Stick to baseball, 6/20/20.

My one piece for subscribers to the Athletic this week looked at which MLB teams just drafted their new #1 or #2 prospects. No chat this week as I was busy with work calls or family commitments every afternoon.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the Kennerspiel des Jahres-nominated game The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, a cooperative trick-taking game that plays out over a series of 50 missions, like a legacy game but without asking you to change or destroy any components.

The Boston Globe just named my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, one of its recommended sports reads for the summer. The book has garnered similar plaudits from major publications as a Father’s Day gift or for summer reading, including from ForbesThe New York Times, and Raise. My thanks to all of you who’ve already bought it; if you’re looking to pick up a copy, you can get it at bookshop.org or perhaps at a local bookstore if they’re reopening near you.

I’m sending out my free email newsletter a bit more regularly lately, which is a good sign for my mental health, I think. You can sign up for free here.

And now, the links…

Comments

  1. Maybe certain Twitter accounts aren’t “bots” according to the academic definition, but it’s more accurate to call them consistent pushers of coordinated content. Something that is clearly not grassroots. A human could still be behind the account tweeting like anyone else, but they participate in organized attempts to draw attention to a story or post. This could be through efforts outside Twitter, like on Reddit or other message boards, or through simple program/extensions that allow a user to automatically like or re-tweet certain content. I do wonder how effective this will be going forward since there are now other programs/extensions that evaluate another user’s bot score and will automatically block or mute users with a high score. So it eventually becomes an echo chamber where only a few users see the intended content and they are probably users who also shared the content.

  2. The North Face is the first big brand to answer the call, stopping all advertising on Facebook and sister platform Instagram. REI followed suit soon after — hopefully these are just the first of many to do so.

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/06/19/north-face-brands-boycott-facebook-over-hate-speech/3224151001/

  3. Could the peer-review failures have come at any worse time, as anti-science voices get louder and louder?

    • A Salty Scientist

      No, and it doesn’t help having a non-scientist President speculate about treatment efficacy.

      For those interested, here’s my perspective as someone who does peer review regularly. As a reviewer, my main goal is to ensure that a manuscript meets a certain quality threshold for publication (e.g. making sure that the conclusions of the paper are well supported by the data). It takes me ~6-8 hours to review a paper (this is unpaid service, so I have to find time outside of my paid research and teaching obligations). If the results are counterintuitive or refute other papers, I scrutinize the data more (i.e. extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence), but only in exceptional circumstances would I re-analyze raw data (this could take days to weeks or more). Because of this, peer review will not generally detect fraud except when it’s done so sloppily that it raises eyebrows*. I do no think that my peer review habits fall outside the norm, and the New York Times article is on point here. And I’ve certainly missed things that other reviewers have caught and vice versa. Occasionally 2-4 reviewers will all miss something, which is why it’s important for scientists to draw their own conclusions from the literature most relevant to their own work. More importantly, this is why sensationalist reporting of new findings is a giant disservice that erodes public trust for science. At the very least, reporters should be as cautious and equivocal as the scientists whose work they are reporting on.

      *These recent retractions should have raised eyebrows. I would never allow anything to be published without the raw data being made available, and the tabulated demographics across continents should have invited much more scrutiny. This is also easy for me to say as someone who did not review the paper.