I'm kind of surprised at all the criticism that that PNAS paper on income and happiness has been getting. Here are some responses to the criticisms I've seen. After an admittedly quick read, the paper, to me, seems fine /1 Criticism #1: Not big enough contribution for PNAS: I thought we all agreed that PNAS was bad cuz they publish flashy findings with questionable methods. I'd love it if they published more studies like this: Simple question with marginally better data than what's come before /2

I think that this new paper is a great example of the type of meta-scientific work that we need to evaluate the effect of changing research practices. But I worry about the simple conclusion that "the push for better practices makes us use cheaper and easier methods" 1/15

https://twitter.com/KaiSassenberg/status/1116728028510543872

We've done similar coding; haven't published it yet, because each time we get into it, we realize that this type of coding is hard, and we keep wanting to make different decisions. So my conclusions are based on coding that I now think is not ideal, but I'll continue anyway 2/15

I've seen many people here ask whether and how we should revise intro psych courses to reflect what we've learned about replicability & research practices. The concerns I've heard are: (a) students will become disillusioned if we talk too much about replication failures and problematic research practices, and (b) there won't be much left to talk about if we remove all the stuff we've lost confidence in.