1/ I learned a lot more from my experiments that "failed" than from the ones that went according to plan. Failed methods followed by troubleshooting and retesting makes you understand your system much more intimately, and often leads to insight and new lines of research.
2/ In fact, I came up with the idea for my PhD dissertation after a "failed" field experiment where ants destroyed spider colonies within hours that my colleagues spent weeks setting up. And my own subsequent methodological failures led to great insight.escholarship.org/uc/item/4pm302… Image
3/ And the first time I tried studying paper wasps in the field I attempted to place queens in nest boxes and planned to follow colony growth and reproductive output over the season. The second I opened their nest boxes, EVERY SINGLE QUEEN flew away and never came back. 😐
4/ I ended up pivoting that season and doing a field experiment with hammock spiders instead. But the next season I modified my field methods for my wasps and had only a 15% nest abandonment rate. 😀 This led to many interesting discoveries and helped me understand their biology.
5/ There's really no such thing as a "failed experiment." The failures are just as important as the "successes", and perhaps even more important. Sure, it can be extremely frustrating, but that's science for you. Nature throws curveballs. Nobody said it's supposed to be easy.

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More from @SwipeWright

22 Nov
Activists want to retract AlShebli's paper finding a female protégé's research had less impact under female vs male mentors, citing methodological flaws.

Where are the calls to retract her paper using the same methods finding that ethnic diversity improved research impact? 🤔 ImageImage
This depends on where the claims of methodological errors arise. Perhaps they approved of the way ethnicity relationships were defined, but not how mentorship was defined in the other paper. But the authors properly qualified their definitions on the mentorship paper.
Though this article suggests people are claiming to have problems with both how they defined mentorship and how they quantified scientific impact. Though they also think the paper is flawed because it didn't consider non-binary mentors... 🤦‍♂️ sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/a…
Read 7 tweets
5 Nov
1/ I don't understand the claim that this election will cause introspection among the woke regarding their ideology. They're incapable of viewing problems from a POV outside their ideological framework. In their minds all outcomes are are perfectly consonant with their ideology.
2/ Their ideology has never aligned with reality, and that has never stopped them from doubling and tripling down. It is beyond falsification *by design*. It is not a correspondence theory of truth. It only pretends to be one when some bit of data happens to lean in its favor.
3/ It is fundamentally about power, not truth. It doesn't matter one bit whether *we* view certain outcomes as falsifying woke narratives. We can only hope that those who haven't already succumbed to the ideology will be inoculated against it.
Read 5 tweets
2 Nov
It's hard to square Sam's take on this with his past insistence that we start actually believing what people openly tell us they believe instead of hunting for increasingly cryptic yet more palatable explanations for their utterances.
Whether Kamala was lying, ignorant, or meant what she said, we should hold people to their actual words. As a rule I believe what people tell me they believe. I'm no psychic. If they sound nuts, ask them to clarify. If they still sound nuts, accept they may believe nutty things.
A lot of people accuse Sam of having TDS. I really don't think this is accurate. His takes on Trump have, IMO, been entirely reasonable. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to be extremely anti-Trump. But I do think he doesn't take the woke left as seriously as he should.
Read 5 tweets
17 Oct
People aren't talking nearly enough about the Equality Act that Biden says he'll enact within 100 days of taking office.

This act changes the definition of "sex" in the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include "gender identity." This will make all sex-based rights impossible to enforce.
Read the whole Equality Act for yourself below. It is pretty nightmarish. congress.gov/bill/116th-con…
By including "gender identity" WITHIN the definition of "sex", as opposed to making gender identity a separate protected category, all sex-based rights and protections will be based solely on the sex someone merely "identifies" with, regardless of their actual biological sex.
Read 5 tweets
17 Oct
This "study" looked at whether external qigong, an Ancient Chinese practice involving waving your hands over someone to guide "qi energy" through them, could reduce chronic pain.

Might be good to have a sham control, right? Nope! That would impose "Western biomedical concepts"!
What the hell is the point of even doing a study and submitting it to a journal if you refuse to use the methods that would enable you to determine whether or not the effects were real and infer a causal relationship between treatment and outcome?

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20626055/
By the way, their EAT treatment they used as a "control" (it's not) stands for "equal attention time" and consisted of someone just chatting with the participant for 30 mins.
Read 5 tweets
6 Oct
In humans, as in most animals or plants, an individual’s biological sex corresponds to one of two distinct types of reproductive anatomy that develop for the production of sperm or egg cells and associated biological functions in sexual reproduction.
See my @WSJ essay with developmental biologist @FondOfBeetles below.

This is our plea to the scientific community to "stand up for the empirical reality of biological sex", for denying biology is harmful to those most vulnerable in our society. wsj.com/articles/the-d…
And see my @Quillette essay below that explores in more detail the science of biological sex and exposes the pseudoscience behind "sex spectrum" ideology. quillette.com/2020/06/07/jk-…
Read 5 tweets

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