My kind of protest sign

February 7, 2012 by 5 Comments

Via Occupy Sanity, on Facebook:

And how about a: “Two, four, six, eight! And if you could please register your studies ahead of time to combat publication bias, that would be great!”

 

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5 Responses to My kind of protest sign

  1. Yannis Guerra says:
    February 7, 2012 at 7:02 pm

    Awesomely nerdy!.
    Although there are also good arguments for post-publication peer review, for example, in the article…
    AHH!, stop me!

    PS: Your slogan does require to talk extremely fast to keep the rhyme. Not good after marching for a long time!

    Reply
  2. liberalcynic says:
    February 21, 2012 at 1:16 pm

    I don’t know if this was intentional, but in the line saying “Evidence based change”, the size of the writing dropped as the writer (I guess) realized that he/she would run out of line-space. That in itself, is an ‘evidence-based change.’

    There! I did something nerdier than that poster or the comment above.

    Reply
  3. Brian Mulligan says:
    February 26, 2012 at 10:36 am

    To be honest, I find “evidence based change” to be too slow. I would have a preference for some sort of Darwinian based change, where new ideas are tried out without evidence and then subject to competition with other changes. I was wondering if it might be possible to develop “experimental politics” where every time I get into a political argument with someone I can say “interesting idea, let’s try it out” even though I know it’s rubbish. The trouble may be that I can’t think of such a catchy slogan as the one above.

    Reply
  4. Phil says:
    February 27, 2012 at 3:45 am

    Respectfully Brian, progress in a Darwinian system is driven by the periodic successes among a series of failures. Increasing the frequency of those successes is precisely what evidence-based decision making is designed for.
    Evidence-based progress occurs more rapidly than evolutionary progress almost by definition.

    Reply
    • Brian Mulligan says:
      March 1, 2012 at 5:22 am

      Phil, I would agree that selecting from random changes might be too slow and that intelligent evidence based changes will increase the speed of improvement. However, in complex quickly changing environments, despite using experimental evidence, our ability to predict good good solutions seems to be poor. So I would contend that evidence based progress will be quite slow if you work within a system that constrains competition and requires an enormous amount of research and discussion before decisions for change can be made (eg public education where I work). Was Facebook set up on the basis of strong evidence of a strong demand for such a service, or were lots of geeks playing around with ideas on the Internet and Zuckerberg just got lucky?

      Reply

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