Tag / bias

by Roslyn

Science is flawed. So what?

The results of the Reproducibility Project – a very cool endeavour to repeat a bunch of published studies in psychology – came out this week [1]. The authors (a team of psychologists from around to world) found that they were able to successfully replicate the results of 39 out of 100 studies, leaving 61% unreplicated. This seems like an awful lot of negatives, but the authors argue that it’s more or less what you’d expect. A good chunk of published research is wrong, because of sampling error, experimenter bias, an emphasis on publishing surprising findings that turn out to be false, or more than one of the above. No one study can ever represent the truth – nor is it intended to. The idea is that with time and collective effort, scientific knowledge progresses towards certainty.

So science crowd-sources certainty.

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by Roslyn

Beware of the blob

It creeps, and it might be more like us than we care to admit. That was a lesson I learned last fall when trying to choose between pigeons and slime moulds for our lab journal club. The birds, it seems, are on a different level.

It started with the Monty Hall problem and a new study that asks, “Are birds smarter than mathematicians?”1. For those not familiar, the Monty Hall problem is a puzzle made famous by columnist Marilyn vos Savant, based on the popular 1960s game show Let’s Make a Deal (which was, incidentally, hosted by Winnipeg-born Monty Hall). Here it is:

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?2

If you were on Let’s Make a Deal, would you take Hall’s offer to switch doors? Or would you stand by your original choice?

Let's Make a Deal

Does it make any difference?

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