相关论文: The Natural Selection of Bad Science

Scientific and technological progress has historically been very beneficial to humanity but this does not always need to be true. Going forward, science may enable bad actors to cause genetically engineered pandemics that are more frequent…

Statistics is sometimes described as the science of reasoning under uncertainty. Statistical models provide one view of this uncertainty, but what is frequently neglected is the 'invisible' portion of uncertainty: that assumed not to exist…

Culture is not just traits but a dynamic system of interdependent beliefs, practices and artefacts embedded in cognitive, social and material structures. Culture evolves as these entities interact, generating path dependence, attractor…

Understanding the dynamics of opinions, preferences and of culture as whole requires more use of empirical data than has been done so far. It is clear that an important role in driving this dynamics is played by social influence, which is…

Data science pipelines inform and influence many daily decisions, from what we buy to who we work for and even where we live. When designed incorrectly, these pipelines can easily propagate social inequity and harm. Traditional solutions…

Social learning -by observing and copying others- is a highly successful cultural mechanism for adaptation, outperforming individual information acquisition and experience. Here, we investigate social learning in the context of the uniquely…

Breaking a norm elicits both material and emotional consequences, yet how this coupling arose evolutionarily remains unclear. We investigate this question in light of emerging work suggesting that normativity's building blocks emerged…

Neuroscientists frequently use a certain statistical reasoning to establish the existence of distinct neuronal processes in the brain. We show that this reasoning is flawed and that the large corresponding literature needs reconsideration.…

The evaluation of the quality of research at a national level has become increasingly common. The UK has been at the forefront of this trend having undertaken many assessments since 1986, the latest being the Research Excellence Framework…

In social, economic and cultural situations in which the decisions of individuals are influenced directly by the decisions of others, there appears to be an inherently high level of ex ante unpredictability. In cultural markets such as…

We investigate a selection-mutation model for the dynamics of technological innovation,a special case of reaction-diffusion equations. Although mutations are assumed to increase the variety of technologies, not their average success…

Scientific research funding is allocated largely through a system of soliciting and ranking competitive grant proposals. In these competitions, the proposals themselves are not the deliverables that the funder seeks, but instead are used by…

Researchers are more likely to share notable findings. As a result, published findings tend to overstate the magnitude of real-world phenomena. This bias is a natural concern for asset pricing research, which has found hundreds of return…

Scientists are frequently faced with the important decision to start or terminate a creative partnership. This process can be influenced by strategic motivations, as early career researchers are pursuers, whereas senior researchers are…

The Open Science Collaboration recently reported that 36% of published findings from psychological studies were reproducible by independent researchers. We can use this information together with Bayes theorem to estimate the statistical…

Community effects on the behaviour of individuals, the community itself and other communities can be observed in a wide range of applications. This is true in scientific research, where communities of researchers have increasingly to…

Classic economic science is reaching the limits of its explanatory powers. Complexity science uses an increasingly larger set of different methods to analyze physical, biological, cultural, social, and economic factors, providing a broader…

At every phase of scientific research, scientists must decide how to allocate limited resources to pursue the research inquiries with the greatest potential. This prioritization dictates which controlled interventions are studied, awarded…

Scientific literature has been growing exponentially for decades, with publications from the last twenty years now comprising 60% of all academic output. While the impact of information overload on news and social-media consumption is…

Infrastructure shapes societies and scientific discovery. Traditional scientific infrastructure, often static and fragmented, leads to issues like data silos, lack of interoperability and reproducibility, and unsustainable short-lived…