James Heathers
@jamesheathers
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pursuing fluid competence i do science loudly
Uncle Sam
Joined September 2011
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I have been asked many times how I would start a foundation to pursue scientific error detection.
My previous answers were too diffuse. After consideration, I have a better answer:
I would try to stop research fraud from killing people.
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Acute COVID is serious, but isn't my primary concern. I've had three Pfizers and great success all my life with fighting off infections.
*Long* COVID scares the shit out of me.
If it doesn't scare you, then I will guess you have never met anyone with a genuine chronic illness.
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I left academia exactly two months ago.
And I just got a peer review request.
So, I have prepared a real, actual, big boy academic consulting contract, and have sent it to the accounting department of the journal.
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We do ourselves a tremendous disservice when we reduce health statistics to 'who's dead'. That's just the price of admission to a big stadium, where there's a game on - we don't know who has to play, how long it runs, or how many athletes get bollocksed while playing it.
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I'm starting to get more and more interested in the formal positioning around remote work, because it heavily involves two things I do: manage people, and punch up on bad science.
So, with that in mind, I did not like this article. I will tell you why and try not to swear.
🧵🧵
Remote work likely affecting our ability to learn, focus and innovate, studies show, by Talia Varley via
@globebusiness
#MentalHealth
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Being debilitated is a combination of endless frustration, uncertainty, and a kind of psychological torture. Your whole life is subservient to a problem you often can't treat, don't understand, and that has a strong tendency to turn doctors into dismissive, angry dilettantes.
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Hard to measure, hard to study, hard to understand, distinctly second-class when it comes to funding and attention.
Search terms: endometriosis, a variety of spinal/back problems, PCOS, ME/CFS, Crohn's, more besides.
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The only way to win that game is not to play. I don't even want to play the Little League version. I got most of a box of KN95s left, and while they try to pull my ears off and they smell like a freshly medicated ferret, I'll see you from behind them.
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Read this.
"A chronic illness is a multilayered cruelty, especially when it is invisible."
"It can take, on average, eight to twelve years to get a diagnosis for endometriosis... many women are treated as hypochondriacs by careless providers."
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Authors choose journals based on Impact Factor (IF).
Editors use IF to justify the importance of their work.
Funders and governments use IF to quantify research impact.
But what do journals do?
Answer: quite a bit, and you won't like it.
Strap in. It's 🧵and new preprint time.
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Read this.
"I don’t remember what it’s like to feel well. I’m 43. I was 19 when I got sick."
"Having to go all the way to the bottom of yourself to find the resources to survive: this is something I understand well. I understand desperation."
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A list of all major psych research results in which we have lost confidence.
Damn.
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which 100% requires me to prioritise this work over other paid work?
(4) they're a private for-profit company with large ownership by a publicly traded for-profit company - please understand that in *literally any other context* this is paid work.
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Is long COVID this ^^ bad? Don't know.
If I got it, would it resolve? Probably... ?
If it did resolve, how soon? No clue.
How would I, personally, react? No idea.
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Dear
@twitter
.
I report porn bots and Nazis. All the time. Nothing happens.
Now you've figured out how to pull my hair, in about an hour, for *hateful conduct* over a statistics joke.
Is everything OK at home?
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'But it's academic service!'
(1) not an academic
(2) if it's in the 'public service' space, why does the agreement *specifically exclude* making the manuscript files and review reports (both mine and others) public assets?
(3) if I'm a volunteer, why do I have a timeframe...
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You know what?
Give me someone with impostor syndrome.
Let me talk to them, let me employ them, let me work for them, let them be my friends.
Give me the overthinkers, and the worriers. You can keep the perpetually smiling, the arrogant, the untouchable successful.
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You haven't seen the stupidest published SARS-CoV-2 take yet. I PROMISE you. No matter what's happened so far, no matter what you've seen, where you've looked, the best is yet to come.
You'll never be ready for this.
But here we go.
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Further additional: if you want to see the contract, I'll have to redact some stuff and turn it into a template. I am of course happy to share it. If you reply to this tweet, I'll ensure you get a copy of it you can turn into a DocuSign or PDF form.
@CharlesOppenh
, you asked.
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This isn't radical. This is how commercial organisations conduct business. Them paying me to do this work is a cost that allows them to charge APCs upon acceptance. It's a textbook definition of an upfront cost. We pay the same to get components to manufacture devices.
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I'm not an anti-vaxxer.
But I will repeat deliberate untruths I have not researched which are the deliberately-constructed talking points of the anti-vax movement, in a concerned tone, for money and/or attention.
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I've been fairly quiet about bad COVID research, as I am not a virologist, I do not work in epi or public health, and that makes trenchant criticism irresponsible.
That has changed, because this exists.
Strap in, we're going long.
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@RickCarlsson
I didn't say anything about 'billing for everything you do'. Academic service is a real thing. I help *people* with code. I help *authors* with papers.
But I think it is appropriate to *BILL* multinational corporations.
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The scale of just how badly science fucked this one up is astonishing.
Hundreds of thousands of views and millions of overhead opinions of vain anti-science divs and meta-analyses, AND NOT ONE PERSON CHECKED THE DATA.
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These researchers should be ashamed of themselves, because if this was a senior undergraduate term experiment, I would fail it. 'Brainwave patterns'. 'important learnings'. A sample size you could fit in a Toyota Sienna. Bilge. Utter twattery.
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cognitive decline in the elderly potentially happens (is it hypercortisolism? is it executive function decline? etc.) and is COMPLETELY DISCONNECTED from the question of 'changing between in-person and remote work').
*Terrible* citation. An academic editor would have your balls.
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This sets out the terms of our consulting arrangement: the cost, including a late payment penalty, the timeframe, the indemnities, etc., certifies that I am capable and in good standing to be able to do the work, and includes my obligations to my present employer.
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My new
@TheAtlantic
article is out.
Before we start, big credits to
@GidMK
@JackMLawrence
@K_Sheldrick
and
@sTeamTraen
, without whom none of this text would exist.
Right. To war.
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Ooh Karikó and Weissman got the Physiology Nobel.
"But for many years her career at the University of Pennsylvania was fragile. She migrated from lab to lab, relying on one senior scientist after another to take her in. She never made more than $60,000 a year."
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Thesis: 'methodological crisis' in science is NOT the sudden realisation of a problem. It is a well characterised problem which benefited hugely in recognition by a change in how scientists communicate and collaborate. Central issues were outlined clearly before 1970.
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Advisor: drafts by Friday, please.
Woke advisor: I will give you life advice which is actually useful (not just the rantings of a rapidly aging husk), also drafts by Friday please.
Galactic brain advisor: I WILL TEAR YOU FROM THE ARMS OF ISIS SO YOU CAN MAKE YOUR FRIDAY DEADLINE.
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True Academic Ironies
* all-day Saturday workshop on maintaining work/life balance
* 2-hour faculty meeting, agenda item: 'reducing administrative burden'
* mandatory seminar, topic: 'maintaining your independence'
* multi-part multi-platform e-training to streamline processes
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Where have all the postdocs gone??
(This is pretty good. It's a complicated issue and it's hard to cover the lot in 800-1200. Solid B+. But seeing as we're here let's hit a few outstanding points.)
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My sincere opinion is that this area is full of vested interests who have a narrative that is valuable to them, and they will tell it. Very loudly. And on both sides. If there's one thing I don't see often, it's that *a lot of managers have not put in the work to understand
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the dynamics of remote interaction*. They want proximity effects to make 'productivity' better because they don't want to do the work of figuring out how to connect with people in digital space. They'd rather you commute and be miserable.
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... and anyway, I'm giving them a discount. My normal consulting rate would set an unsustainable precedent and I don't want to price this so other people can't get paid.
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People have been starting and running hyper-effective, high-trust 100% online companies for YEARS, and I've met the people who manage these companies, and without a single exception they're people who can manage empathy AND accountability over the internet.
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I'm going to stop because this is eating my morning.
Also, because I think I've made my point. All of these high-handed pieces about remote work being crushing, miserable, isolating, and dangerous are liberally saturate with this very weak attitude to evidence.
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Additional: we employ consultants at
@CipherSkin
. Quite a few. They're very, very useful. And they get paid. I am on both sides of this equation now.
Further: this is not a BILL. This is a CONTRACT. I have not done the work then requested money. That is ridiculous and dishonest.
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Screw it, I don't have a Soundcloud, so let's start a movement.
If your company has a 2.5 billion topline, I want four hundred and fifty dollars to consult for you.
Full exposition and contract included here.
I review academic literature during peer review for very, very large companies, and it is one of their revenue streams.
When I do this, I want them to pay me four hundred and fifty dollars.
No, I am not joking.
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and never acknowledges that a lot of people who manage people suck out loud at it, and they threw their hands up at the complication of not having social control to maintain, and wanted to Go Back To How It Was without having to learn anything or be decent to their people.
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I am setting out the terms of my employment before beginning, which is generally how any employment terms anywhere for any reason are set out.
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I'm just going to screencap this because it's miserable beyond belief. Maybe SEVEN pairs in the remote/together condition. Using the word 'prove'. (AGH) No methods, no citation, no details on WHAT THE TASK WAS, who the people were, where it happened, etc.
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I have been staring at this for five minutes now, and I can feel my eyeballs starting to dry out, and my family begin to forget my name and replace it with an eldritch curse
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But even if this study was perfect, is it in any way reflective of how remote work is done? In any remote or hybrid job you have, do you have two people closely cross-monitoring common task performance... or do you just do shit separately 98% of the time and then communicate?
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"Loneliness and cognitive function in the older adult: a systematic review"
In THE OLDER ADULT is already invalidating. This is a review of studies about how aging, cognitive decline, and loneliness interrelate. The conclusion is: there are some ...
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... correlations, many of them quite weak, and there is absolutely no causality that can be drawn from it. The larger samples include adults >75 years, adults mean age 80, etc.
It is a discussion about whether or not we can learn anything about the mechanisms by which ...
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Lots of mouse-flavoured headlines these days, but this total hero is the first person to actually MOUSE HIS OWN HEADLINE.
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Let's do the next one.
"In 2020, a Microsoft study..." produces an article in Fortune Well (Fortune has a wellness section? What kind of clown car full of Infinite Wellness babble would be buried there... hanging out for Outside Magazine to have a section on options trading)
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I haven't written anything for a long time, because I didn't want to.
Then earlier this evening, I was thinking about what our greatest mistake was during the plague.
I think it's how little we've actually *seen* it. Ugly, up close, and personal.
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* wrapping the Plague and work disruption up into 'remote work' (i.e. 'forced remote work', 'sick with COVID remote work', etc.) makes this categorically difficult
* people with anxiety and depression may - OBVIOUSLY - be self-selecting for remote / hybrid roles!
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They don't whine about 'lost productivity', they build systems (and then update/maintain them) that allow the constraint to work for them. I'm editorialising here, but it's frustrating to see all the 'news' about this which is a parody of evidence-driven at best...
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"In the end, two of them refused to sign off on her degree if she did not remove criticisms of Gino’s paper from her dissertation."
This is some bulllllllllllshit.
The
#fraud
investigation at Harvard and lawsuit from Francesca Gino is in the NYT
The article confirms that Dan Ariely is under investigation for fraud at Duke.
She claims she barely knows Ariely, he says they are good friends (they published 10 papers together)…
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This isn't even a citation, it's a fly-by of Microsoft's marketing material.
Anyway: first two, absolutely dreadful. No points. Let's do the next one.
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Spare a Christmas thought for the poor bastards working ICU shifts, getting spat at and slapped and kicked in the shins, and trying to stop your mad uncle from getting dead, again, two years in, while you're arguing about why the turkey is dry.
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(your neighbour cannot be blasting the Nicki Minajes, and your kids will not pull your hair at a tournament) (c) preparation strategies might be non-optimized for online play, etc.
This is a really good study, which says NOTHING ABOUT THE INTRINSIC QUALITIES OF REMOTE WORK.
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A question I didn't think I'd be answering last week is 'how many of these 35,000 papers are fake?'
But: here I am.
This is a monstrosity, a problem off the scale of anything I've ever seen before.
It's new blog and thread day, cats and kittens.
🧵🧵
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So, my local university news has a sense of humour, and they wrote an article on
@justsaysinmice
.
That's not the important part. They made a graphic.
And it is DARLING.
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* income is a BIG covariate!
* the previous research is irretrievably mixed
* coarsely speaking, pre- and post-Plague remote work studies seem to be categorically different
etc.
This is why you need a whole report for complicated issues!
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I continually get mouse-related communication now. No complaints, obviously I signed up for that.
However, it's giving me the distinct impression that
@justsaysinmice
is... well, it's working. Mice seem to be appearing in headlines, ledes, and tweets at a higher rate.
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@RickCarlsson
I'm not billing the editor, or the authors, or the grad students. I am billing the organisation who are generating a profit through the end product whose quality is assured by skilled labor.
I cannot express in words how utterly un-radical this position is.
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"Her work has led to 519 retractions, 74 expressions of concern and 452 corrections."
GOAT status.
Microbiologist Elisabeth Bik queried Covid research – that’s when the abuse and trolling began
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Sometimes I accept a peer review (one I'm sure I can do fast but properly) and do it in the next two hours, just to see what will happen.
I'll tell you what happens - absolutely nothing.
No-one has ever, ever said thank you, been impressed, or given a single solitary shit.
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Alright, let's have a roll-call of the big psychology studied that ate their own teeth for one reason or another.
SOCIAL PRIMING. Lots of failed repos.
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But in the Fortune article, there's indeed a link to a Microsoft study.
"Do remote work and video meetings actually tax our brain more than in-person work? The brain science suggests, yes." Oh weeping Jesus on the cross, here we go.
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So, it's not evidence, but it's not untenable or problematic - it's just from the Little Golden Book version of managing people, where poorly-defined 'creativity' at work matters and the happiness of people in the real world doesn't.
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PSA: when your video call is interrupted by an affectionate pet, hilariously demanding child, or unexpected pratfall, it is not 'unprofessional'. It is charming, breaks up the monotony, and everyone is secretly wishing it would happen more.
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And again, I reiterate my considered position that
@MicrobiomDigest
is a legend, and that a scientific establishment that does not support her is wrong.
NEW: I wrote about Elisabeth Bik, a scientist turned science detective, and the time she challenged a prominent hydroxychloroquine crusader.
Their feud illustrates a larger truth that COVID has made all too clear: science often fails to police itself.
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Press F in chat if your parents have no idea what tenure is, what Google Scholar is, what citations are, and what an H-index is, and just say something like 'I'm sure you're doing well' from time to time.
TFW your parents go out to dinner with their friends who brag about their child getting tenure, and your Dad has your Google Scholar page bookmarked to counter that their tenure-track child has more total citations and a higher h-index
#firstgenPI
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The content is far from controversial: exhaustion and stress reduce creativity, etc. etc. There's some neurobabble and some poorly described studies, and the advice - as always - is canonical Oprah bullshit like Plant A Tree, or Harass a Squirrel.
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Well, of course the study isn't linked, because why would you make it easy for people, so I found the press release, which led to the website, which led to a place where you can download the study if you put in an email.
Fun.
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@byrd_nick
Well, it's very easy to prepare an invoice. That is utterly straightforward.
The contract, bit more heavy lifting there. I can ABSOLUTELY make that available. THAT qualifies as an academic service, which I would be delighted to do both for free, and soon.
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@statsepi
@alisonkgerber
@socarxiv
What in seven shades of shoe-shined shit is this farrago of arse-backwards nonsense.
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Micing things (
@justsaysinmice
) takes ages. And I don't have all day to start more alt accounts (job).
So, this thread contains similar accounts run by total heroes with similar concerns.
RT this, and let's throw a bigger spanner in the gears of biased science reporting.
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To my extreme amusement,
@justsaysinmice
is now cited in actual real research.
In our opinion piece for the Issue of PhilTransB
@RSocPublishing
‘Linking the mitochondrial genotype to phenotype: a complex endeavour’, we discuss about the comparative method and the potential of non-model animals in mitochondrial research... 1/2
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Why in seven hells does my manuscript need 'highlights'. Why do I need to sum up a 7k word document in a series of half-tweets. Read the abstract, you ruinous brass band of bastards.
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It has come to my attention, due to the fact that my email is public, that some people are upset about my article (more a screed, really) in the Atlantic.
Apparently, some people who lie about microchips in vaccines are not happy with the moniker 'smooth-brained garbage-people'.
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Easy to find. Here it is.
The report itself is... OK. I don't know how big or representative the sample is, and response rate sucks out loud, but in its entirety it hits some real points without embarrassing itself at all.
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This is the story of someone who succeeded in spite of, rather than because of, the Big Nonsense. And now we all aren't dead. What a genuinely impressive person.
There's a lot more I could add to that, but it feels weird to do it in her moment.
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Again, an intermediate link. "Fully remote (40 percent) and hybrid work (38 percent) are associated with an increased likelihood of anxiety and depression symptoms compared to in-person work (35 percent)."
Oh really.
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Now here's something interesting: a lot of the effect was driven by a tournament (the 'Magnus Carlsen Invitational') which was held in *18th April to 3rd May, 2020*. Now that might be something of a confounding effect!
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Alright, next link. It's to some goofy-arsed blog from an education institute that uses so many buzzwords I still don't know what they do after reading the About page. Top reference.
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This study, of course, conducted by people who aren't fools, goes RIGHT FOR this explanation and others. There obviously IS a remote play decrement, and it's some combination of (a) a change in environment (b) chess tournaments are MORE controlled than home environments ...
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13 days since partial positive remdesivir results released. Still no further details, no preprint, no data, NOTHING.
This isn't evidence-based medicine. It's hope-based medicine. I've run out of superlatives to describe what a bad idea this is.
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Right.
I'm not going to lose my mind here, but the remdesivir trial dropped today, and the initial results seem positive.
Seem.
That word will do a lot of heavy lifting in a bit.
I had reservations, but that's what people pay me for.
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I just love the optimism involved in thinking scientists have the time or money to plan a conspiracy.
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This is really interesting, because chess is a real cognitively-demanding task, there is real money involved, and using chess engines, you can very precisely define the quality of moves and you have 100Ks to measure! I smell a valid observation coming up!
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To my surprise, there was a great big bag of research on impact factor manipulation that already exists! Some of it is ~20 years old!
And, for some inexplicable reason, no-one talks about it!?
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New preprint!
This is the strangest thing I've ever gotten to study, and I love it.
Some people can raise their own goosebumps *just by thinking about it*.
There are THREE people in recorded history who've been studied doing this. We found about 30.
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