Replication Crisis

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A lot of the things we are now responding to it in light of but all of these problems people were aware of them in some sense for a long time. The file draw problem where if I get a positive result suggesting there is an effect that's exciting especially if it's a new thing I can go and publish that in a high prestige journal. If I fail to find anything and even if I just replicate that that's not exciting it's much hard to get published. Often that information will only be available to the particular scientist who did the photos movement. So like there's a massive bias in what kind of information is transmitted to community at large.

Everybody talks about the truth, but nobody does anything about it. And to be honest, how we talk about truth — what it is, and how to get there — can be a little sloppy at times. Philosophy to the rescue! I had a very ambitious conversation with Liam Kofi Bright, starting with what we mean by “truth” (correspondence, coherence, pragmatist, and deflationary approaches), and then getting into the nitty-gritty of how we actually discover it. There’s a lot to think about once we take a hard look at how science gets done, how discoveries are communicated, and what different kinds of participants can bring to the table.

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Liam Kofi Bright received his Ph.D. in Logic, Computation and Methodology from Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently on the faculty of the London School of Economics in the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and the Scientific Method. He has worked on questions concerning peer review and fraud in scientific communities, intersectionality, logical empiricism, and Africana philosophy. He is well-known on Twitter as the Last Positivist.

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