How much money do you think it cost to run the experiments to come up with the concept of the file drawer problem and the concept pre-registration of studies? I don't think that's knowledge that got created by running expensive experiments. It came from people engaging in theoretical thinking.
The earliest citation in the Rosenthal paper that coined the term 'file drawer' is to a 1959 paper by one Theodore Sterling; I jailbroke this to "Publication Decisions and Their Possible Effects on Inferences Drawn from tests of Significance - or Vice Versa".
After some background about NHST on page 1, Sterling immediately begins tallying tests of significance in a years' worth of 4 psychology journals, on page 2, and discovers that eg of 106 tests, 105 rejected the null hypothesis. On page 3, he discusses how this bias could come about.
So at least in this very early discussion of publication bias, it was driven by people engaged in empirical thinking.
After some background about NHST on page 1, Sterling immediately begins tallying tests of significance in a years' worth of 4 psychology journals, on page 2, and discovers that eg of 106 tests, 105 rejected the null hypothesis. On page 3, he discusses how this bias could come about.
I think doing a literature review is engaging in using other people data. For the sake of this discussion JoshuaZ claimed that Einstein was doing theoretical work when he worked with other people's data.
If I want to draw information from a literature review to gather insight...
For those who haven't heard, NIH and NSF are no longer processing grants, leading to many negative downstream effects.
I've been directing my attention elsewhere lately and don't have anything informative to say about this. However, my uninformed intuition is that people who care about effective altruism (research in general, infrastructure development, X-risk mitigation, life-extension...basically everything, actually) or have transhumanist leanings should be very concerned.
The consequences have already been pretty disastrous. To provide just one, immediate example, the article says that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has shut down. I think that this is almost certain to directly cause a nontrivial number of deaths. Each additional day that this continues could have huge negative impact down the line, perhaps delaying some key future discoveries by years. This event *might* be a small window of opportunity to prevent a lot of harm very cheaply.
So the question is:
1) Can we do anything to remedy the situation?
2) If so, is it worth doing it? (Opportunity costs, etc)