Scientists are rewarded for novelty and worry about being “scooped” by competitors. Can such competition harm the scientific process by causing rushed research? Can “scoop protection” help? Very excited to share a new model (osf.io/preprints/meta…) in which we tackle these q's. We wanted to test the hypothesis that incentivizing priority of discovery (i.e., larger rewards for novel findings) harms scientific reliability by causing scientists to “rush” their work. To do so, we built an evolutionary agent-based model of competition for priority in science

Thread. Just finished reading “The Misinformation Age” by @cailinmeister & James Weatherall. Among other things, it provides a nice summary of some simple models in philosophy of science that get at mechanisms by which false beliefs can spread / become stabilized. These same mechanisms (e.g., conformist transmission; prestige-biased transmission; trusting similar others) have a large overlap with social-learning biases studied in work on the evolution of social learning and cultural evolution.
E.g., sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

@IrisVanRooij @psmaldino @o_guest @djnavarro @CarcassiFausto @PratherLab @bradpwyble @ProfData @twitemp1 @B_Lindstroem @Logic_Cognition @RinekeV @andrea_e_martin @krysdolega @nicholaraihani 1/x - For agent-based modeling in psychology, see rips-irsp.com/articles/10.53… , link.springer.com/content/pdf/10…, and smaldino.com/wp/wp-content/… @IrisVanRooij @psmaldino @o_guest @djnavarro @CarcassiFausto @PratherLab @bradpwyble @ProfData @twitemp1 @B_Lindstroem @Logic_Cognition @RinekeV @andrea_e_martin @krysdolega @nicholaraihani 2/x - For general utility of modeling and modeling philosophy, see Wimsatt, W. C. (1987). False models as means to truer theories ; and jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/11/4/12.html.b… for introductions....