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 Forbes, The 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…
- Longreads first: USA Today has the story of the late scout Rudy Santin’s attempts to expose MLB’s broken system for signing international amateur free agents, which can include verbal (and thus unenforceable) agreements between teams and 12-year-old players. The system doesn’t really work for either side – players can, and do, walk away from these agreements as late as the day before the signing period opens – but the likely alternative, a draft, will just result in less money flowing to players from teams.
- Vanity Fair‘s Jeff Sharlet goes deep inside the cult of Trump, talking to his diehard supporters and their beliefs in some of the most bizarre, antifactual conspiracy theories you could ever imagine. These are people who think Q is real, that leading Democrats are literal demons who eat children, and that Trump was sent by God to save us all.
- One way to craft a response to a pandemic is to look at successful responses to past pandemics. STAT News explains how the pornography industry dealt with the HIV epidemic, successfully, and what lessons countries might take away from their strategy.
- The New York Times looks at two major failures in the peer-review process this year, asking why this happened and if the process itself is flawed (or, as some of the quoted sources say, simply overtaxed).
- Also in the Times, what exactly is a Twitter bot, and are they as numerous as many recent headlines have claimed? I shared a story a few weeks ago about research at Carnegie Mellon that claimed as many as half of the tweets about COVID-19 in the study sample were from bots, but multiple sources here say that conclusion was not supported by the data.
- My friend Alex Speier looked at unconscious racial bias in baseball scouting, including the language used in scouting reports. I’m quoted in the article.
- Arizona’s COVID-19 pandemic might be even worse than the official data indicate. The state’s Rt remains well above 1, there’s barely any contact tracing, and the current trend has the state on its way to running out of ICU beds. This is what happens when you elect anti-science people to run your state.
- Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts has told counties that if they require citizens to wear masks in county buildings, they will not receive any of the state’s COVID-19 relief funds. This is what happens when you elect anti-science people to run your state.
- Stefan Fatsis, author of the entertaining Word Freak, writes about the debate within the competitive Scrabble world over whether to prohibit racial and other hateful slurs.
- Expecting college students to behave prudently if they return to campus this fall is a fantasy, because people in that age range tend to engage in more risky and impulsive behaviors.
- Troy Amen, who is entering his fifth year of a joint MD-MBA program at Harvard Medical School (and, I assume, Harvard Business School), writes about systemic racism at HMS and the school’s apparent refusal to hire a more diverse faculty.
- Prosecutors allege that 18-year-old Chicago man murdered a trans woman after going home with her and learning she was transgender. According to the prosecution, he left, got a gun, returned to shoot her, left, and then went back to shoot her again.
- Facebook Groups are fountains of disinformation and crackpot conspiracy theories, according to this editorial in WIRED by two authors who research disinformation and fake news. This isn’t shocking to anyone who follows anti-vaccine activity online, as Facebook is ground zero for so much of their bullshit.
- Civil rights groups are asking big advertisers to pause spending on Facebook ads for the month of July, citing the platform’s failure to police hate groups on the site, as part of the #StopHateforProfit campaign.
- Two Virginia lawyers pleaded guilty to attempting to extort $200 million from Monsanto by threatening to file false legal claims around Roundup (glyphosate). This is notable because the two lawyers work with scaremonger Carey Gilliam and her anti-GMO organization U.S. Right to Know.
- Plenty of bad actors are spreading bogus stories of service workers tampering with the food ordered by police officers, but now the police unions are doing the same, disparaging Shake Shack with a false claim that workers there had “poisoned” several cops’ milkshakes. The NYC Detectives’ Endowment Association didn’t admit their error or apologize for spreading the lie.
- Writer and book critic Carolyn Kellogg revealed on Twitter why she quit the National Book Critics Circle’s board – the group’s refusal to issue a statement on Black Lives Matter and the verbal abuse directed at another board member who led the working group trying to craft a statement.
- Zimbabwe may be on the verge of collapse yet again, and they’ve resumed arresting and torturing opposition activists.
- Board game news: roll20 announced the upcoming release and pre-order availability for Burn Bryte, a new tabletop RPG that’s been three years in the making.
- Asmodee Digital announced an upcoming port of the Game of Thrones board game, a big, complex, long game that might really benefit from a digital adaptation.
- Bézier Games announced pre-orders for Maglev Metro, the newest game from the designer of Suburbia and the Castles of Mad King Ludwig.
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.
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/
Could the peer-review failures have come at any worse time, as anti-science voices get louder and louder?
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.