Related papers: The Natural Selection of Bad Science
We are facing a real challenge when coping with the continuous acceleration of scientific production and the increasingly changing nature of science. In this article, we extend the classical framework of co-word analysis to the study of…
From scientific experiments to online A/B testing, the previously observed data often affects how future experiments are performed, which in turn affects which data will be collected. Such adaptivity introduces complex correlations between…
Nobel Prizes are commonly seen to be among the most prestigious achievements of our times. Based on mining several million citations, we quantitatively analyze the processes driving paradigm shifts in science. We find that groundbreaking…
In research policy, effective measures that lead to improvements in the generation of knowledge must be based on reliable methods of research assessment, but for many countries and institutions this is not the case. Publication and citation…
What factors affect a scientist's choice of research problem? Qualitative research in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science suggests that this choice is shaped by an "essential tension" between the professional demand for…
The tendency of repeating past choices more often than expected from the history of outcomes has been repeatedly empirically observed in reinforcement learning experiments. It can be explained by at least two computational processes:…
We initiate the study of the effects of non-transparency in decision rules on individuals' ability to improve in strategic learning settings. Inspired by real-life settings, such as loan approvals and college admissions, we remove the…
A suite of impressive scientific discoveries have been driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence. These almost all result from training flexible algorithms to solve difficult optimization problems specified in advance by teams of…
Scientific research requires taking risks, as the most cautious approaches are unlikely to lead to the most rapid progress. Yet much funded scientific research plays it safe and funding agencies bemoan the difficulty of attracting…
Predicting the social and behavioral impact of future technologies, before they are achieved, would allow us to guide their development and regulation before these impacts get entrenched. Traditionally, this prediction has relied on…
We analyze the dynamic tradeoff between generating and disclosing evidence. Agents are tempted to delay investing in a new technology in order to learn from information generated by the experiences of others. This informational free-riding…
In response to growing concern about the reliability and reproducibility of published science, researchers have proposed adopting measures of greater statistical stringency, including suggestions to require larger sample sizes and to lower…
Experiments used in current continual learning research do not faithfully assess fundamental challenges of learning continually. Instead of assessing performance on challenging and representative experiment designs, recent research has…
For billions of years, evolution has been the driving force behind the development of life, including humans. Evolution endowed humans with high intelligence, which allowed us to become one of the most successful species on the planet.…
As scientists we like to think that modern societies and their members base their views, opinions and behaviour on scientific facts. This is not necessarily the case, even though we are all (over-) exposed to information flow through…
Science is essential to innovation and economic prosperity. Although studies have shown that national scientific development is affected by geographic, historic, and economic factors, it remains unclear whether there are universal…
Modern science increasingly relies on ever-growing observational datasets and automated inference pipelines, under the implicit belief that accumulating more data makes scientific conclusions more reliable. Here we show that this belief can…
Overconfidence is a prevalent problem and particularly consequential in its relation with scientific knowledge: being unaware of one`s own ignorance can affect behaviours and threaten public policies and health. We introduce both analytical…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
Publication selection bias undermines the systematic accumulation of evidence. To assess the extent of this problem, we survey over 68,000 meta-analyses containing over 700,000 effect size estimates from medicine (67,386/597,699),…