
The Debunkers of a Gay Marriage Study Just Re-Bunked It, Sort Of - tokenadult
http://www.wired.com/2016/04/political-sciences-whistleblowers-rebunk-gay-canvassing-study/
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danso
NYMag had a great indepth piece about how the original study was debunked, and
the fallout that occurred:

[http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/05/how-a-grad-student-
unco...](http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/05/how-a-grad-student-uncovered-a-
huge-fraud.html)

Some of my favorite takeaways from the whole thing:

\- How you should put time into making impressive-looking data visualizations,
and to show them on a nice device. In this story, and a few others, academics
and researchers talk about how blown away they were by the research because he
had such great visuals:

> _The iPad thing was LaCour’s trademark. “He was sort of famous for taking
> his results from different studies he was working on, putting them on an
> iPad, and buttonholing people at the conferences and going over all of the
> research that he was doing, the different findings he had, and basically not
> letting the people go until they had an idea of what he was working on,”
> says Tim Groeling, a communications professor at UCLA, who is listed as one
> of LaCour’s references on his curriculum vitae. “It was infectious,”
> continues Groeling. “Really cool stuff was on that iPad.”_

\- There is an online forum that is pretty much like 4chan for the polisci
community...this is where the study unraveled, in between all the anonymous
shittalking and rumors about who's getting tenure and who they fucked to get
it.

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powera
I find the article's implication that replication of scientific studies is
something invented at Yale in the 21st century beyond preposterous. And I'm
certain that "Re-Bunked" isn't actually a word.

~~~
freshhawk
They implied that actually doing the replication of already published studies
in the social sciences being considered a normal thing was the result, for
these researchers, of being exposed to this attitude at Yale.

I don't know Yale, but I know enough to know this attitude had to come from
somewhere, since the norm is that replication is not just unrewarded, but
often actively discouraged. Hence the generally shittiness of social science
results. This seems to be changing as the results of the combination of WEIRD
bias, the filedrawer effect, these social norms and other problems have been
recognized and done serious damage to the reputation of the social sciences
(for good reason).

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PhasmaFelis
Wired now appears to block adblocking browsers, and then hits you with a
large, autoplaying video ad if you whitelist them. Is this story covered
elsewhere?

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e40
Use uBlock Origin and the 3rd-party filter "Anti-Adblock Killer | Reek‎"
turned on. Works fine.

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eridius
I use the regular uBlock (Safari here) but it lists the same filter. I turned
it on and it didn't work. Are you sure it's not some other filter or plugin
you have installed that's blocking this one?

Edit: Nevermind. After I clicked "Purge all caches" it immediately offered an
update to that list, and after updating it works now. I don't know why it
didn't offer this update originally since I hadn't had the filter enabled
before.

Edit 2: Oops, it still doesn't work. It just waited until I started scrolling
before displaying this time. I wonder if Wired is just A/B testing different
approaches, including not having the blocker at all, and you just got lucky?

~~~
retbull
Don't use regular ublock it isn't well maintained and lets ads through for
money.

~~~
eridius
I've never heard that it lets ads through for money, nor have I ever noticed
that happening.

Also, I don't really have a choice, unless I want to switch to a completely
different product. uBlock Origin made the decision to not support Safari
despite the original uBlock it was forked from supporting it.

