Self-Correcting Science, 99% is not enough & Misaligned Incentives
CC#35 - social media x age, non-cognitive skills & a blog search engine
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
❎ The joke of self-correcting science: The Andero lab and Nature Communications
As a researcher you are essentially a producer of knowledge. As such, the quality and correctness of your research should be the utmost priority. Why is it then that the current incentive scheme in science discourages error correction?
Among many memorable events, I saw a talk by David Allison about his efforts to correct simple statistical mistakes in the published literature. He would notice a clear and obvious error, like a claimed interaction that wasn’t actually tested properly. He would then send a polite email to the authors to explain the situation so it could be corrected. If the authors didn’t respond, he’d move on to the editors. He went through case after case that he had pursued, and the result was almost always the same: indifference. Most of the authors he contacted either didn’t care or didn’t respond. The same was true for the editors. Despite intense efforts, actual corrections were extremely rare.
🚨 Heuristics That Almost Always Work
There are many situations where it clearly makes more sense to rely on heuristics that mostly work as opposed to rationally analyzing every aspect - for e.g. if you are looking to hire someone who is good at math, choosing the person with a good math grade in school will probably give you good mathematicians most of the time and be much less effort than letting every candidate take a 2 hour math exam. However, in certain cases even heuristics that work in 99.9% of the cases shouldn’t be applied.
The Security Guard
He works in a very boring building. It basically never gets robbed. He sits in his security guard booth doing the crossword. Every so often, there’s a noise, and he checks to see if it’s robbers, or just the wind. (…)At some point, he develops a useful heuristic: it he hears a noise, he might as well ignore it and keep on crossing words: it’s just the wind, bro. This heuristic is right 99.9% of the time, which is pretty good as heuristics go. It saves him a lot of trouble.
The only problem is: he now provides literally no value. He’s excluded by fiat the possibility of ever being useful in any way. He could be losslessly replaced by a rock with the words “THERE ARE NO ROBBERS” on it.
Insightful interview that debunks some common misconceptions that many people in the developed world have about global development policies - quite eye opening.
But very often in practice, participatoriness ends up being user fees or cost sharing, in ways that are not particularly empowering to people. Think about if someone came along and said, “We’re going to fix the potholes on your street, and we need everybody to show up with a shovel.” There are these myths that people will appreciate it more if they help pay for it themselves.
I feel like it’s a little paternalistic and a little insulting. People deserve services. They should be provided to them. They shouldn’t have to participate — they’re citizens of countries that should be doing these things for them. So I think that that term often gets used in ways that’s cynical, and when you really actually get down to, “Are you actually giving people decision-making authority?” — not so much. So yeah. I feel like that’s one we want to interrogate sometimes.
Food for Thought.
🧑💻 Social Media channel usage in America by age groups
🧠 According to a recent study (which admittedly is limited to a sample of Swedish man drafted for the military), non-cognitive skills, comprising traits such as stress tolerance or social maturity, have become more valuable on the labour market since 1990.
📑 Interesting write up of an ML engineer's approach to reading papers. Reminder: its ok to not read linearly!
Random Stuff.
🏄♀️ Blog Surf is a specialized search engine for blogs. It makes it very easy to find content from individual writers on a specific topic (as opposed to articles from large newspapers) - I am quite excited about this, have been looking for something similar for a while!
📆 Calenday is a tool that allows for real-time sync calendar sharing, including voting on events. Kind of like google docs but for calendars.
🔢 If you work with data and SQL, its often easy to get lost. That’s why this webpage might come in handy - it simply visualises the outcome of SQL queries.
Personal Update.
Happy belated Easter to those who celebrate! 🐣
Spent some days back home having quality time with family and friends.
Now heading to the Allied for Startups Board Retreat in Lisbon - looking forward to some warmth and discussing startup politics & the EU data act.