Dr. Judith Curry tips me to this interesting blog post by Daniel Lakens, an experimental psychologist at the Human-Technology Interaction group at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands.
A blog on statistics, methods, and open science. Understanding 20% of statistics will improve 80% of your inferences.
Five reasons blog posts are of higher scientific quality than journal articles
The Dutch toilet cleaner ‘WC-EEND’ (literally: ‘Toilet Duck’) aired a famous commercial in 1989 that had the slogan ‘We from WC-EEND advise… WC-EEND’. It is now a common saying in The Netherlands whenever someone gives an opinion that is clearly aligned with their self-interest. In this blog, I will examine the hypothesis that blogs are, on average, of higher quality than journal articles. Below, I present 5 arguments in favor of this hypothesis.
- Blogs have Open Data, Code, and Materials [when technical articles are published, yes, whenever possible]
- Blogs have Open Peer Review [oh, don’t you know it, except hardly anyone reads RealClimate anymore]
- Blogs have no Eminence Filter [just look at the variety of articles on Climate etc, Climate Audit, and WUWT]
- Blogs have Better Error Correction [absolutely, mistakes are usually caught within minutes]
- Blogs are Open Access (and might be read more). [no paywalls=broad distribution]
Read his entire article for the thinking behind the reasons, my comments are [in brackets] above. Item 5 is particularly important. It has been said to me by a few people that WUWT has changed the world. I think it has, but I view it as a collective effort with other climate blogs. If climate blogs didn’t exist, there would be no exposure of Climategate, no exposure of the [IPCC’s] horrid messes in AR4 and AR5, among other issues.
There may be other benefits, I’m sure readers can add some points not covered above.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The sooner blog review replaces the corrupt practice of pal review, the better.
I totally agree. Here are couple of examples to show why.
I published a short article in a widely-read trade publication. It was intended to be clever, and might have been. However it had a fatal mistake, and I got crucified in the letters to the editor a month or two later. That was quite an educational experience. Fortunately tenure committees rarely check things like that and my university was not so high in the academic pecking order that it would reject everything except journal articles.
In contrast there was greatly flawed article in one of the two top journals in my field. The author was the former editor of the other top journal. The guy didn’t have a clue about statistics, but that didn’t stop him from supporting his agenda by making some very false statements about statistical analysis.
A guy I know with a PhD in statistics wrote a rebuttal showing how wrong that author was. Instead of publishing it as a letter, they suggested he write it up as a full-fledged article. Then they strung him along for several years with repeated requests for resubmissions with changes. Eventually they rejected the paper after he put a lot of work in it. Message sent.
Review blogs would need some standards for commenters, but they could be minimal, and moderators could weed out the wheat from the chaff. Under any such regime, malpractice such as your colleague experienced wouldn’t happen. If a blog started filtering out such valid criticisms, another wouldn’t.
My reply is in m.o.d.e.r.a.t.i.o.n, I guess because I wrote the word m.o.d.e.r.a.t.o.r.s. I need to consider the trigger terms.
One detailed true story of trying to submit a comment on a journal article-
/scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/wp-content/blogs.dir/382/files/2012/04/i-7c5ff130f94caaf8ce32c52e2caab328-How%20to%20Publish%20a%20Scientific%20Comment2.pdf
Is this an April Fool’s Joke?
No. April Fools was postponed this year, to April 22.
Not postponed – it has always been April 22. The joke is that many think it comes on April 1
NW sage,
+many. 🙂
No, but you are.
A self deprecating sense of humor is also a good reason blogs are better science. Taking yourself too seriously is a clear sign of insecurity, and insecurity about ones self IMHO is a clear indicator of what Feynman said: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Climate “Science” is Pseudo-Science; A Point-by-Point Proof
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/04/05/climate-science-is-pseudo-science-a-point-by-point-proof/
Blog review is superior for the reasons given. The establishment, learned societies and academia accept climate science as a given because it is peer reviewed. But peer review is becoming a joke. We have the reproducibility problem where most published work cannot be replicated. Then we have the fact that most papers are read by a dozen people at most. Many papers are biased to supply the answer that the funding provider paid for and in climate science, we have pal review as illustrated by ClimateGate.
Many papers these days are recycled endlessly with minor changes in separate funding applications. Very little original work is actually started. The system is rotten to the core but it is all the academics have. Sadly, their careers are measured and rated on the number of publications.
The downside of “blog review” is that the author of the post has to sift through a lot of nonsense from those like “Mr. Layman here…”
The upside is a lot of people who aren’t laymen in the field or another related to the topic might spot something the author honestly just “missed”.
Unless they have a Mann sized ego to protect or an agenda to promote, the result is a correction of an error.
PS Sometimes a comment by a layman might just spark something that gets someone to think outside their own “9 dots”.
PPS For those who don’t know what I meant by “to think outside their own “9 dots”…
http://www.brainstorming.co.uk/puzzles/ninedotsnj.html
The puzzle might not be “earth-shattering” (maybe that’s why the Greens never seem to do it?) but the application of the lesson often has been.
Most papers these days have so many authors that the sifting job could be divvied up among them.
“Blogs have Open Peer Review … except hardly anyone reads RealClimate anymore” what hypocritical arrogance. You regularly prevent people commenting on articles whereas I’ve never had that problem on Real Climate.
As a result WE DON’T KNOW what you’ve removed.
IMO the visitor statistics support that assessment of the situation.
Logical error detected.
Just because YOU have not had a problem with Real Climate, does not mean others have not.
Scottish Sceptic,
I’d say that the fact that YOU were allowed to rant a bunch of baloney, calls BS on your post.
listening to: Teachd Chlann Dhonnchaidh
Scottish Sceptic:
You assert
Bollocks!
Our host, AW, has repeatedly given me temporary bans from posting on WUWT because in his opinion my comments ‘overstepped the mark’.
RealClimate gave me, Willis E. and countless others permanent bans for posting accurate and referenced information which contradicted their propaganda.
Richard
After an extended exchange on Real Climate to form a basis of agreement on the core non-optional calculations of radiative heat transfer , I ran into a dead end when pressing for agreement on the calculation of the equilibrium temperature of balls with arbitrary spectra . That should be basic undergraduate stuff for anybody presuming to model the temperature dynamics of a planet .
It remains the case that I see no evidence that the “climate” establishment even knows how to calculate the experimentally testable temperature of a billiard ball under a sun lamp .
Bob Armstrong
What do they get for the far easier case of the moon (a sphere in a vacuum with no atmosphere and no water) slowly turning at a constant rate under a near-constant sun with a simple crushed rock surface?
What equation and which constants did you propose for the net long wave radiation losses from the sea to a real atmosphere with humidity and pressure changes?
The easy quantitatively experimentally testable case is a simple ball with a measured uniform absorption=emission spectrum irradiated on one side with a cold absorber on the other . Such experiments are how one abstracts and quantitatively verifies the laws one then applies to understand more complex remote cases like a planetary object .
This is the method of physics which appears to have been mothballed in this field for so many decades it has been forgotten .
Regularly prevent people from commenting?
Care to back up that nonsense?
Luke warmers are either people who afraid of conflict or people who believe it’s a scam but don’t want to miss out on some of those billions of bribe dollars so they put forward the just in case argument.
They will have a solution if they can just get taxpayer funding.
So if you follow the science and believe that CO2 will only cause a few tenths of a degree of warming, then you are either a chicken or corrupt.
Nice binary world you live in there steve.
This amounts to preaching to the choir to a group like this but it nonetheless never ceases to amaze me that as knowledge has become more available to more people, as in our universities, the “keepers” of the knowledge, supposedly our universities, continue to narrow their focus to “keep the baptized interpretation” in the forefront and preclude other views. This is called unhealthy regression and it is all too common. Kudos to this blog and others like it.
Cold Wind
One of the HUGH benefits of this sort of blog. Helps keep the ‘serious’ science and expert from getting so wrapped up in the technical jargon and buzzwords that all useful information is lost. Keeps the technocrats from getting too introverted.
HUGH? Pardon, but I think you meant YUUUGE.
“Keeps the technocrats from getting too introverted …”.
========================
And too arrogant as the hostile posts from members of the clerisy and claque indicate from time to time.
Since what used to be called ‘climatology’ morphed into politicised ‘Climate Change™’ it has become a matter that everyone everywhere has a legitimate interest in.
In resp. to:
“Frank Karvv April 15, 2017 at 11:27 am
HEY, my wife owns a Prius and not because of ‘Climate Change’ we a dedicated skeptics, but because its cheap to run. So an apology is in order !! 😉 Your wild statement is not valid for many.”
‘Cheap to run’?????? Do you pay for the electric charge thro’ yr residential meter? PLS ADVISE INCREMENTAL COST PER KM. TRAQVEL. THAT YOU’D OTHERWISE PAY AT THE PUMP.
Or, do you plug-in at one of the free charging stations like we have here in B.C. burgeoning like Windmills all over the place! — and who is paying for the installation and the kWh?? Dollars-to-donuts it’s us taxpayers (at one level of taxation or another!)
Frank…. if you or your wife are gravy-training off ‘free’ fuel, then I PROTEST. Pay for your own fuel.
Forgot to add:
The more ‘black-boxes’ there are in a vehicle …. and these hybrids & electric cards are FULL of them, the more the comoponent failures and the more expensive to maintain.
Used to be that most handy-men cd fix an old-fashioned car with a tweek here or there, but now antyhing that goes wrong is one replacement black-box or chip or ‘circuit board’ that’ll set you back $hundreds to replace.
Guess what …. that’s where they make their money …. off the dolts who buy-into hi-tech technological solutions!
I invite Frank to advise us 5 years in the future what his ‘full-cost-accounting’ car bill per km experience has been.
Ross, lose your rant on these cold war lukewarmer facts.
My significant other and I traded in her BMWZ3 for Kermy, a MY 2007 Ford hybrid Escape acquired in August 2007. Ours has AWD and class 1 tow capability and is still going strong at 70+kmiles. The V6 tow/power AWD equivalent was ~$3k less.
Well, I got the $3k back on the next tax day thanks to stupid federal subsidies.
But that was not the core of the transaction. Our ‘Kermey’ does 32 city, 28 highway (well, honestly more like 27 with AC on at 75mph.) The V6 equivalent did 18 city, 22 highway. So, we use a lot less gas. BUT the hybrid fuel savings were not the deal clincher. Kermey’s Atkinson cycle engine uses regular; the Standard equivalent V6 used high test premium. Where we live, the price Qdifference is about $1/gallon. So, the full hybrid with equivalent off road and towing capacity was tax ‘free’ (you paid, TY)? uses less gas, and that gas costs ~$1/gal less. A no brainer. Our hybrid SUV has been essentially free for several years now. One of my best deals.
Suggestion. Get a Brain, then use it to do the Math.
What do you calculate to be the time, given your driving habits, to pay back the higher initial purchase cost from lower operating costs?
And I should add, given your local cost of electricity. Time might differ here in the PNW, where cheap hydro lowers our price for power. Although the Green Meanies are trying to make sure that we fall into national line.
Rud,
Sounds like you scored with your Ford. It all sounds good. Well, good up until the part where I was reminded that the gov’t makes a constant implicit threaten to send men with guns against all of us if we refuse to pay your subsidy. April 15th and all.
Just curious, but how close are you to buying a $5K re-built battery pack?
The best example of this public peer review (“Five reasons blog posts are of higher scientific quality than journal articles”) that I saw was 5 years ago with:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/
Many scientists chimed in with over 1000 (peer review) comments. I was very impressed with this and I think all 5 points were demonstrated in the comment section along with the original post by A. Watts.
Thanks for the reminder. Was the paper published? Did McIntyre look at TOBS?
Blogs versus Journals contains the same philosophical assumptions that govern how we view the larger society and human organization.
Do you trust people in positions of power to use it competantly for the greater good?
Or would you rather have that power distributed to the masses WARTS AND ALL?
These are the same pros and cons between journals or blogs and small government or big government. I suspect these similar values explains why most WUWT readers do not identify as left wing.
It’s also like the distinction between mainstream and alternative media. In the old model, a priesthood of “journalists” was needed to decide what “news” the masses could be fed. First talk radio, then cable TV and finally the Net have helped liberate news consumers from this Leftwing, group-thinking cabal of self-anointed “fact” dispensers and opinion leaders.
Shades of the Protestant Reformation.
The liberating new technology then being the printing press, of course, so that people could read the Bible and Protestant tracts for themselves.
Roger Knights description of the Dutch climate dialogue site leaves me rather cold, it sounds far too elitist and lacking the essential democratic nature of WUWT. In fact – and I going by Roger’s description which I am happy to take on trust – it seems very much to be the kind of “don’t interfere in matters too difficult for you to understand” approach that seems to characterise the worst sort of (climate science) arrogance.
The great thing about WUWT’s approach is that it is highly educative precisely because people with deep knowledge of all sorts of things contribute, scientists provide arguement and rigorous fact correction, “ordinary” people can ask questions and usually get polite answers, dissenters can disagree and yes everyone can let off steam. The moderator deals with the outright outrageous, like the holocaust deniers, and mostly the just rude are just deservedly self-defeating.
Isn’t this much better that failing to communicate? I think so. But if any scientist doesn’t like it they can stay in their close academic circle and ignore the outside world. Trouble is the world is less and less inclined to accept that.
Not at all, because unlike all other sites it is set up for formal debating between two teams of knowledgeable scientists, warmists and skeptics. That makes up the “above the line” discussion. It is not derailed by half-baked assertions and rudeness from non-experts, which is what Pat Frank eloquently complained of.
That happens on the Climate Dialogue site too. Persons commenting below the line exchange views with one another and sometimes with those above the line.
Here’s a link to the site, where you can see for yourself what it was like: http://www.climatedialogue.org The site is no longer supported by the Dutch government, alas.
Here’s the contents of the Climate Dialogue’s “About” page:
Climate Dialogue has been discontinued due to lack of funding:
If you want to know anything about anything in today’s world, you search out the discussion boards like this one which host people who have an interest (or more likely a truly obsessive hobby) in some topic.
Most posters will have been there for several years by now (and even more than a decade). Over that time, they and the board will have accumulated a body of knowledge which is unparalleled in history.
It can be anything from cameras to golf clubs to birds to basic sciences to gardening to personal lives..
You need to be able to sort out the wheat from the chaff and find the boards where the real dedicated volunteers are camped out. But discussion boards have become the world’s best experts on almost everything.
Wait another 10 years and many things will be completely sorted out just by these internet discussion boards.
“You need to be able to sort out the wheat from the chaff and find the boards where the real dedicated volunteers are camped out. But discussion boards have become the world’s best experts on almost everything.”
You are contradicting yourself.
Read again what you wrote.
“Dr. Judith Curry tips me to this interesting blog post from by”
Should read either “from” or “by” should it not ?
Regardless of how one feels about the superiority of blogs vs. journals (I greatly favor online offerings), peer review is increasingly a failure. I wrote two comments on it four years ago:
http://electronotes.netfirms.com/ENWN11.pdf
More to the point, the webnote includes 8 linked references, three by our good friend Jo Nova.
Interesting. For many the ‘peer review’ thing has become a virtual talisman of ultimate truth and when they use the magical words, what is implied is that this wisdom may not be challenged – because it is ‘peer reviewed!’. If you were to say ‘but there is a serious and very obvious flaw in the reasoning’ of some article under discussion, the answer is often along the lines of ‘but it’s ‘peer reviewed!’ and ‘who are you to challenge that which is thus sanctified?’. It’s as though no discussion is allowed anymore. All that is acceptable is hurling ‘peer reviewed’ papers at each other with no discussion of the contents and he or she who runs out of articles to hurl first loses the argument. Science is in a terrible place right now and needs a complete makeover.
I have only ever been to this blog on climate related issues, having arrived here 6 months back, completely by accident. So I thought for fun I would google climate blogs and see what other climate blogs there are and what they are up to. After all, if the hypothesis is that climate blogs create higher scientific quality than journal articles, then that should apply across the board. Not…
I came across one called hotwhopper and was surprised that everyone just seemed to be writing the exact same drivel about we are all doomed because of CO2, and more from a perspective of the now disgraced Dr. Mann style. Everybody just repeats the same thing, sort of like if you were in the North Korea climate academy or worse, waiting for the comet to pick you up.
But what really kind of shocked me was that a lot of the articles and opinions were directed at WUWT, and hostile to Mr. Watts and all his posters, and even all us commenters labelling us all as mentally challenged. Now I certainly wouldn’t say that about all those commenters over there, but more maybe feel a bit compassionate about all those poor folks who are getting a good brainwashing there.
There is a nice gal over there called Sou, who appears to be the coordinator of that site, and with all the talk about WUWT, it appears she is maybe a wee bit jealous of this site and all the intelligent posts and comments here. She can’t stop talking about us all. And especially Anthony. I think she maybe has a secret crush on you Anthony, based upon her not being able to quit talking about you.
I think I’m just gonna make some spaghetti and save my witty remarks for tomorrow.
Talk about an opening…..
“The worst case example when it comes to data sharing is the American Psychological Association.”
That has not changed since the scandal with ‘dissociative identity disorder’:
As long as the family could pay the treatment, new ‘personalities’ were found in the patient; When the money was gone the patient was declared ‘cured’.
https://www.google.at/search?client=ms-android-samsung&q=dissociative+identity+disorder&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj7rM2o-6fTAhWJalAKHVFtCsMQ1QIIDg
Does anyone here see an analogy to ‘climate change’ ?
When you want to evaluate scientific claims, you need access to the raw data, the code, and the materials. Most journals do not (yet) require authors to make their data publicly available (whenever possible). [ sic ]
The worst case example when it comes to data sharing is the American Psychological Association. In the ‘Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct’ of this professional organization that supported torture, point 8.14 says that
psychologists only have to share data when asked to by ‘competent professionals’
for the goal to ‘verify claims’, and that these researchers can charge money to compensate any costs that are made when they have to respond to a request for data.
Worse yet, many journals that say they require raw data and such to be made available, when push comes to shove, are willing to waive that requirement for certain authors.
Never gave journals a first or second thought until I started hanging out here. The whole setup seems designed to produce something other than knowledge and light. A lay person is surprised at the general mess. Then again I never suspected that Universities were often back biting swamps until i attended one.
This blog is special and the folks posting have provided a remarkable education in climate and energy.
Already tried crossref:
https://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/full/nrn3475.html
Button K. S., Ioannidis J. P., Mokrysz C., Nosek B. A., Flint J., Robinson E. S., Munafò M. R. (2013). Power failure: Why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 14, 365–376. doi:10.1038/nrn3475 Google Scholar CrossRef, Medline