Episode 31: Criticismus

In this episode, we discuss the role of criticism in science. When is criticism constructive as opposed to obsessive? What are the features of fair and useful scientific criticism? And should we explicitly teach junior researchers to both give and accept criticism?

 

Shownotes:

• Babbage, C. (1830). Reflections on the Decline of Science in England: And on Some of Its Causes.
• Prasad, Vinay, and John PA Ioannidis. "Constructive and obsessive criticism in science." European journal of clinical investigation 52.11 (2022): e13839.
• Lakatos, I. (1968, January). Criticism and the methodology of scientific research programmes. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian society (Vol. 69, pp. 149-186). Aristotelian Society, Wiley.
• LOWI: https://lowi.nl/en/home/ As an independent advisory body it plays a role in the complaints procedure about alleged violations of principles of research integrity.
• Holcombe, A. O. (2022). Ad hominem rhetoric in scientific psychology. British Journal of Psychology, 113(2), 434–454. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12541
• Daniel C. Dennett: I've Been Thinking https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393868050 
• Phillip Stark textbook chapter on logical fallacies: https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/SticiGui/Text/reasoning.htm 
• Gelman, A., & Tuerlinckx, F. (2000). Type S error rates for classical and Bayesian single and multiple comparison procedures. Computational Statistics, 15(3), 373–390. https://doi.org/10.1007/s001800000040
• Popper, K. R. (1959). The logic of scientific discovery. Routledge.
• PubPeer: https://pubpeer.com