October 2018 – The Black Goat

Testing 1-2-3

Personality tests are perennially popular – good ones and bad ones alike. In this episode we talk about personality testing in the public sphere. What do we think accounts for their popularity. What do people get out of taking them? What distinguishes good ones from bad ones? And we spend a little time trying to guess each other’s Big Five profiles. Plus: A letter about raising open science when you’re applying to graduate school.

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, on Facebook at facebook.com/blackgoatpod/, and on instagram at @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 45. It was recorded on October 16, 2018.

Our Most Significant Episode Ever

p-values. Love them or hate them, they are everywhere in science. In this episode we talk about some of our thoughts and feelings about this ubiquitous statistics. What are the drawbacks and benefits to dichotomizing results into “significant” and “nonsignificant”? What do we think of other statistical approaches as alternatives or complements, like effect size estimation or Bayes factors? Do we ever actually care about what p-values actually represent (the probability of data given a hypothesis)? And with no small trepidation, we wade into the Alpha Wars, a.k.a. the discussion and debate around a trio of papers representing different views on how p-values should be used in research. Plus: We respond to a letter about suppressing research findings when they conflict with your morals

Links:

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

This is episode 43. It was recorded on October 3, 2018.

Don’t Trust Me, I’m A Doctor

“Public trust in science is declining” is a common refrain – but it turns out that it isn’t true, or at best it’s complicated. In this episode we discuss whether, when, and why the public should trust science. Why is public trust in science important anyway? How should people decide whether to trust research they cannot technically evaluate? Should scientists avoid criticizing each other in public because it will erode our public image? What is a scientific consensus, when should you take one as a valid indicator, and when shouldn’t you? Plus: We answer a letter about preparing for the job market when you have focused your training on methods and skills rather than a coherent subject area.

Links:

A Credibility Crisis in Food Science by James Hanblin in The Atlantic
The Complex Interface between the Public and Science by Carrie Funk at Scientific American
Why We Should Trust Science, Naomi Oreskes’s TED talk
What Is the Value of Social Science? Challenges for Researchers and Government Funders by Arthur Lupia in PS: Political Science and Politics
The War Over Supercooled Water by Ashley G. Smart in Physics Today

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

This is episode 43. It was recorded on September 27, 2018.