Daniele Fanelli's webpages

Latest news:
17-12-2020. Over 450 have visited covidConsensus.org and nearly 100 have voted! Some really interesting patterns emerged in the opinions, which I summarized in a Blog post.
6-12-2020. It's out! A pilot project to develop new ways to help scientists debate controversial ideas in public. I asked a sample of published authors to express their opinion on the Focussed Protection stratgegy against Covid-19: www.covidconsensus.org. Initial results suggest that opinions are widespread, and it appears that females are less favourable than males, and Western countries less than Eastern ones. Response rates are rather low, however, and any suggestions to improve them will be greatly appreciated.
22-11-2020. Wow, time flies, when you are locked at home! I kept myself rather busy on numerous fronts. Aside from a couple of interesting empirical studies currently under review, I am exploring ways to apply K theory directly to help improve research practices. This is mainly why I decided to withdraw the preprint on applying K to reproducibility - whilst I work on more generalizable methodologies. But, most exciting of all at present, I have been working a secret new project that aims to help science and society talk better. Stay tuned as this will be unveiling soon!
31-03-2020. About one year after the publication of K theory, a new preprint presents Metascientific reproducibility patterns revealed by measuring K. This is part 1 of results I partially showed at a few recent conferences, including the REWARD | EQUATOR Conference 2020, which has released the video of my talk.
29-02-2020. The National Academy of Scholars has posted online recordings of all the talks at the "Fixing Science" conference, including of course my contribution. Those who wished to see the event cancelled will be disappointed by the lack of any racist, sexist and antiscientific tones. For example the talk by Pat Michaels, whom I was told was a climate-denialist, and disappointingly started his talk by acknowledging conclusive evidence for global warming by green-house effect (but then went on to criticize the use made of climate models).
My final assessment of this "controversial" event is the following.
There was perhaps a kernel of truth to the suspicions aired online that the "Fixing Science" conference was at least partially inspired by political concerns. A number of talks were devoted to critiquing regulatory science and evidence purported to support environmental and health policies. The connection between such talks and issues of reproducibility was not very obvious, just as it wasn't in the NAS report that, two years ago, was calling for higher reproducibility standards in evidence-based policies.
However, there was no covert conspiracy here, let alone a racist or anti-environmentalist agenda. The organizers made at least some effort to bring together contrasting voices. The talk by Michaels, for example, was preceded by that of Tim Edgell whose work found no evidence of publication bias in climate science. This is more perspectival diversity than I see at most academic conferences. But regardless of how the program is put together, there is just nothing wrong in letting informed sceptics articulate their position. No scientific field should be considered immune from scrutiny.
Conclusive evidence of the intellectual genuineness of the event came, for me, by seeing how the policy proposal advanced in the final talk by David Randall, one of the event organizers and author of the aforementioned report, got torn to pieces by other NAS members, in a heart-warming display of open, friendly but frank scholarly debate.
It may not have been the usual scientific conference, but I was really pleased to have taken part. I feel sorry for the speakers who withdrew out of fear of being superficially and wrongfully burned at the stake like so many other academics before them. It was great to catch up with colleagues, to meet lots of very interesting and clever people, and to be confronted with evidence and ideas that I would not normally encounter in my own information bubble infused with academic group-think, as Lee Jussim brilliantly explained.
Rather than trying to have it shut down, people who disagree with a public event should join it and engage with the speakers, thereby increasing the intellectual diversity of the event, as well as their own.