Open Science Leaders: Dan and Steve Tell Their Stories

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Dan Simons may be best known as the co-author of the best-seller The Invisible Gorilla. He’s also the foundation editor of the new APS statistics and methods journal AMPPS.

Steve Lindsay is an accomplished cognitive psychologist and current Editor-in-Chief of Psychological Science. Steve has developed Open Science policies at this journal, see for example here.

Dan and Steve were interviewed at the recent SIPS meeting. A podcast of the interview has recently been released and is here.

In my opinion it’s a fascinating 47 min of story-telling about Open Science, and how two highly successful researchers came to understand that what they–and pretty much everyone else–had been doing for decades was fundamentally flawed. Only over the last 4-6 years have they come to deeply appreciate the importance of p-hacking, optional stopping, cherry-picking, dichotomous thinking…

To their great credit, they have embraced the new ways of Open Science and have indeed become leaders in the development and wide understanding of Open Science practices.

Here’s an approximate sketch of the podcast timing:

0 to 9.20: Dan and Steve describe how they came to be researchers in psychology

9.20 to 18.40: (The most interesting and important bit, imho.) How they came to understand the basic Open Science issues and their importance.

Includes around 13.50+ Steve recalling a talk I gave at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand in 2012. He says that the dance of the p values, in particular, was for him ‘revelatory’–and a prompt for his journey to Open Science.

18.45 to 30.20: The need to improve statistics education (hey, we hope ITNS can help!), and stories about stats ed and other signs that the shift to Open Science has a way to go.

30.20 to 38.50: Bayesian possibilities

38.50 to end: Current developments, priorities for further change. Wrap.

Thanks Dan and Steve for describing your own journeys to OS, stumbles and all. I hope your stories encourage many others in their own journeys.

Enjoy,
Geoff

P.S. Thanks to Pierre for the heads up about the podcast.