Five Reasons Blog Posts Are Of Higher Scientific Quality Than Journal Articles

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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.

1. Blogs have Open Data, Code, and Materials

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). 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. Despite empirical proof that most scientists do not share their data when asked, the APA considers this ‘ethical conduct’. It is not. It’s an insult to science. But it’s the standard that many relatively low quality scientific journals, such as the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, hide behind to practice closed science.

On blogs, the norm is to provide access to the underlying data, code, and materials. For example, here is Hanne Watkins, who uses data she collected to answer some questions about the attitudes of early career researchers and researchers with tenure towards replications. She links to the data and materials, which are all available on the OSF. Most blogs on statistics will link to the underlying code, such as this blog by Will Gervais on whether you should run well-powered studies or many small-powered studies. On average, it seems to me almost all blogs practice open science to a much higher extent than scientific journals.

2. Blogs have Open Peer Review

Scientific journal articles use peer review as quality control. The quality of the peer review process is as high as the quality of the peers that were involved in the review process. The peer review process was as biased as the biases of the peers that were involved in the review process. For most scientific journal articles, I can not see who reviewed a paper, or check the quality, or the presence of bias, because the reviews are not open. Some of the highest quality journals in science, such as PeerJ and Royal Society Open Science, have Open Peer Review, and journals like Frontiers at least specify the names of the reviewers of a publication. Most low quality journals (e.g., Science, Nature) have 100% closed peer review, and we don’t even know the name the handling editor of a publication. It is often impossible to know whether articles were peer reviewed to begin with, and what the quality of the peer review process was.

Some blogs have Open pre-publication Peer Review. If you read the latest DataColada blog post, you can see the two reviews of the post by experts in the field (Tom Stanley and Joe Hilgard) and several other people who shared thoughts before the post went online. On my blog, I sometimes ask people for feedback before I put a blog post online (and these people are thanked in the blog if they provided feedback), but I also have a comment section. This allows people to point out errors and add comments, and you can see how much support or criticism a blog has received. For example, in this blog on why omega squared is a better effect size to use than eta-squared, you can see why Casper Albers disagreed by following a link to a blog post he wrote in response. Overall, the peer review process in blog posts is much more transparent. If you see no comments on a blog post, you have the same information about the quality of the peer review process as you’d have for the average Science article. Sure, you may have subjective priors about the quality of the review process at Science (ranging from ‘you get in if your friend is an editor’ to ‘it’s very rigorous’) but you don’t have any data. But if a blog has comments, at least you can see what peers thought about a blog post, giving you some data, and often very important insights and alternative viewpoints.

3. Blogs have no Eminence Filter

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4. Blogs have Better Error Correction

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5. Blogs are Open Access (and might be read more).

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April 15, 2017 at 08:26PM

U.S. Energy Secretary Orders Review To Determine If Green Energy Is Killing Coal

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Energy Secretary Rick Perry ordered a study Friday examining to what extent solar and wind power are hurting what the Trump administration considers reliable forms of coal power.

Perry, a Texas Republican who served as governor of an energy-rich state, wants the Energy Department to undergo a 60-day review of the energy grid to determine if green energy subsidies are hurting more reliable forms of energy like natural gas and coal.

“We are blessed as a nation to have an abundance of domestic energy resources, such as coal, natural gas,” Perry wrote in a memo to his chief of staff, Brian McCormack. The DOE chief was referring to sources of energy he and President Donald Trump believe should be included when discussing the country’s energy grid.

Perry’s review also seeks to evaluate to what extent regulatory burdens, subsidies, and tax policies “are responsible for forcing the premature retirement of baseload power plants.”

The grid study comes after Perry said he and international counterparts discussed the need for a diverse supply of electricity during a G-7 Energy Ministerial meeting in Rome.

“It impressed upon me that the United States should take heed of the policy choices our allies have made and take stock of their consequences,” Perry said, not referring to any specific country.

But there is evidence that Germany and Australia’s reliance on green energy subsidies have caused damage to their grids. Germany’s subsidies for green energy, for instance, have sharply increased power prices in the country, with the average German paying 39 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity. The average U.S. citizen, meanwhile, spends 10.4 cents per kilowatt-hour by comparison.

Wind and solar power plants in the European country under-performed in January because of cloudy weather with little or no wind, which nearly collapsed the country’s entire grid. Germany’s power grid was strained to the absolute limit and could have gone offline entirely.

South Australia underwent similar strains. The state has plenty of coal and natural gas reserves, but, thanks to South Australia’s environmental movement, many of the state’s most reliable coal-powered plants have been shuttered, forcing solar and wind power to make up the deficit.

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April 15, 2017 at 08:19PM

Subsidised Suicide: Wind Power Delivers Nothing But Rocketing Power Prices & Blackouts

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*** In this pair of pearlers, James Delingpole spans the globe: firstly detailing the growing and staggering cost of subsidised wind power in Britain; and then turning his attention Downunder to the disaster that is Australia’s wind power capital, South Australia. Post-Brexit Britain Wants To Escape Its EU Renewables Targets. About Time Too Breitbart James […]

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April 15, 2017 at 07:35PM

SCOTT PRUITT CALLS FOR USA TO EXIT PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT

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Date: 14/04/17

• The Washington Post

President Trump’s top environment official called for an “exit” from the historic Paris agreement Thursday, the first time such a high-ranking administration official has so explicitly disavowed the agreement endorsed by nearly 200 countries to fight climate change.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, left, shakes hands with coal miners during a visit to Consol Pennsylvania Coal Company’s Harvey Mine in Sycamore, Pa., on April 13. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)

It seems that the doubts expressed a few days ago were wrong. The USA may yet lead the world back to sanity on the great CO2 scam that has enveloped it.

Speaking with “Fox Friends,” Pruitt commented, “Paris is something that we need to really look at closely. It’s something we need to exit in my opinion.”

“It’s a bad deal for America,” Pruitt continued. “It was an America second, third, or fourth kind of approach. China and India had no obligations under the agreement until 2030. We front-loaded all of our costs.”

Pruitt had called the Paris accord a “bad deal” in the past but does not appear to have previously gone so far as to call for the United States to withdraw.

The Trump administration has previously said it is currently reviewing its position on climate change and energy policy and remains noncommittal, for now, on whether it will follow through on the president’s campaign pledge to “cancel” the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

“You might’ve read in the media that there was much discussion about U.S. energy policy and the fact that we’re undergoing a review of many of those policies,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry said in Texas on Thursday, according to prepared remarks. “It’s true, we are and it’s the right thing to do.”

Amid this uncertainty, the statement aligns Pruitt with a more hard-line approach held by some in the Trump administration, rather than the more moderate take of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who had said in his confirmation hearing that the U.S. should have a “seat at the table” in the Paris negotiations.

Tillerson’s former company, the oil giant ExxonMobil, has also supported the Paris accord, and in late March wrote a letter to the White House reiterating its view that “the United States is well positioned to compete within the framework of the Paris agreement, with abundant low-carbon resources such as natural gas, and innovative private industries, including the oil, gas, and petrochemical sectors.”

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April 15, 2017 at 06:30PM