seems to have happened in a Lancet Public Health paper that claimed that hearing aids were linked to higher risk of dementia. It was retracted earlier this month. There but for the grace of god, etc.

• Psychedelics researchers are well aware of the big problems with blinding in their studies. Do they care? Well… no.

• In general, post-“replication crisis”, psychology journals won’t explicitly tell you that they’re not interested in replication studies. But it seems that some still will!

• Here’s a fun little exchange on exactly how many people died in the Black Death - and tracking down some false claims about the exact number.

  • And, relatedly, a great new article from Saloni Dattani on Our World In Data about pandemic death tolls.

• More than ten thousand scientific papers were retracted in 2023 - a new record. Given how many fake “paper mill” articles are out there, why don’t we try to beat the record again in 2024?

  • A huge majority of those retracted articles are from journals published by Hindawi. Looks like that “beleaguered” brand is now being sent to the glue factory.

• An attempt using a machine-learning model to assess the replicability of studies in psychology. Experiments are less replicable than observational/correlational studies, as you might expect. Surely that’s in part because experiments are usually more risky than the sort of research that asks: “does ‘extraversion’ correlate with ‘going to parties’? Wow, yes it does!”. Not to diss personality research at all, but the riskier parts of that research (linking personality to aspects of the brain, say), have been a heck of a lot less successful when it comes to replication.

• The US Food & Drug Administration is now naming and shaming pharma companies and researchers who break its rules about registering clinical trials or reporting accurate information about them. Long overdue!

• Also this month, French pharma company Servier had to pay a massive fine for marketing a weight-loss drug they knew for decades was harmful (and covering up evidence of the harm).

• If you think large areas of science are train-wrecks, you oughta see what’s been happening in history. Ian Leslie gives the latest update on a long-running story where an obviously false history paper was debunked, but was then defended (extremely unconvincingly) by the editors of the journal that published it, simply because it fit with their political preferences. In the process, they gave up on any commitment to truth and empiricism. Great stuff!

• “In 2022 alone, 1,266 non-physics authors published the equivalent of one paper every 5 days, including weekends, compared with 387 in 2016”. Are more scientists becoming massively more productive? Or are more scientists treating publication like a stupid game, sitting there chuckling every day as they realise they’re getting away with it? (It’s the latter BTW).

• And finally, a story to warm the cockles of your heart: fraudulent trachea surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, whose botched operations led to multiple deaths, is on his way to prison. Let’s hope he gets there just in time to spend Christmas behind bars.

Image credit: DALL-E

Hello! For a change this month, I’m just going to get right to the cool bad-science links from around the internet, rather than reposting all my own stuff.

I have some job news incoming that might mean that the Science Fictions Substack returns to its former not-just-linkposts glory very soon…

…but for the time being: a linkpost! If you like getting links to all the most interesting happenings in the world of scientific reform and scientific integrity in your inbox, do sign up below:

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But first… The Studies Show

I’m really enjoying this podcasting lark. Our special spooky Halloween episode on parapsychology seemed to go down particularly well, and you might also be interested in our discussions on scientific fraud, attention spans, and (for paying subscribers only), long COVID.

We’ve been building up subscribers, both free and paid, very nicely and we’d love it if you signed up too. You can do so in the box below:

The Studies Show Podcast

A weekly podcast about the latest scientific controversies, with Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie

By Tom Chivers

Your monthly bad science links

• A Science Fictions Substack update: you might remember that last year I wrote about a really bad meta-analysis that claimed that homeopathy worked to help people with ADHD. Well, the meta-analysis has now been retracted, and the retraction note mentions some of the flaws I talked about in my post. Sometimes scientific journals do the right thing, and lots of credit is due to Pediatric Research in this case.

• Chris Said brings together four recent stories of prominent Alzheimer’s researchers who have been credibly accused of scientific fraud. Is it just random that fraud seems to proliferate in some scientific fields like this one? Or does the sheer desperation for Alzheimer’s advances cause people to overlook dodgy data - or to produce it? Whatever the reason: it’s grim news. As Matt Patton puts it: “these ‘scientists’ squandered tax dollars that were invested to spare you and your family years of horrible suffering”.

• While we’re talking about allegations of misconduct, that University of Rochester physicist who claimed he’d found a room-temperature superconductor (no, not that “LK-99” one. A different one) has just had a second paper retracted from Nature - his third overall.

• To cite one retracted paper may be regarded as misfortune. To cite twenty-nine looks like… actually, what the hell is going on here?!

• “Psychological constructs and measures suffer from the toothbrush problem: no self-respecting psychologist wants to use anyone else’s”. There are a lot of psychological scales, measures, and questionnaires out there, and most of them are used only once or twice. This is quietly a disaster, because it makes it very hard to compare studies and adds a whole bunch of noise into the literature. And I bet it’s similar in other parts of science, too.

  • The same researchers, in another paper, find a verrrrry suspicious “bump” in the values of Cronbach’s alpha (a statistic used to assess the reliability of measures) that are just at the threshold that’s considered to be “acceptable”. It’s a bit like those school datasets that show an unexpectedly high number of kids who are just above the passmark in some teacher-rated test: are researchers (teachers) juking the stats to make their measures (pupils) appear good enough? Almost certainly!

• Remember Brian Wansink? He’s the tragic Cornell food psychologist who exploded his own career by inadvertently admitting to serious p-hacking. After that, 18 of his papers were retracted, and he resigned from his job. Now, though, his most famous paper—the one with the self-refilling soup bowls, which had won an IgNobel Prize—has been successfully replicated! Funny old world.

• Scientists are just like magpies who enjoy shiny things: it seems they pay more attention to studying “pretty” bird species than “drab” ones. Maybe that’s rational and there’s more to learn about sexual selection from the pretty ones - but the whole thing is a great metaphor for science in general, where shiny hypotheses get disproportionate attention.

• Prof George Davey Smith, having done more than anyone else to popularise the method of “Mendelian Randomisation” (where you can use genetic variation to make causal estimates from observational data), is sort of like Dr. Frankenstein: his creation has come back to haunt him, in the form of a flood of crap MR studies. As previously mentioned on this newsletter, he’s doing his best to stem the flow - and now you can watch him doing a talk about it, too.

• I keep seeing examples of scientists using legal threats against other researchers who’ve criticised them, and against journals that are taking action to flag or correct potential misconduct. It’s already the case that scientists find accusing others of bad behaviour incredibly aversive - and journals are often very reluctant to act when they do. This just makes the whole thing much harder. Anyone who uses vexatious legal threats to suppress scientific criticism of their work should be drummed out of science entirely.

  • Other recent examples: Francesca Gino (Harvard psychologist accused of fraud); Priscilla Coleman (abortion researcher accused of flawed research)

• Another parapsychology study got published in a mainstream journal! But Sam Schwarzkopf, who has previously written sceptically about claims of psychic powers, is having none of it.

• Let’s end on a positive note for once. This new study shows that if you follow lots of the “Open Science” advice and do things like pre-registering your study, increasing its sample size, and being open and transparent with your data, you can get a very impressive replication rate. This happens to be good news, but regardless of the specific result, we need more meta-scientific tests like this - please keep them coming!

Image credit: Getty

Hello! Another month, another selection of science pieces I’ve written recently. And not only that, but as usual it’s followed by a veritable smörgåsbord - nay, a cornucopia! - nay, a plethora! - of interesting scientific links from the last month. Skip straight to those links by clicking here.

Let’s get on with it, shall we?

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The Studies Show podcast

The Studies Show, my podcast with Tom Chivers, is now the place to listen to me talk about science for an hour every week (literally: there aren’t any other places. So it’s the place). We’ve covered all sorts of interesting topics recently, like nuclear power, football and dementia, and cash transfers. You might also be interested in our first paid-subscriber-only episode, where we review the science of diversity training, covering trigger warnings, unconscious bias, microaggressions, and stereotype threat. If any of that sounds interesting, consider taking out a subscription on the podcast’s Substack page!

Really gets up my nose

I wrote about phenylephrine, the “nasal decongestant” which, at least in its oral form, doesn’t work to decongest your nose - despite being in tons of medicines (in the UK it’s in Lemsip, Beechams, and several others; in the US it’s in Benadryl).

Phenylephrine is “Generally Recognised as Safe and Effective” by the FDA - that’s the classification they give to medicines that are well-used even if the evidence base comes from old, low-quality studies. The reason I wrote about it was that the FDA had decided to review that evidence, and put out a devastating report ahead of an expert panel to re-assess the classification.

The update since then is that the panel unanimously agreed that phenylephrine doesn’t work. The FDA will now have to decide what to do, policy-wise. Once they’ve decided what to do with this one, maybe they could go after some of the other ineffective drugs on the market to which they’ve nonetheless given approval (ahem, Aducanumab, ahem).

Genetic amnesia

There’s a funny phenomenon whereby on the one hand we all know that a parent passes on their genetics to their child, and yet we somehow forget this basic fact when discussing (or doing!) science. I’ve written about a couple of instances of this recently.

The first article was about a big new study claiming that a father’s involvement can make a difference to his child’s educational outcomes. Maybe it can - but this study, lacking any kind of genetic control, certainly can’t show that. Just a complete failure of the people setting up (and funding) the study; it cant possibly address the question it’s supposed to address. You might as well have thrown the money spent on the study (£243,000) into a big furnace.

The second time was about the flurry of headlines relaying the shocking information that vegetarianism is partly genetic. But… of course it is, because all human behaviours are partly genetic. This was not news - and yet the authors saw fit to put out a press release on their study anyway.

I swear to god, every day I get closer and closer to writing an article called “Abolish Scientific Press Releases”…

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The noble lie about vaping

There’s a weird anti-vape panic gripping the UK media (and the UK in general) at present. One example was a paediatrics professor interviewed by the BBC who said that the message that vapes are “95% safer than cigarettes”—which he doesn’t deny is true—is a bad message because it’s made lots of children take up vaping.

This doesn’t seem right to me either empirically or as a matter of policy, as I argued in this piece (£). A “noble lie” is always going to backfire in the end when people find out they’ve been lied to - however nobly.

(You can also listen to our Studies Show episode on vaping).

Hello Goodbye Dolly (‘s creator)

Sir Ian Wilmut, the scientist most associated with Dolly the Sheep, died last month. As well as being near-synonymous with a massive scientific advance, he was also a controversial figure, and there were acrimonious disputes among his colleagues about the extent to which he deserved the credit for cloning Dolly. I wrote a piece about his career, why human cloning has never really become “a thing”, and why giving scientists proper credit is such a tricky issue.

Debunking as positive science

You don’t hear much about the “sceptics movement” these days. It still exists, to be sure - but it’s nowhere near as prominent as it was when I were a lad (i.e. in the early 2000s). And thus, I feel like I’m doing my bit to keep the tradition going when I publish sceptical takes on near-death experiences (£) or on whether you should be endlessly glugging gallons of water all day long.

Stephen Jay Gould, non-overlapping magisteria rest his soul, once wrote about “debunking as positive science” - you can learn a lot by working out where things have gone wrong. Anyway, in writing that latter article I learned that there are some proper RCTs—though still just preliminary ones—implying that drinking more water might actually help with some specific medical conditions. Huh!

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Stuff I didn’t write but that you might like anyway

• If you’re a scientist who worries that you’re doing research nobody cares about, this is for you: a new database made by the UK Government’s Office for Science where you can type in a relevant keyword and see what questions the Government/Civil Service want scientists to tackle on that topic to help them develop policies. Such a simple idea—basically a bulletin board to link up scientists and policy-makers—that it’s a wonder it took until now to make it. More of this, please!

• Cool survey on the factors that relate to US liberals and conservatives supporting government funding for science. As we’ve discussed before on this Substack, aspects like the appearance of impartiality really seem to matter (and you might say “duh!”, but a lot of scientists these days will tell you that impartiality is just a naïve pipe dream…).

  • Talking about government funding: the US National Science Foundation have announced (in partnership with my pals from the Institute for Progress) that they’re going to be running formal experiments on their grant-giving process. Not too many details yet, but this is an extremely promising move.

• A long, detailed, useful article from bioRxiv’s Richard Sever on the history and future of the scientific publishing process.

  • And relatedly, a new article on “replacing academic journals” (published in an academic journal! Ha ha, Alanis Morrisette, etc etc). How do we get over the inertia that stops scientists trying new ways of publishing their research?

• Pre-registration is one of the many fixes that have been suggested for research, and I’m a big fan. But here’s evidence that about half of all pre-registrations ended up different, in terms of the hypotheses eventually tested, from the eventual published study. That’s bad, and undermines pre-registration. But in a world where everything’s pre-registered, we can see this happening - ordinarily hypotheses get changed all the time and we’ve no idea.

• I dread to think how many hours of my life I’ve thrown away by reformatting study manuscripts that I’ve had rejected from journals, so they can be sent on to a different journal that has different formatting guidelines (I can guarantee that any scientist reading this is grimly nodding along). Now there’s an estimate of how much all this pointless effort costs, and it’s a lot.

  • Scientists, rise up! Stop doing this! Just submit the manuscript formatted however you like - if the journal wants to publish it, they can darn well format it themselves to whatever silly, arbitrary rules they prefer.

• Mendelian Randomisation is an amazing study design when it works: you can use genetic information to magic causation from correlation. But it seems to have become something of a Frankenstein’s monster for one of its biggest advocates, who now says that “The vast majority [of studies using the technique] are at best non-contributory or at worst simply ludicrous”. Ouch!

• A new (to me, at least) method called Z-curve that seems to predict almost spookily accurately which psychology studies will replicate.

• Here’s a demonstration of a new tool that searches through thousands of scientific papers and extracts relevant information about their statistics and methodology. In this case, it’s used to see if anything substantive has changed in psychology studies since the “replication crisis” began over a decade ago (I wrote about this here, before this new tool appeared - it’s exciting that we’ll soon see more empirical analyses on whether the science-reform movement has been successful).

• This is absolutely no surprise whatsoever, but with new generative AIs, you can produce entirely fake, but plausible-looking, scientific papers. Great - it’s not like we already had an issue with worthless studies polluting the literature.

• I’ve been doing this (writing about dodgy scientists’ antics) for a long time, and yet still I’m surprised at the lengths to which some people go to game the publication system. The latest discovery is people manipulating the metadata of papers so they contain secret citations to a target paper. These get picked up by the systems that count references, inflating the target’s citation count. Cheeky rascals.

• Sex differences in scientific fraud: women are underrepresented (in this case, the good kind of “underrepresented”).

Image credit: Getty

Welcome to the monthly science writing update! In terms of my own stuff, it’s been a quieter month than usual because I was on holiday for a while. But don’t worry - I made the “interesting links to things I didn’t write” section at the end longer than usual to make up for it - click here to go right to it.

Before we get started, just another little plug for The Studies Show, my new podcast with Tom Chivers. We talk about a controversial scientific question for an hour every week. In recent episodes we’ve covered the LK-99 superconductor story and the recent fight about growth mindset; the next one (coming on Tuesday) is about cash transfers to alleviate poverty. Hope you’ll have a listen!

I’m so pleased to say that, as of this week, 10,000 people(!!) subscribe to this Science Fictions newsletter. If you aren’t already one of them and you want a monthly update on all things bad-science, enter your email address below:

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A fare question

The “ultra-processed food” panic, scare, thing, whatever it is, continues. You can’t avoid hearing about it, at least here in the UK.

I heard someone on the radio the other day saying that learning about ultra-processed foods (and the “lies” told by food companies) had him feeling extreme rage every time he went food shopping, obsessively checking labels for E-numbers and insisting he brought a banana with him everywhere so he wouldn’t have to buy anything processed while out. It doesn’t strike me as a particularly healthy attitude towards eating, and it would be a shame if this is what the UPF discussion encourages.

Anyway, in response to a couple of new studies on this topic, I wrote a(nother) piece summarising the evidence, which has been described variously as “the best and most reasonably minded thing I’ve read on this topic” and “balanced” (just like a good diet). You can also listen to our podcast episode on UPFs here.

Pole-arising results

You might remember the study from 2021 that claimed that opening a strip club reduces sex crime in the local area, by a remarkable 13%. It all seemed a bit too good to be true.

And according to a pretty devastating critique of the study, it was. They had used the registration date, not the opening date, of the strip club as their measure of when it opened, despite these often being many weeks apart. And the data on sex crimes were hopelessly flawed, too. I wrote about the whole thing here (£).

Since I wrote that, the original authors of the strip-club study have posted a rebuttal. But I don’t find it very convincing: for example, even if they’re right in saying that a lot of strip clubs don’t have alcohol licences, I don’t get why this makes it okay to use the registration date as the opening date. I’ll stick with my previous position that this was a great example of how bad data, even with a perfect analysis, leads to researchers making spurious claims.

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BMI baby

BMI has been debunked! It’s misleading! It’s trash! It’s so common to hear people say this or something like it. I hear quite a lot of echoes of the things people say about, for example, IQ scores in discussions about psychology: “I know someone who got a very high IQ score but never did anything worthwhile with their life - so there!”. “You can have a very high BMI and still be perfectly healthy!”.

Well, yes, but that’s quite a basic misunderstanding of correlations - if a correlation isn’t exactly 1.00 or -1.00, you’re gonna get people who are off the diagonal and don’t perfectly conform to the prediction! It doesn’t mean the measure isn’t useful if you understand the limitations. Here’s my article on why BMI is (like every measurement) flawed, but still useful.

The IQ scale

Do music lessons make kids smarter? Here’s another area where there are duelling meta-analyses: one side says no, there’s no “far transfer” from one skill to another; the other can point to their own review that says there might be something going on. I rather doubt it, given what we know about all the previous interventions that are supposed to have made kids more intelligent.

But guess what? Although it would be cool if music lessons made your kids smarter, it doesn’t ultimately matter: you should do them anyway, because music lessons are great! Like so many questions where science overlaps with morality, politics, or (as here) aesthetics, there are good, entirely non-scientific arguments for the proposition, and we shouldn’t forget them.

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Things I didn’t write but that you might like anyway

• Perhaps predictably given I’m always talking about the replication crisis in science, I loved Anton Howes’s piece on the replication crisis in history.

  • The specific example Anton gives, about the “Cort process” and some highly questionable claims made about it recently, was also covered by Ian Leslie in his piece on how “stories are bad for your intelligence”…

  • …which itself fits nicely with an old post of mine from this Substack: “Science isn’t storytelling”.

• A long but very worthwhile piece on the history of the malaria vaccine, and how we might speed up our vaccine-making efforts in future.

• “Encouraging kids to drink more water at school helps prevent unhealthy weight gain! Randomised trial! Published in a prestigious journal!” Except the study didn’t show that, the reporting was highly misleading, and you can see that they changed their preregistration almost two years after the data were collected(!?). Great debunking thread here by Jon Baron.

  • And it’s not the only study that Jon Baron has “rekt” this month!

• A while ago I wrote an article that, among other things, critiqued that well-known “Facebook rolling out to universities in the early 2000s caused a decline in student mental health” study. Now there’s a more in-depth critique of the study by Dean Eckles. He argues that baseline differences across the universities violate the assumptions of the model, and mean we can no longer be confident in the causal effects.

• Dorothy Bishop looks into a crap review study on polyunsaturated fatty acids and children’s development and discovers “a huge edifice of evidence based on extremely shaky foundations”.

• Should we abolish the Discussion section in scientific papers? Having thought about this proposal, I reckon ultimately it wouldn’t help that much. But it’s fun to consider, and useful to be reminded of how much bullshit scientists add to their research papers.

• Just because your study is a simulation (maybe to check how a new statistical technique works) doesn’t mean it’s immune to all the usual tricks that scientists use to make their studies say basically whatever they want. Here’s a new paper on “questionable research practices” in simulation studies.

  • And just because your study doesn’t focus on p-values doesn’t make it immune to the usual tricks used in p-hacking. Here’s an article showing how “area under the curve” (important in many prediction models) can be hacked just like a p-value.

• (Another) worrying study on publication bias in research on antidepressants.

• Can you tell how strong a correlation is just from looking at a graph? A lot of people think they can, as I’ve previously documented here. A fun new study actually tests this, and looks at what other factors influence people’s judgements.

• You know how you get “special issues” at scientific journals? Maybe a journal will have one or two a year, perhaps curated by a guest editor with all the papers focused on a specific question. Well, apparently the journals run by the publisher MDPI have had more than sixty-five thousand special issues just in 2023 so far! The International Journal of Molecular Sciences has by itself had 4,216 this year. Does this heavily imply that MDPI is a “predatory publisher”, and that the quality of all the articles in these journals must be at absolute rock-bottom? I couldn’t possibly say.

Image credit: Getty.

Hello everyone - it’s time for your monthly update on what I’ve been writing about science! In this one, I’ve gone into a bit of detail on why I was so sceptical about LK-99, the magical “room-temperature superconductor”, plus some more writing on Alzheimer’s disease, the scientific publication system, and more.

And as always, I’ve added a collection of interesting science links at the end: you can click here to skip right to that.

Also, I’ll quickly give another mention to The Studies Show - it’s my new science podcast with fellow science writer Tom Chivers, where we take a controversial scientific topic and talk about it for an hour each week. It’s already critically-acclaimed!

So far you can hear episodes on Ozempic, breastfeeding, aspartame, psychedelics, and vaping, and there’s much more to come. We’d love it if you subscribed on The Studies Show’s own Substack - or on whichever app you normally use to listen to podcasts.

Now: on with the science writing.

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LK-99: My part in its downfall

Discovering a material that’s a superconductor at room temperature would be a major technological advance: if we could conduct electricity with zero resistance and without having to cool the conducting material to near absolute zero, we’d get advances ranging from a vastly more efficient energy grid to viable quantum computers.

The other week a group of Korean scientists posted two preprints to arXiv claiming they’d invented just such a material, called LK-99. Twitter went mental.

I mean, really mental: threads with thousands and thousands of retweets and millions of views, with endless replies from people positively rapturous about this incredible discovery.

I didn’t believe a word of it. The same day that the hype began to build on social media, I had an article out calling it “probably nonsense”. I didn’t have any particular special insight, and of course I’m not a physicist. But this was the very basic stuff I was thinking:

• The main preprint was very badly presented. A lot of people became enraged when I posted a tweet saying the study was “not serious” on account of its presentation. How dare I criticise scientists whose first language isn’t English for not writing perfect English prose?! Well, first off, that’s the soft bigotry of low expectations: thousands of scientists with first languages other than English write papers with perfect English grammar every day. And second, the grammar was just a small part of it. The scrappy-looking figures and overblown pronouncements did not look like the work of sober, well-organised scientists but instead of people who were rushed, naive, or maybe even a bit delusional: not things you’d associate with careful, meticulous, world-changing work.

  • In their angry tweets, a lot of respondents seemed almost to be contorting themselves into the position that more poorly-presented papers are actually more likely to be true! Come on, man. Bad presentation might not be strongly predictive of bad research—it’s just a red flag—but in my experience reading and reviewing hundreds of papers, it’s certainly a correlation.

• Actual experts were highly sceptical. For my article I contacted some top UK materials physicists. They thought the preprint was missing crucial details. Others were quoted elsewhere saying something similar. If you’d really made a world-changing discovery, I feel like you’d be clued-in enough to include those details, since you’d know your paper would be subject to intense scrutiny. These authors did not seem particularly clued-in.

• Your priors should be very low. There are several holy grails in physics: cold fusion is maybe the most famous, but room-temperature superconductivity is another. Claims of its discovery are made every couple of years, and none of them have panned out. LK-99 just happens to have gotten astronomically more attention due to all the social-media hyping. So it’s not just that you should’ve been sceptical because rare things happen rarely - it’s because this specific thing has been claimed over and over again in the past, to no avail.

• This field has had prominent cases of bad research. Literally the day before the LK-99 news started spreading, a now-infamous researcher who’d claimed to have discovered room-temperature superconductors had had a(nother) paper retracted for scientific misconduct.

None of these things, by themselves or even together, mean that LK-99 isn’t a room-temperature superconductor. But they should’ve made you incredibly sceptical, and should’ve absolutely ruled out any excitement until we had solid replication data.

Regardless, I saw otherwise-sensible people saying that they were 99.9% sure LK-99 was a room-temperature superconductor, offering 10:1 odds that it would successfully replicate, or that it was a discovery on a par with the Green Revolution that saved more than a billion lives.

It really was a wild few days, showcasing extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. At the same time, amateur physics tweeters racked up the likes and retweets by dramatically hyping up every new development in posts full of false information (“insanely bullish for humanity”!). People created and shared likely-hoax videos of pieces of something floating above magnets, as superconductors sometimes can. Most bizarrely, an anonymous account with a cartoon avatar posted long, fictionalised stories of the discovery of LK-99 which were seen by millions but only sometimes had the word “fiction” written at the top.

Anyway, now we have some replication data. Several studies have come back finding that LK-99 is not, in fact, a room-temperature superconductor. Authoritative sources are saying it’s time to give up. Even the daft tweeters who misled millions with their OTT initial reports are slinking away. I do hope we hear much less from them in future.

Sure, maybe tomorrow we’ll see something that brings the story roaring back. But I rather doubt it. Hate to say I told you so.

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Burying the dead - or the scientific publication system?

The LK-99 articles were preprints, and of course many people are concerned that a lack of peer-review allows false claims to circulate.

The journal eLife now has a pretty unique publication process where it publishes as preprints all the articles that it decides to send out for peer-review - and then publishes the reviews, too. A couple of weeks ago they published multiple papers about Homo naledi, the ancient hominins who, apparently, buried their dead and made deliberate cave etchings. But the claims went way beyond the data. Was it bad that eLife published these papers? Or good that the process was so transparent?

I wrote an article (£) that attempted to weave together the H. naledi tale with the story of eLife’s attempts to reform the scientific publication system.

Alzhypemer’s

There are now three drugs approved for patients with Alzheimers (aducanumab, lecanemab, and donanemab. Try saying those with a mouthful of boiled sweets. Actually, if you just say them normally, you sound like you have a mouthful of boiled sweets).

None of them have particularly stunning results. But every time a new study comes out, we’re told—by the media and scientists themselves—that it’s an enormous breakthrough, the beginning of the end for Alzheimer’s… and so on.

I tried to puncture this bubble with an article that pointed to some serious confusion about how to measure effect sizes in these kinds of trials, as well as references in the trial writeup that don’t support the authors’ case (I went into more detail on that here, and Jesse Singal wrote a much longer article on it here).

You don’t need a weatherman

Remember back in the day, when social psychology research was full of very silly studies about how certain unconscious influences (“primes”, like words, phrases, or images we happen to hear or see) had a massive influence on our behaviour?

A remnant of this kind of thinking still exists, and it’s “the wind speed changes your vote”! An article recently appeared claiming that the Brexit and Scottish Independence referendums, among other votes, were influenced by how windy the polling day was (the idea is that not that it changes turnout, but that it influences how “safe” people feel, and thus whether they vote for the “safe option”). You might be thinking “hmm, that doesn't sound very plausible” - and I’d agree with you. I critiqued the study here (£).

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Things I didn’t write but that you might like anyway

Here are some interesting science links from the last month or so that you might’ve missed:

• There was a collective sharp intake of breath in cancer biology research this month: a devastating critique appeared pointing to some fatal flaws in a Nature study that claimed to be able to predict cancer types from the microbial DNA in tumours. It’s really brutal stuff.

• 176 new attempts to replicate various psychology studies. Only 49% were successful. And to think some people don’t believe there’s a replication crisis!

  • And ecology continues to be the field that’s maybe second only to psychology in facing up to its own big problems.

• According to a new analysis, scientific papers are getting less hedge-y over time: they contain fewer words like “might” and “probably” that signal uncertainty. It’s consistent with the idea that pressure to publish nudges scientists towards more overblown claims. Or, maybe it is. Probably.

• Here’s an astonishing thread about growth mindset, and a seemingly deeply inept attempt by pro-growth mindset researchers to defend themselves against criticism. Reading the list of errors in their rebuttal had me cringing half to death - the rebuttal should probably be corrected or retracted.

• How many clinical trials are either “problematic” or entirely fake? The answer is higher than you might think, and this article interviews some of the sleuths who are spotting the bad ones.

• A useful summary of where errors creep in at all points of the scientific research and publication process.

• The latest update in the Francesca Gino case: she’s now suing not just Harvard, but also the academics who wrote the (extremely careful, well-evidenced) Data Colada blog posts alleging that there was fraud in her research. This is really shameful, cynical stuff, and it’ll contribute to a chilling effect where people are even more afraid to point out anomalous-looking research by powerful, well-known, big-deal scientific figures.

  • Oh, and this tweet about the case from Keith Humphreys contains a pun so painful that it should be considered illegal under the Malicious Communications Act.

Image credit: Getty

I’ve now got a podcast!

It’s called The Studies Show. It features me and my fellow science writer Tom Chivers talking about a controversial scientific issue for an hour every week.

We think it’s a great match-up, because Tom and I have very similar areas of interest in science (you might know Tom from his excellent books on statistics and AI), and we both try and take a sceptical attitude to new scientific research. Some early listeners have also noted that we have a nice English/Scottish accent combo.

If that sounds like the kind of thing you’d enjoy listening to, you can go to the podcast’s own Substack page right here and subscribe for free, or even become a paid member if you’d like to support us and get access to the occasional paid-only episode.

You can also get it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or any other podcast provider.

The first episode, which is available right now, is on the new weight-loss drugs and the spate of really bad arguments against them:

The Studies Show Podcast

Episode 1: Why is Ozempic so controversial?

Listen now (54 min) | In this first episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart discuss the new wave of weight loss drugs (like semaglutide), and the weird, often irrational arguments that people make against them. “New, effective drugs will help people lose lots of weight and this is a good thing” doesn’t…

Listen now

3 years ago · Stuart Ritchie and Tom Chivers

We have several other episodes recorded already, on the following topics:

• Aspartame - is it really a cancer risk?

• Psychedelics - are they what psychotherapists have been looking for?

• Breastfeeding - will it make your kids smarter and healthier?

• Vaping - why do so many people think it’s as bad as smoking?

These and plenty more are all to come. Some episodes will focus on a scientific issue that’s in the news, and others will be on more general topics. We’re also happy to take suggestions on what you’d like to hear about.

It’s all very exciting: I really hope you’ll subscribe at The Studies Show’s Substack and give it a listen.

See you there!

P.S. This Science Fictions Substack isn’t going anywhere; you’ll still get the monthly update of all my science writing on here as per usual.

P.P.S. It’s, like, “the studies show [X]”… but also it’s a “show” about “studies”. Get it!?

Hello and welcome to another monthly update on the stuff I’ve been writing about science! It includes a defence of diet drinks against some spurious criticisms, a call for scientists to learn how to debate, and (sigh) the story of my dispute with the BBC.

This is just a selection: you can read everything I’ve written at my author page at the i.

There’s also the usual list of interesting science links at the bottom (it’s been a fraud-heavy month in science, alas, so a lot of the links are to do with that). You can click here to skip down to that section.

Here we go, then - and if you’d like more of these updates, don’t forget to subscribe:

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Misinformation^2

I hate “misinformation” and “disinformation”. In both senses: obviously I’m on board with the idea that bad information is a serious problem, and I wouldn’t bother writing so much if I wasn’t. But I also hate those specific terms, which have in recent years become a signal of your political position more than any actual commitment to getting things right.

Case in point: I criticised the BBC’s new anti-mis/disinformation service (“BBC Verify”) for some of their coverage on conspiracy theory belief in the UK. They had commissioned a survey from the polling company Savanta, overseen by academics at King’s College London - but as I described in my article, the survey didn’t make any sense. If the numbers it reported were correct, then many millions of people have attended protests against things like “15-minute cities” (I feel like we’d have noticed an Iraq War-level protest of this nature), and an obscure conspiracy newspaper has vastly more subscribers than The Times.

After criticism from me and others, King’s added an addendum to their survey coverage noting that the numbers don’t really add up. Contrastingly, the BBC sent me what I’d describe as a passive-aggressive email about it, but stood by their coverage and (at the time of writing) haven’t made any amendments or corrections to their article, podcast, or TV documentary that all quote the survey numbers uncritically.

So, who fact-checks the fact-checkers? Well, I tried, but it turns out the fact-checkers DGAF.

Putting the “die” in “diet”

The World Health Organisation has been pretty crap of late.

First, I criticised their new guidelines on diet drinks, which totally fail to communicate the scientific uncertainty that was included in their own review of the evidence. What’s the point in commissioning an evidence review if you just revert to “diet drinks bad” regardless of what it said?

Then, I criticised the WHO’s cancer-research arm for adding the sweetener aspartame, commonly found in diet drinks, to their (silly) list of things that “possibly” cause cancer. Again, this is terrible science communication and will just worry people for no actual benefit. Thanks, WHO!

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Debate me, bro

Here’s what turned out to be a mildly controversial view: I disagree with people who say “scientists shouldn’t debate anti-vaxxers, creationists, climate sceptics, and other anti-science cranks”.

Well, that’s not quite right: I agree that most scientists shouldn’t debate them - because most scientists are terrible at debating, terrible at public speaking, and don’t know the ins and outs of the arguments made by these kinds of people. They get steamrollered in live debates by bad-faith actors who are nonetheless good at rhetoric and give at least the appearance of knowing their stuff.

But it’s a cop-out to say that we just shouldn’t debate these people under any circumstances - especially if they have a big platform (or have been given one). Yes, writing articles and filming YouTube videos to do post hoc debunks of anti-science claims is important. But we need to find (or train) the next generation of hard-headed, rational, pro-science debaters who can hold their own against BS vendors of all kinds in live debates. We can do it! Let’s have a bit of faith in ourselves!

That, anyway, was my argument in this article (£), with reference to the discourse on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And to the guy who emailed me asking when I would debate RFK Jr. (possibly without realising that I’m a complete nobody), my answer is: literally anytime. Bring it on.

Australia: land of contrasts

Clearly the Australian medical regulator didn’t read my first ever post on this Substack, which was all about the many scientific problems researching psychedelics. I know this because Australia has recently become the first ever country to legalise psychedelics for use in psychotherapy sessions. I reckon the best thing to’ve done would be to adjust the law so they’re more available for research, rather than jumping straight to patients, and I wrote about it here.

Weirdly, despite the new permissiveness about psychedelics, Australia has cracked down extremely hard on e-cigarettes/vapes, and is (I think) the harshest of any of its comparator countries on this question. Which leads me to my article (£) on vaping, about how scientists for some reason press-released an n=9 article “IN MICE”, spreading fear about vaping during pregnancy - something which I’m sure isn’t ideal, but which is a hell of a lot better for you than smoking - which vaping helps you give up.

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Alien aren’t, fam

A weird trajectory is the following:

1. Anti-woke journalist/academic; rails against the new political correctness

2. Gathers audience with “heterodox” views

3. Starts pushing the idea that UFOs are really aliens visiting Earth???

Many such cases, as the man once said. I wrote about the latest massive UFO revelation here. And, of course, we’ve heard nothing since this story came out and I don’t expect there’ll be anything soon… until the next massive revelation that also won’t come to anything.

Until anyone actually produces solid evidence that UFOs aren’t just camera artefacts (the exact same UFO filmed from different places by multiple cameras would be a start), maybe we should just lay off the UFO stories, much as I’m sure they fit into the anti-government views that so many people want to push.

Vax 🦇 the 🦇 bats 🦇

And finally… I didn’t realise before the extent to which we vaccinate wild animals, for all sorts of reasons that aren’t just to do with preventing human pandemics. I wrote about it here. Will this lead to a slippery slope into caring more and more about wild animal suffering, to the point where we try to stop, I dunno, lions from predating on gazelle, and things like that? Okay, probably not. But would that be such a bad thing?

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Things I didn’t write but that you might like anyway

• Anyone who reads this newsletter has probably already heard about the Francesca Gino scandal, which began to unfold over the past month. But just in case you missed it, the summary is: high-powered professor at Harvard Business School and expert in dishonest behaviour(!); four studies (and maybe more) that contain data that’s been tampered with; she’s been put on administrative leave; the retraction process is beginning. The excellent, careful, four-part investigation at Data Colada is a must-read, starting here, and there’s a summary of the story so far here.

• And talking about fraud: if you’ve read Chapter 3 of my book Science Fictions, you might remember the fraudulent surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, whose plastic-trachea operations (about which he lied in multiple scientific papers) led to the injury and death of several patients. He’s now been sent to prison, in a rare case of this happening to a scientific fraud. Of course, this case was more extreme and more immediately, directly damaging than the data- or image-manipulation stuff we routinely come across.

  • You might also remember this guy, where the story is rather different.

• And still talking about fraud, sort of: here’s a fun YouTube video that fact-checks an oft-repeated claim (“verified” by the Guinness Book of Records!) about the fastest typist in the world. I think it illustrates two things relevant to this newsletter: people very confidently reciting bogus numerical claims, and the game of Chinese Whispers you often encounter when you try to track a claim back to its source.

• Even if the official journal website has a big, noticeable “RETRACTED” label (and sometimes it’s actually not that big or noticeable!), scientific articles are shared in many different ways online, and many of them just never get updated when the status of the article changes. Here’s an article in the BMJ discussing the problem.

• Relatedly, here’s a thread criticising the journal Science for “burying” what sounds like a very important critique of a highly-cited cancer research study in an “eLetter” which, presumably, hardly anyone will ever see. It’s not just retractions and corrections: we need a better way of highlighting critiques of non-retracted, non-corrected articles too. But how do you ensure that you draw attention to the good-quality critiques without allowing a flood of crap comments to appear under, say, politically controversial articles? Or can we just live with that?

• How it started: “THIS FREEZER IS BEEPING AS IT IS UNDER REPAIR. PLEASE DO NOT MOVE OR UNPLUG IT.” How it’s going: “Janitor heard ‘annoying alarms’ and turned off freezer, ruining 20 years of school research worth $1 million, lawsuit says”.

  That’s it for another month. Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already, and keep in touch with all things Science Fictions:

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Hello! You are, as ever, very welcome to this digest of my science writing from the past month. Below is a selection of articles on topics from baby feeding to diet to AI to loneliness to cash-transfers. You can see everything I’ve written at this link.

And I’ve also collected a bunch of other interesting science-related links for your delectation (skip right to those links by clicking here).

Oh, and: there might be some exciting news coming soon for those of you who enjoy listening to me talking about science. Watch this space.

Let’s get to it. Don’t forget to sign up if you’d like more of these monthly update-digest-roundup-newsletters:

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Milky milky warm and tasty

I don’t think you have to be a hardcore libertarian to think that the UK’s laws on baby formula are crazy. You can’t advertise it, you can’t allow “buy one get one free” offers on it, and you can’t even put a picture of a baby on the front of the box, among many other restrictions on its sale and composition.

It’s as if baby formula was a dangerous substance - and many people seem to think it is - they argue that allowing it to be sold like any other food item might cause mothers to stop breastfeeding their babies, which could cause great harm. I wrote an article arguing that there’s no convincing scientific support for the idea that these laws work to “protect” breastfeeding, nor for the idea that they’re particularly proportionate:

…it’s not at all clear that the downside of allowing marketing for baby formula outweighs the downside of making life harder for non-breastfeeding mothers.

My tweets on this topic managed to kick off a great deal of Twitter discourse, much of which was extremely stupid, so here are the links if you like that sort of thing.

And just as a bonus, I also did a little Twitter thread on a new observational study that says breastfeeding is linked to better school exam results 16 years later (reported in much of the media, of course, as if it was a causal relationship). This also seems to have upset a few people.

You can call me AI

I’ve found that when I bring up the topic of the existential threat of AI, a lot of people look at me as if I’ve gone completely mental. That’s why I wrote this long article setting out, as clearly as possible, what people mean when they say that a rogue AI could be a severe danger to humanity.

Regardless of how plausible you think such a scenario is—and I also wrote a follow-up piece with even more possibilities—I hope this will be useful to send to your friends who might not have followed this debate, which has been happening on (let’s face it) pretty obscure internet forums for decades, particularly closely.

On the positive, non-doom, non-killer-robot side of the AI discourse, we also recently saw headlines about a new antibiotic “discovered using AI”. This article tries to put that claim in the proper context.

Food fads

I started to notice a new nutritional claim going around: that science tells us we should eat “30 different plants a week” for optimal gut health. Like me, your first reaction to hearing this might be “come on, man!”. But I decided to trace it back to its scientific source. And it turns out, perhaps predictably, that it’s bullshit.

The true nutritional buzzword/bogyeman du jour, though, is “Ultra-Processed Foods”. What does that term even mean? Is there something special about a “UPF”—some ingredient or ingredients—that makes it particularly unhealthy, or do these foods just taste really nice and that’s why people eat more of them? What does the evidence actually look like, here? I talked about those questions and more in my article on UPFs.

In any case, I’m feeling far more optimistic about the obesity epidemic: the cavalry really is on the way, in the form of GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide (marketed as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Rybelsus; but also even newer ones like tirzepatide). The UK’s NHS has just announced that you’ll soon be able to get semaglutide from your GP. This is extremely good news, as I discussed in this piece.

It’s lovely to see that the NHS has ignored all the daft anti-semaglutide arguments buzzing around in certain quarters: I’ve noticed that the Guardian seems to publish a surprisingly large number of articles of this nature so I started collecting them in this Twitter thread. The most recent one at the time of writing is perhaps the worst.

(The most annoying thing, though, is that with all this semaglutide discussion, I’ve had the jingle to the US Ozempic ad stuck in my head for days. “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic!” to the tune of that old “It’s Magic” song by the (Scottish!) band Pilot. It’s a genius bit of marketing, but it is driving me slowly round the bend. And now it’ll do the same to you.)

Extend your Nature-al life

I’m always excited to see more research on cash transfers for people in developing countries: these seem like a really great way to improve people’s lives. So I was excited to read a new Nature paper that claimed to show, with data from dozens of countries, that these cash transfers help prevent people dying young.

But the analysis in the study makes some really basic missteps that undermine the whole argument. I wrote about the whole thing here (£):

But do [cash transfers] protect against early mortality? The sad thing is that, even after reading an article in Nature—the world’s “top” scientific journal, where you’d expect strong, definitive results—I don’t know.

Some dodgy comparisons

Loneliness: as bad for your health as smoking 20 a day? Well, not really: we know an awful lot more about the causal effects of smoking.

Flying in a private jet: as bad for the environment as owning three dogs? Well, not really: it heavily depends on how you do the analysis.

Maybe these kinds of comparisons aren’t actually very helpful, except as pure rhetoric.

And finally… mea culpa

Embarrassingly, the other week I shared what turned out to be a very bad preprint on fake “paper mill” research. This was a disturbing lesson in confirmation bias on my part: I knew the paper had shoddy methods, and even said so at the time, but I still tweeted and wrote about it anyway because it seemed to point in the same direction as other investigations of paper mills that I already knew about. Anyway, I deleted the tweet and wrote an extra critique of the study plus a column (£) about mistakes in science, including my own. A fuckup to be sure, and a good reminder to be extra-critical in future.

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Things I didn’t write but that you might like anyway

And now for your monthly bonus links list:

• There was a really nice one-off programme from BBC Radio 4 called “The Truth Police”, about data sleuths and why we need them. I pop up about halfway through, and you’ll also hear from Elisabeth Bik, Nick Brown, James Heathers, and Dorothy Bishop - all names you’ll likely know if you’ve been following the whole “replication crisis” story.

• The first thing you need to know is that I’m not sharing what I’m about to share because a book that covered this topic beat my book to an award a couple of years ago. That’s not what this is about, honest! I’m glad we’ve established that. Now: there’s been a huge thing in books, articles, podcasts, and scientific papers in recent years about the “wood wide web” - the claim that trees can share resources, and maybe even communicate(!), because there are networks of fungi linking them up underground. Well, maybe the whole thing turns out to be based on exaggeration of the scant evidence. “Among peer reviewed papers published in 2022, fewer than half the statements made about the original field studies could be considered accurate”. Oops!

• Is it possible for a scientist to publish a study every two days? Turns out technically the answer is “yes”. But you might wonder whether (a) the studies are any good and (b) whether the scientist in question actually contributed anything beyond signing his name.

• And as if the scientific literature didn’t include enough low-quality research papers, now high-school kids are getting in on the game (often with help from pushy parents who can pay for their paper to be published).

• Of the two most famous psychology studies of the 1960s/70s*, Milgram’s gets a better rap than Zimbardo’s. Mainly that’s because, unlike the Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison “Experiment” (which wasn’t actually an experiment and was a weird semi-theatrical occurrence where Zimbardo himself played a heavy role), Milgram’s studies actually had data and occurred across many hundreds of participants. But in this thread, Shane Littrell points to several sources that remind us that Milgram’s research was extremely shoddy as well, not to mention very difficult to interpret.

• How many psychology studies are direct replications of previous work? According to this analysis by Beth Clarke shared at the recent Metascience conference, not very many: about 1 in 500 (though it has increased recently, thank heavens). I wonder whether this number would be higher or lower in other, non-psychology research fields.

• What on Earth is happening in the very weird world of “hydroxychloroquine for COVID” research?

• I loved this: a useful taxonomy of all the “persuasive communication devices” (read: sleazy writing tricks) that scientists use in studies to mischaracterise and oversell their results.

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Unimportant P.S.: This shouldn’t make any difference to anything because the old URL still works too, but due to the recent nonsense where Twitter was (is?) throttling links to Substack, you might have noticed that I’ve changed the main URL for this site, merging it with the site I made for my book when it came out: www.sciencefictions.org.

*Edit 10 June 2023: Milgram’s experiments took place in the 1960s, not 1970s. They came to popular attention in the mid-70s when Milgram published his book, but had all happened a decade earlier. Now corrected above.

Hello and welcome to your monthly update of my science writing! This has been quite the varied month at the i, as you can likely tell from the subtitle above. I’ve selected some of my favourite pieces below; you can read everything I’ve written at this link.

And as usual, at the end I’ve left a collection of interesting links to science-related stories I didn’t write, but that are still very much worth your while (click here to skip directly to that part).

Do remember to subscribe, if you haven’t already: just type your email below and you’ll get monthly updates just like this one.

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In a Piff of smoke

You might remember the 2012 PNAS paper by Piff et al. that claimed that people from higher social classes were more likely to act unethically, across a whole range of different domains.

For obvious reasons this study became a massive blockbuster, reported in the media and tweeted regularly to this day - but I remember discussing it with colleagues right at the start and it all seemed a bit too good to be true.

Well, there have now been several replication attempts, and perhaps predictably none of them look particularly good for the original claim. I wrote about the latest one here.

Isn’t that the plot of The Terminator?

I regret to inform you that recent months have made me much more of an AI doomer. That is, I’ve raised my view of the likelihood of the worst-case scenario where a super-intelligent AI becomes a genuine threat to the continuation of the human race. I still don’t think it’s a high chance, by any means, but I’m now actively worried about it, in the same way I am about nuclear weapons or pandemics.

That’s quite a common view given the incredibly rapid AI progress in recent months. Indeed, as you’ll have seen, famous AI researchers like Geoffrey Hinton are coming out and saying it too.

Oddly though, many news outlets wrote up the story of Hinton leaving Google and warning the world about AI as one that was mainly about the risks of “misinformation” and job losses - not about the total extirpation of humanity by a rogue, un-aligned AI. Seems like quite a big thing to miss.

I wrote about the weird media coverage here. And I also went on TV for 5 minutes to talk about this last week.

Yong COVID

Here’s an article (£) where I took issue with Ed Yong’s recent Atlantic piece on Long COVID. I really think his transition into some sort of patient advocate over the past couple of years really hasn’t been helpful for his science writing, and this article illustrates that perfectly.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s admirable to want to help people who are struggling with a horrible illness. But as I say in the piece:

Simply agreeing with people when they tell you what they think caused their symptoms, and smoothing over all the complications and uncertainties about the condition, is not necessarily the best way to help them – and might be actively counterproductive.

We need a lot more research on Long COVID to properly understand it - and I worry that articles like Yong’s inadvertently stand in the way of that research being done.

The Mad King(s)

Through no particular design, I ended up writing several articles about heads of state this month. The first is one about Joe Biden, his age, and his cognitive abilities. Hopefully it serves as a useful little primer on the phenomenon of cognitive ageing, which was probably the subject I published most papers on back when I was a scientist.

The second one is about King Charles III. If you look back at the history of British Royalty then you’ll find many of them had a deep interest in science. But our current King has for decades been pushing homeopathy and “alternative medicine”, which is a bit of a bummer. Let’s hope we see less of that, and more support for real science, now he’s King.

And here’s one about a somewhat different head of state: the other week I noticed that it had been exactly 40 years since the fraudulent “Hitler Diaries” were first “discovered” - so I wrote an article about it. It’s a great little story if you don’t happen to know it, and I also included a brief detour into the relevant (dodgy) science on handwriting analysis.

Shooting Pisces in a barrel

There’s nothing wrong with doing a study that’s just on zebrafish - really! You don’t need to give in to the solipsistic desire (or, at least, the scientific-publishing incentive) to make everything about humans. But here’s a story about a perfectly interesting zebrafish study that was press-released as if it was relevant to the effects of intermittent fasting in humans.

And finally… after Hermione Emma Watson made a long, rambling comment about her “Saturn Return”, I wrote a piece asking why it seems so many people are into astrology now.

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Things I didn’t write but that you might like anyway

• My dear friend Saloni continues to write info-rich science Substacks, and her one on snakebites and what they tell us about missing data was particularly good.

• Scientists behaving badly, Episode No. 41923957: A Japanese researcher has been busted by his university for faking data in a 2019 Nature Neuroscience paper. When asked for the raw data, he said that—oops!—the hard disks and paper copies had all been destroyed in an earthquake. Which is the best scientific dog-ate-my-homework excuse I’ve heard since the one where the data were apparently lost due to the 2016 military coup in Turkey.

  • By the way, at the time of writing, the Nature Neuroscience paper still doesn’t have a retraction, correction, or even an editorial “expression of concern”. It’s now been well over a month since the university provided unambiguous evidence of a great deal of scientific fraud. Oh well!

• Yet another “Native American” academic has been revealed to be a white person just pretending to be a Native American. The reason it’s relevant is that it’s a new kind of research fraud I hadn’t thought of: misrepresenting your identity to colleagues, students, grant funders, research participants… all of whom would likely have treated you rather differently if they knew the truth.

• Waaaaay back at the very start of the pandemic, I wrote an article called “Don’t Trust the Psychologists on Coronavirus”. It was about how various psychologists and behavioural economists had blundered into the media to tell people to just calm down about this whole “virus” thing. We know how that turned out. Anyway, there’s now a new paper that takes statements made by psychologists and members of the general public near the start of the pandemic about how society would change, then rates them for how accurately they turned out. You guessed it: the “experts on human behaviour” are no better than the average participant at predicting this stuff. Maybe I should’ve just called my article “don’t trust psychologists”, full stop.

• NeuroImage is a scientific journal that I’ve read a lot and submitted papers to in the past - it’s a pretty staple journal if you do any kind of MRI or fMRI neuroscience. In April the entire editorial board resigned because the publisher, Elsevier, ramped up the “article processing charge”—the amount you’re forced to pay to publish there, since it’s an open-access journal—to $3,450 (£2,730). This is obviously an absurd amount and I was very glad to see the editors standing up to a publisher rinsing academics (and ultimately the taxpayer) in this way.

  • By the way, I don’t think you have to go “full commie” and object to the very idea of a profit-making motive in scientific publishing. That’s still an important spur to make things better. But pretty clearly what’s happening with Elsevier and many other publishers is rent-seeking, where someone demands more money without actually providing more worthwhile services. That’s what we should be objecting to very strongly.

• To end on a depressing note: you know how the evolution-vs-creationism wars were pretty decisively won by the “evolution” side in the West, to the point that basically nobody ever talks about it any more? Well, in India the anti-evolution side is making big strides, literally rewriting school textbooks and gaining political support. Easy to see quite a grim future for Indian biology (and science in general) if this stuff really sticks.

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