Significant Feelings

Everybody’s talking about p-values. An important part of the replicability discussion has been about the correct use and interpretation of p-values, and the potentially distorting incentives attached to getting one below .05. And recently, Simine was a co-author on a paper proposing to redefine the interpretive threshold for calling something “significant.” In this episode we talk about p-values: our feelings about them, how we were taught to think about them and how that has changed over the years, and the role of thresholds and categorization of evidence in our scientific thinking. Plus: A letter-writer asks if you should put more faith in the “pre-crisis” early work of present-day open science advocates.

Discussed in this episode:

The Black Goat is hosted by Sanjay Srivastava, Alexa Tullett, and Simine Vazire. Find us on the web at www.theblackgoatpodcast.com, on Twitter at @blackgoatpod, or on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/. You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com. You can subscribe to us on iTunes.

Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license.

This is episode 22. It was recorded November 22, 2017.

We Were Never Cool

Alexa studies how our beliefs change them over time. Simine studies self-knowledge and what others know about us. And Sanjay studies lifespan development. So this episode we are going to go full me-search and talk about what we were like as kids, how we’re the same and how we have changed into who we are now. Were any of us cool in high school? (Spoiler: No.) And how did going into academia change who we were? And in our letter of the week, we talk about how to keep up with what can seem like a firehose of new methods and practices in science.

The Black Goat is hosted by Sanjay Srivastava, Alexa Tullett, and Simine Vazire. Find us on the web at www.theblackgoatpodcast.com, on Twitter at @blackgoatpod, or on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/. You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com. You can subscribe to us on iTunes.

Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license.

This is episode 21. It was recorded November 1, 2017.

The Learning Curve

When you’re faculty at a research university, you get mixed messages about teaching: it’s a big part of the job, but you get all kinds of not-so-subtle messages that you are supposed to think of yourself as a researcher first. In today’s episode, we talk about where teaching fits into our identities and values, and how that has evolved over our careers. Alexa talks about her experiences volunteering to teach in a prison; Simine tells how she found a way to be her quiet, skeptical self in front of hundreds of people; and Sanjay talks about looking for the overlap between rigor and showmanship. Also: In our letter of the week, we answer a question about doing professional service for scientific societies and how that looks on the job market.

The Black Goat is hosted by Sanjay Srivastava, Alexa Tullett, and Simine Vazire. Find us on the web at www.theblackgoatpodcast.com, on Twitter at @blackgoatpod, or on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/. You can email us at letters@theblackgoatpodcast.com. You can subscribe to us on iTunes.

Our theme music is Peak Beak by Doctor Turtle, available on freemusicarchive.org under a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license.

This is episode 20. It was recorded October 26, 2017.