But a new study suggests that the increased Western demand for quinoa has increased welfare throughout Peruvian quinoa-farming regions both for farmers and for non-farmers, presumably because the farmers’ increased wealth is trickling down to non-farmers. Apparently some people felt guilty because they thought that quinoa-eating Westerners were taking all the quinoa and then Peruvians were starving. Vox: You Can Finally Stop Feeling Guilty For Eating Quinoa. Some very complicated and potentially questionable attempts to ferret out all the different personality traits involved in religiosity tentatively conclude that it is directly related to moral concern and inversely related to analytic thinking, which are inversely related to one another. Also, how did one small British expedition destroy earthworks longer than the Great Wall of China? I’m confused why I never heard about this before – not in a “neocolonialist society covers up the greatness of Africa” sense, but in a “even the people complaining about how neocolonialist society covers up the greatness of Africa only ever talk about Zimbabwe and Kilwa which are both way less impressive” sense. It also boasted “the longest walls in the world”, beating the Great Wall of China. The lost medieval City of Benin in Nigeria had streetlights, great art, and was larger than many European capitals. Wikipedia: List Of Games That Buddha Would Not Play Yet another reminder that things are worse than I thought. This really bothers me because I remember specifically combing over these studies and finding them believable at the time. Now Uri Simonsohn says – too bad, it’s all spurious. A bunch of very careful studies confirmed this effect even after apparently controlling for everything. Related: A long time ago I blogged about the name preference effect – ie that people are more positively disposed towards things that sound like their name – so I might like science more because Scott and science start with the same two letters. That wouldn’t make sense if the problem was just the normal vagaries of replication, and suggests that “the influence of questionable research practices is at the heart of failures to replicate psychological findings, especially in social psychology”.
Related: Internal Conceptual Relations Do Not Increase Independent Replication Success. Anything published in 2015 or earlier is part of the “too big to fail” era, it’s potentially a junk bond supported by toxic loans and you shouldn’t rely on it.” Don’t take publication as meaning much of anything, and just cos a paper’s been cited approvingly, that’s not enough either. Everything published before 2016 is provisional. Related: Andrew Gelman: “Let’s just put a bright line down right now. I’ve always noticed that correlational studies that control for confounders get confirmed by experiments much less often than I would expect, and now I finally understand (some of) why. So many studies that claim to have gotten a result after “controlling for confounders” but which haven’t used complicated statistical techniques that nobody uses are now potentially suspect. Confounders are always imperfectly measured, so when you control for your measure of a confounder, you’re only getting a portion of the real confounder, and the portion you didn’t get might be more than enough to sustain a significant effect.
A new PLoS paper argues that “controlling for confounders” doesn’t work as well as we’d like. Maybe the most important article I’ve read this year: When Confounding Variables Are Out Of Control. Zerão is a Brazilian football stadium with the dividing line exactly on the Equator, so that each goal is on a different hemisphere.
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