Gwern — Meta-Science↗

Criticizing studies and statistics is hard in part because so many criticisms are possible, rendering them meaningless.

I have noticed I seem to be unusually willing to bite the correlation ≠ causation bullet, and I think it’s due to an idea I had some time ago about the nature of reality.

Mainstream science is flawed: seriously mistaken statistics combined with poor incentives has led to masses of misleading research.

Hydrocephalus is a damaging brain disorder where fluids compress the brain, sometimes drastically decreasing its volume.

A list of examples of claims I have had the misfortune to spend time looking into which, on closer investigation, turned out to vanish with the dew: Most discussions of Thomas Robert Malthus are...

Did John Calhoun’s 1960s Mouse Utopia really show that animal (and human) populations will expand to arbitrary densities, creating socially-driven pathology and collapse?

I try to trace back “Littlewood’s Law of Miracles” to its supposed source in Littlewood’s A Mathematician’s Miscellany .

How do researchers transition from uncritically absorbing research papers or arguments to actively grappling with it and questioning it?

What is the “afterglow effect” ( 1 / 2 , /r/hangovereffect ) where some people with ADHD-like symptoms report abrupt temporary relief during the hangover the next morning after consuming large...

Statistical folklore asserts that “everything is correlated”: in any real-world dataset, most or all measured variables will have non-zero correlations, even between variables which appear to be...