Harv

@hmann07.bsky.social

Teacher

One of the first "outrageous" claims I saw as Jason Arday's media hounding unfolded was that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days! Wow! What a thing to claim! And the newspapers all suggested there was no evidence he actually did it. Well, they clearly didn't look very hard 🙄 🧵 1/26

Photo after Jason's final marathon taken from his archived blog showing Jason surrounded by supporters in orange charity t-shirts

Russia is inflaming the debate on immigration in Britain as part of “increasing ambitions to disrupt our way of life”, counter-terror police and experts say It has directly and indirectly paid right-wing influencers to spread messages that align with its political goals inews.co.uk/news/putin-i...

How Putin is inflaming immigration tensions to spark disorder in Britain

Counter-terror leaders reveal the tactics Russia is using to sow division in the UK

inews.co.uk

It was inevitable, wasn't it🙄 Of course the Telegraph would run with something like this👇 So let's remove some of the rose-tinted spectacles and also look at some of that data comparing 1976 with modern heat waves Because the 1976 nostalgia porn is wearing a bit thin at this stage 🧵1/23

Telegraph headiline:

"Heatwave hysterics wouldn't have lasted a day in 1976", overlaid with a bold “MONK DEBUNKED” stamp.

The Big Bang theory is the creation story science has given us. It‘s harder to believe for some people than ones involving gods, and I suspect most people just accept it on a sort of faith. It‘s not clear from the title or description but this book helps you understand why the BBT is likely true:

Why Don’t Things Fall Up?

Why Don’t Things Fall Up? delivers what every adult and schoolchild deserves, but often doesn’t get: an authoritative and accessible account of the key ideas in science. The book is rooted in Alom’…

alomshaha.com

Pretty much the last place in the universe I'd expect to find planets is in the incredibly violent and radiation-laden accretion disks around supermassive black holes. And yet… maybe? ⚫ 🌎 www.scientificamerican.com/article/plan... [thanks to @saavikford.bsky.social for a convo about this] 🧪 🔭

Planets may swarm around supermassive black holes. Could any be habitable?

Planets might exist in the least likely place you’d imagine—around the outskirts of supermassive black holes

scientificamerican.com

We have a new version of this paper out. The headline results are the same—political science must filter results heavily for statistical significance—but we've added many extensions and rewritten much of it in response to feedback (thank you!). A quick thread on updates 👇

Ryan Briggs@ryancbriggs.net · 9mo ago

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

It must be very hard to publish null results
Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.