Organizing science around an external reward system can foster scientific discovery, but not reliable or rigorous research. Bc, while external rewards serve the interests of science in the context of discovery they can have the opposite effect in the context of justification 🧵 The context of discovery demands a different value system than the context of justification. Qualities like ambitiousness, risk-taking, prestige-seeking, self-interestedness can contribute to the proliferation of novel ideas, hence can be desirable for the sake of collective good

In the debate on "social” priming in Psych Inq, it was maintained in the target article (by Sherman& @amrivers1 ) and several commentaries (e.g. @missyjferguson & @JeremyCone2; @dalbarra &Wenhao Dai ) that we must investigate “operating characteristics” and “moderators”.🧵1/20 The problem of moderators we keep facing here as well as in many other literatures signals in fact a deeper and prevalent problem to which many authors have for decades drawn our attention: Except a few instances, psychologists almost never test their auxiliary hypotheses. 2/20

Last paper to read before the holiday! Me and @tunc_necip would like to announce that we’ve uploaded the latest, thoroughly revised version of our manuscript. Here is a 🧵 summarizing the main points and major additions. 10.31234/osf.io/pdm7y 👇 1. Auxiliary hypotheses are indispensable, bc they allow to derive testable predictions from theoretical claims. These range from ceteris paribus clauses to assumptions abt the research design and instruments, accuracy of the measurements, validity of the operationalizations etc.

A defense of evo psych on the grounds that there is no logic to scientific inquiry, rather scientists do and "should" engage in "inference to the best explanation": arcdigital.media/critics-of-evo… I will compose a thread soon, now I can just point out a few points I will argue for: 1. If inference to the best explanation characterizes science (and should), then there is hardly a rational criterion by which we can differentiate lay reasoning from scientific inquiry. 1/n