Lars P. Syll

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Inference to the best explanation [embedded content] In a time when scientific relativism is expanding, it is important to keep up the claim for not reducing science to a pure discursive level. We have to maintain the Enlightenment tradition in which the main task of science is studying the structure of reality. Science is made possible by the fact that there are structures that are durable and independent of our knowledge or beliefs about them. There...

Deborah Mayo on statistical significance testing [embedded content] Although yours truly appreciate much of Mayo’s philosophical-statistical work, it is essential to remember that her qualified use of ‘severe testing’ actually is pretty far from​ the usual day to day practice of significance testing among applied social scientists today. If, however, statistics​ users stuck to Mayo’s ‘severe testing,’ there would be less reason to criticize the modern...

Big data — Poor science Almost everything we do these days leaves some kind of data trace in some computer system somewhere. When such data is aggregated into huge databases it is called “Big Data”. It is claimed social science will be transformed by the application of computer processing and Big Data. The argument is that social science has, historically, been “theory rich” and “data poor” and now we will be able to apply the methods of “real science” to...

Well-regarded economics journals publishing rubbish In a new paper, Andrew Chang, an economist at the Federal Reserve and Phillip Li, an economist with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, describe their attempt to replicate 67 papers from 13 well-regarded economics journals … Their results? Just under half, 29 out of the remaining 59, of the papers could be qualitatively replicated (that is to say, their general findings held up, even if the...

At the University of Chicago, where I went to graduate school, they sell a t-shirt that says “that’s all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory?” That ode to nerdiness in the ivory tower captures the state of knowledge about rising wealth inequality, both its causes and its consequences. Economic models of the distribution of wealth tend to assume that it is “stationary.” In other words, some people become wealthier and others become poorer, but as a whole...

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Why bloggers are so negative Rather than getting into a discussion of whether blogs, or academic sociology, or movie reviews, should be more positive or negative, let’s get into the more interesting question of Why. Why is negativity such a standard response? 1. Division of labor. Within social science, sociology’s “job” is to confront us with the bad news, to push us to study inconvenient truths. If you want to hear good news, you can go listen to the...

Why statistical significance is worthless in science There are at least around 20 or so common misunderstandings and abuses of p-values and NHST [Null Hypothesis Significance Testing]. Most of them are related to the definition of p-value … Other misunderstandings are about the implications of statistical significance. Statistical significance does not mean substantive significance: just because an observation (or a more extreme observation) was unlikely...

When the herd turns  [embedded content]