I'd previously shared a preprint summary of a talk I gave last year on meta-analytic approaches to exploring intervention effect heterogeneity in resistance training. But, based on feedback (and an invitation to submit something for a special issue), I've now shaped it up into a proper paper... 1/8

Modus Tollens New ink courtesy of The Pied Piper (Gemma - link below) 😊 I will get other researchers thinking more about philosophy of science, even if I need a conversation opener like this on my wrist 😅 www.th3piedpiper.com

If you aren't sat on a garden bench enjoying a British summer evening, with Kiki on your lap, wearing yellow crocs with socks and a Comedian t-shirt, and eating an ice lolly... what are you even doing with your life?

As someone who engages in a lot of evidence synthesis, and also generally holds a pretty low opinion of the quality of research in the field, this quote upon my re-reading of Meehl and Faust's papers proposing cliometric approaches to metascience struck a chord... 1/6

If anyone wants to hear me talk very fast about appraisal of competing theories, riskiness, corroboration, observational uncertainty and error propagation, and meta-analysis for tests of theory predictions... 1/5

If anyone wants to hear me talk very fast about appraisal of competing theories, riskiness, corroboration, observational uncertainty and error propagation, and meta-analysis for tests of theory predictions... 1/5

"The reason most work is bad is that most of us are stupid and incompetent." Man, I feel this in my bones whenever I look around... and it's not even just the usual selection of metascience bug bears that are the reason. It's just that so much is pointless unthinking academic/research busywork.

@lastpositivist.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Since life is keeping me busy I don't have time to do much writing and what not now, so just to keep my blog active I fired off a quick post about the latest report on the humanities. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-...

With Deborah Mayo, Kent Staley, and Wendy Parker we are editing a special issue of Synthese on "Severity and Learning from Error": link.springer.com/collections/... Deadline for submissions is the 15th of December, 2026. If this is a topic that you are interested in, consider contributing!

Severity and Learning from Error

This Topical Collection examines how inquiry learns from error by focusing on a basic principle of evidence in science, statistics, medicine, law, ...

link.springer.com

For a variety of reasons over the past couple of years the finalisation of the research methods textbook that Eimear Dolan and I have been editing has been somewhat delayed (mostly my fault 😅), but we are back on track and nearing the finish line! 1/8

The programme for the King's Open Research Summer School 2026 is now here! Free, open to everyone, and available both in-person and online. Register: tinyurl.com/3wbx9tmr

The 3rd edition of Meta Research Symposium is open for accepting abstracts. We have two categories: 3-h hackathons, organised by @youngmetascience.bsky.social and 20-minute talks. Learn more and submit your abstracts here: paulmeehlschool.github.io/workshops/sy...

Interested in being actively involved in maintaining and building a community of young meta-science enthusiasts? Join the PYMS Board! (It's great. And I would know because I am also in it) Doubts or questions? Send me or the PYMS page a DM :)

Platform for Young Meta-Scientists (PYMS)@youngmetascience.bsky.social · 3mo ago

📣 Volunteer position alert 📣 At PYMS, we are looking for a new Board Member! Are you an ECR with a passion for meta-science? Do you want to help organize events for fellow meta-scientists and help grow PYMS over the coming years? Check out the open position of Board Member!

Well... this tops any peer reviewed publication or other career accolade acheived so far. We got home from an amazing Disneyland trip with the family for @ejps2013 40th birthday to find both a very excited to see us Kiki, and this in the post.

Names of resistance exercises: Text analysis of survey responses sportrxiv.org/index.php/se...

Well... this tops any peer reviewed publication or other career accolade acheived so far. We got home from an amazing Disneyland trip with the family for @ejps2013 40th birthday to find both a very excited to see us Kiki, and this in the post.

JFC... journals which allow for preprints on the one hand and then on the other try to enforce double blind review are the dumbest.

Honestly, might have to just start using github directly for pre-registration as OSF just seems to continually crash on me lately. Every project is in a github repo nowadays anyway and I only link it to an OSF project to utilise the registration.

Updated version available on ResearchGate (will be up on sportrxiv shortly) addressing typos, adding missing demographics and dropout reasons (my bad for missing them), and also adding reference lines to the figures for the theory predictions as in the figure shared above. tinyurl.com/y39b3355

(PDF) A test of higher and lower fractional volumes of resistance training upon arm and thigh muscle area: A multi-site randomised trial

PDF | On Apr 8, 2026, James Steele and others published A test of higher and lower fractional volumes of resistance training upon arm and thigh muscle area: A multi-site randomised trial | Find, read ...

researchgate.net

James Steele@jamessteeleii.bsky.social · 4mo ago

📣 New preprint! Our latest Project Discover conducted in collaboration with the fantastic team at Discover Strength with delivery led by David Gschneidner and Luke Carlson and of course with the inimitable James Fisher PhD. 1/6

#philsci #metascience

James Steele@jamessteeleii.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Trying something out here I'd be interested in peoples thoughts on... Marrying Meehl's distinction of the theoreticians/statisticians problem with Dubin's ontologically agnostic framing of theoretical hypotheses. An idea for explaining the difference between theoretical and statistical hypotheses.

Trying something out here I'd be interested in peoples thoughts on... Marrying Meehl's distinction of the theoreticians/statisticians problem with Dubin's ontologically agnostic framing of theoretical hypotheses. An idea for explaining the difference between theoretical and statistical hypotheses.

Trying something out here I'd be interested in peoples thoughts on... Marrying Meehl's distinction of the theoreticians/statisticians problem with Dubin's ontologically agnostic framing of theoretical hypotheses. An idea for explaining the difference between theoretical and statistical hypotheses.

📣 New preprint! Our latest Project Discover conducted in collaboration with the fantastic team at Discover Strength with delivery led by David Gschneidner and Luke Carlson and of course with the inimitable James Fisher PhD. 1/6

That feeling when the time investment to try to automate data wrangling and cleaning (even with some assistance from an LLM) isn't worth it relative to just doing the wrangling bit manually because the excel spreadsheet you've been given is so ghastly it hurts your soul 🙃

Anyone have access to this? pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3436839/

Nutrition and energy balance on the 'Footsteps of Scott' expedition 1984-86 - PubMed

Nineteen-Eighty-Seven marks the 75th anniversary of the expedition to the South Pole led by Captain R.F. Scott, during which he and his party died. Between November 1985 and January 1986, three men manhauled sledges 875 miles, following Scott's original route to the South Pole. They consumed an ener …

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Anyone have access to this? pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3436839/

Nutrition and energy balance on the 'Footsteps of Scott' expedition 1984-86 - PubMed

Nineteen-Eighty-Seven marks the 75th anniversary of the expedition to the South Pole led by Captain R.F. Scott, during which he and his party died. Between November 1985 and January 1986, three men manhauled sledges 875 miles, following Scott's original route to the South Pole. They consumed an ener …

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Anyone have access to this and happy to share? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Ultra-endurance athletes and the metabolic ceiling

Endurance limits, measured as the maximum sustainable rate of caloric expenditure, constrain human performance from athletics to manual labor. Early w…

sciencedirect.com

If anyone is interested, I have preprinted with SportRxiv a short summary of my talk delivered at the conference on Inter-Individual Variation in Resistance Training Responses (www.jyu.fi/en/events/in...). Available here: sportrxiv.org/index.php/se...

jfc... working through a paper that did performed a quantitative synthesis (badly) at the moment attempting to re-extract data from the underlying studies and it's honestly a mess. I have no idea where the authors got some of their values from... methods are utterly unclear.

Anyone have access to this? Multiplicative Treatment Effects in Randomized Pretest-Posttest Experimental Designs psycnet.apa.org/buy/2019-312...

Every day is a good day for sharing one of the most useful papers about research data ever written. PLEASE get your people to understand and follow this advice. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....