What is Going On?
Big History is one thing. But what's going on right now in the world? A complete list would be amazing. Anders Sandberg and Katja Grace have done some work here:
aleph.se/andart2/uncategorized/what-is-going-on-in-the-world/
Big History is one thing. But what's going on right now in the world? A complete list would be amazing. Anders Sandberg and Katja Grace have done some work here:
aleph.se/andart2/uncategorized/what-is-going-on-in-the-world/
See nautil.us/issue/92/frontiers/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics
Basically the methods of NHST (null-hypothesis significance testing) were contrived so that R. A. Fisher, Karl Pearson and the other pioneers could defend eugenics and appear to be impartial scientists just upholding objective truth. That's why they favored frequentist statistics.
It's a damning highlight of just how many people feel motivated to do science fraud, when the field of statistics itself basically arose from that motivation.
Inspired by Pablo Stafforini's page www.stafforini.com/blog/my-beliefs-updated/. See the whys in Unpacking beliefs.
NOTE: I don't state all my beliefs here. Many can be found on more relevant pages for each topic.
Many people share these beliefs with me, and it makes little difference to state them, but I thought it fun to identify them.
One part of the problem is that journals still permit you to make unsupported dismissive statements in your literature review, the chapter that's supposed to summarize past research, and these statements are rarely verified by the editor or reader. Retraction Watch calls this problem a dismissive review: retractionwatch.com/2021/03/23/dismissive-reviews-a-cancer-in-the-body-of-knowledge/
You can get a feel for the scale of the problem yourself with some internet searching. Try exact phrases, such as “this is the first study,” “little research,” “few studies” and various similar word combinations.
and
When dismissive reviewers band together, they form a “citation cartel” (and practice what is variously called “citation stacking,” “citation amnesia,” or the like). They may cite each other profusely while declaring the work of others outside their group nonexistent or no good.
You could work around this by requiring what's known as Systematic review, or that the author refer to previously made systematic reviews.