Second day of #RepCrises2019 kicking off. First lecture, @derxen on the tone debate.
the lecture is part of the session on normative issues.
Derksen: "I find it very difficult to be normative about the tone debate."
the term is generated by participants in the reform debate. it's a meta debate, a debate about how to debate. what is central, criticism or civility?
it's part of a more general question, of how do we relate with each other in academia.
themes: 1. power ie seniority and hierarchy. 2. scientific self, how should we be as scientists 3. epistemic consequences : how we debate has consequences for our knowledge production.
precursors to the tone debate, the salon. 
oy vey if Twitter is the intellectual salon (my comment not Maarten's)
Fiske's column starts the tone debate in the reform movement. Fiske objects to the ad hominem attacks on researchers. Fiske argues subjectivity should be separate from science. For Fiske it's also about power, in the sense that people are being bullied online.
another aspect of power is about the control of scientific debate : it needs to go through the 'proper' channels like peer reviewed journals.
responses were varied. first is: there is no tone problem, just individuals. second is that the tone debate is a misdirection of people in power, "tone policing is guarding the status quo"
third is, civility is important in scientific debate, and is usually described through lists of how to behave in debate.
fourth: instead of talking about manners, it's about formulating virtues of scientists e.g. cultivating civility, humility.
tone is increasingly discussed in the terms of diversity and inclusivity. mention of #bropenscience as criticism of masculinity in open science.
reform often includes explicit calls for addressing power and inequalities in academic hierarchies.
"writing this paper I found it difficult to figure out what the point should be"
who is allowed to join the debate, who feels comfortable with joining debate has a consequence for the kind of knowledge produced. whether it's minorities or junior members of community/academic hierarchy.
there are different types of of criticism in history. parrhesia in a democratic context, or parrhesia between the student and a teacher, or the uncivil outsider like the cynic.
in other words, communities can maintain different practices of debate. the civility side and the polemical side actually hide a wide diversity of possible ways of engaging in debate.
Cornelius Baum draws a parallel between the science wars and the reform tone debate, and how a purely STS perspective might have been more interesting than a normative perspective.
answer: why a normative take in the end? sensitivity to the audience, trying to offer something to the possible participants in the debate, to highlight the epistemic consequences of discussing tone, but also to go beyond simplistic dichotomy of civil vs polemical.
@felicitycallard asks the question about the medium. of how it happens in journals vs Twitter for example.
the architecture of the conversation is crucial. example of the salon: the lady of the salon could control the debate and the conversation. journals are controlled spaces, Twitter is anarchic as a space that is new, has many participants, and offers extreme freedom in how to join
@Nicole_C_Nelson draws a comparison to biomedicine. her impression is that it's unique for reform in psychology, that it doesn't happen in e. g. biomedicine. is that a correct impression, what are other people's views?
Torsten Wilholt: does a conversation being online mean it's democratic? it's more of a netocracy and the disappearance of civility is a feature of the forum that depends on an economy of attention, not a bug.
next on. @siminevazire and her talk the credibility revolution in psychology.
ah, change of title to: do you want to be credible or incredible?
Simine will talk about how do we evaluate scientific claims. her point is that we should evaluate the research culture that produces the claims.
we are inundated by claims that are immensely difficult to evaluate.
Naomi Oreskes call to trusting the collective authority of scientific communities. that call didn't resonate well with Simine as a psychologist, this just doesn't apply to psychological science.
Trying to reach consensus through continuous replication of some effects is wasteful (social psychologists actually collectively experience experimenter's regress!)
paradox: the public knows science is not 'pure' but still widely trusted (she showed data from polling in the US about trust in science)
a scientific community that organizes mistrust well can earn trust in their claims.
The criteria for judging a credible research culture.
Transparency doesn't ensure credibility. That depends on how robust the work is. if it's not, transparency leads to less credibility.
Meta-science as a field for gauging the research cultures of different fields.
Torsten Wilholt: why are psychologists so annoyed with false positives? what are the expectations of the literature among psychologists, what do they want from their field?
Simine answers that the problem is is that people garner prestige through publishing, and then the journals misadvertise as places that gatekeep against false positives.
second is that a field can't calibrate itself, to group findings into more and less trustworthy findings.
I really love this question. I think this goes really deeply into the expectation of what the scientific literature is among psychologists, and how the reform movement is changing the idea of a cumulative science as just a consequence of publishing,
into cumulativity being a consequence of particular research practices and hard work of researchers who will actually spend research time on organizing and thinking through accumulation.
next talk is by Frieder Paulus on replication and organization of academic work.
"People are under a lot of pressure to keep their reputation to survive" in the job market.
Slowed down with tweeting, but the lecture mostly covered the use of citation counts and impact factors in promotion, tenure, and grant funding applications and how widely spread the practice is despite strong criticism of the idea that IF is a proxy for quality.
@EikoFried making an appearance.
"this is not narcissism of individual scientists, but a structural element of the system"
skipped tweeting to listen to a really fascinating talk about replication of the Milgram experiments in Germany in the 1970s by Sascha Topp. instead, I offer a new book mentioned by Topo about the Milgram experiments, ethical issues and the Holocaust link. palgrave.com/gp/book/978331…
Wolfgang Maieres and his talk historicizing the replication crisis closes off the workshop.
