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 insights I don't need expensive equipment. JoshuaZ claimed that you need expensive equipement to gather new insights in biology. I claim that's not true. I claim that there enough published information that's not well organised into theories that you can make major advances in biology without needing to buy any equipment.
As far as I understand you don't run experiments on participants to see whether Dual 'n' back works. You simply gather Dual 'n' back data from other people and tried doing it yourself to know how it feel like. That's not expensive. You don't need to write large grants to get a lot of money to do that kind of work.
You do need some money to pay your bills. Einstein made that money through being a patent clerk. I don't know how you make your money to live. Of course you don't have to tell and I respect if that's private information.
For all I know you could be making money by being a patent clerk like Einstein.
A scientists who can't work on his grant projects because he of the government shutdown could use his free time to do the kind of work that you are doing.
If you don't like the label "theoretic" that's fine. If you want to propose a different label that distinguish your approach from the making fancy expensive experiments approach I'm open to use another label.
I think in the last decades we had an explosion in the amount of data in biology. I think that organising that data into theories lags behind. I think it takes less effort to advance biology by organising into theories and to do a bit of phenomenology than to push for further for expensive equipment produced knowledge.
If I phrase it that way, would you agree?
I claim that there enough published information that's not well organised into theories that you can make major advances in biology without needing to buy any equipment.
This can be true but also suboptimal. I'm sure that given enough cleverness and effort, we could extract a lot of genetic causes out of existing SNP databases - but why bother when we can wait a decade and sequence everyone for $100 a head? People aren't free, and equipment both complements and substitutes for them.
...As far as I understand you don't run experiments on participants to see
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)