Brent W. Roberts

Well...

And this could reduce the paranoia generated by asking 10 vaguely similar questions--two for the price of one.

I now have a new plan for my retirement...

Le rassemblement Stand Up for Science à l’institut Pasteur

One year after, we Stand Up for Science one more time at @pasteur.fr
#StandUpForScience
@standupforscifr.bsky.social
✊

Current NIH leadership want you to think they are using rigorous, consistent & scientific processes to screen studies to align them with agency priorities.

But the process that they have put down on paper is a sham.

It’s important to know NIH is not following its own guidance. Here’s why:

🧵1/

Scientific datasets are riddled with copy-paste errors Initial results from scanning through Excel files belonging to 600 published scientific papers.

If you want to take your mind off awful politics and look at awful science stuff instead, this is a good read: www.sciencedetective.org/scientific-d...

The one science reform we can all agree on, but we're too cowardly to do OR: the long overdue forest fire

The problem cannot be reduced to the for-profit nature of scholarly publishers. In domains where there is real competition, like groceries, cars, or TVs, the free market delivers products that constantly get better, and cheaper. www.experimental-history.com/p/the-one-sc...

Only 2 weeks left to apply to a 3-day hackathon to build tools to improve the visibility of replications!
Apply by 16 March: indico.uni-muenster.de/e/marco2

Do You Agree? Do You Strongly Agree? The Effect of the Number of Response Categories on Response Processes and Verification of Substantive Hypotheses Abstract. This study investigates how the number and labeling of response categories in survey scales affect respondent behavior, psychometric properties,

This is consistent with earlier psychometric work that suggests 5-7 is the best response scale options, but good to see that the finding holds up in contemporary research. Also, good to see that labeling scales whether anchored or not has little impact on findings. academic.oup.com/ijpor/articl...

No, you see the smartphones will moderate the effect of school absence for 13.5 year olds living in exurbs in Wyoming. Very nuanced.

Unmasking Academe’s Gilded Boys’ Club The Epstein files reveal an elite, chummy, and venal scholarly network.

This is the swamp in which we work. To pretend that these men are exceptional mistakes the deep misogyny & racism built into American higher ed. These same men have fashioned themselves as heterodox thinkers against the world of woke but this is who they really are. www.chronicle.com/article/unma...

How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM Jeffrey Epstein was deeply interested in the scientific community, and he used his power and money to keep women out of places they might succeed.

The boys’ club: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM ctmirror.org/2026/02/23/t...

Grievance Is All You Need Understanding attacks on NIH, CDC and FDA through the lens of COVID revisionists

Thank you to @joshuasweitz.bsky.social. The origin of the current assault on science and public health has a direct tie to COVID contrarianism. But Bhattacharya, Prasad and the rest couldn’t rise without help and patronage. 1/ joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/grievance-...

A different kind of reproducibility crisis.

Paper on statistical power necessary for interaction effects
doi.org/10.1177/2515...

Jeffrey Epstein helped fuel the campus culture wars The academics in the Epstein files aren’t all criminals, but they shared beliefs about whose work matters.

Take a load off your minds everyone, it was regular old misogyny the whole time

Recent work has shown how vulnerable online survey research is to LLMs. Motivated by this, we examined our online Posner cueing data from Prolific. It's concerning. We now must carefully consider when (or whether?) online behavioral data can be trusted.
see our comment:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

How the processes of recuperation vitiate apparent methodological advances in medical research, from meta-analysis to Mendelian randomization

Babbage, 1830, discussing the problem that scientists selectively report findings that they want to be true.

Confirmation bias is a strong human tendency. This is why we need to design science in a way that prevents conformation bias from leading us away from the truth.

This article raises the larger point that it’s not just Individual decisions or moral failings that the Epstein files reveal. It’s a culture and clique that was self-reinforcing and enabling.

New paper, on a worrying trend in meta-science: the practice of anonymising datasets on, e.g., published articles. We argue that this is at odds with norms established in research synthesis, explore arguments for anonymisation, provide counterpoints, and demonstrate implications and epistemic costs.

Moldy maybe?

I'm monotonously monotonous. The age effect does, however, seem to be monotonic.

Well, isn't it an interaction of insult quality and age effect? Or is it my cohort which didn't use sunscreen???

Yeah, what does that make us 60-year olds? Desiccated husks?

I think you just called us older people raisins. I'm deeply offended...

One approach to the age-period-cohort problem: Just don’t. Just to cause yourself more problems, you seek for something. But there is no need for you to seek anything. You have plenty, and you have just enough problems. Shunryū Suzuki in a 1971 talk A ...

New blog post about the age-period-cohort identification problem!

In which, for the first time ever, I ask "What's the mechanism?" and also suggest that sometimes you may actually *not* be interested in causal inference.

www.the100.ci/2026/02/13/o...

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

A meta-analysis on reducing discrimination finds:
1) passive interventions, such as short-term education or bias reminders, are ineffective
2) targeting behavior directly to inhibit bias (eg making individuals accountable or changing social norms) is helpful
psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...