Meta- and Open Science at AIMOS, Soon: Get Pumped

Bob recently tweeted: “I just registered for AIMOS, the meta- and open-science conference, Nov 30-Dec 3. https://aimosconference.com/register.html … Looking through the program, pretty easy to get pumped about AIMOS.”

Indeed! And not only because Bob is presenting.

See the full four-day program here, including brief abstract of many contributions. Pro tip: click the little RED LABEL below a session to see the time in your local time zone. (Each day runs roughly 7 or 8 am until early evening, Melbourne-Sydney time, which is UTC+11.)

Or you can click here to see the program (lacking some outlines, at least now) with times for your chosen time zone.

Bob’s Talk

Bob’s talk is Teaching Estimation First: New Tools For Better Inference in a session titled Improving inference – the role of statistics education. It’s at 8.30-10.00am on Wed 1 Dec (Day 2), my time (UTC +11), which is his 3.30-5.00pm on Tues 30 Nov (Chicago, UTC -6). He’ll be talking about the great advantages for students and teachers (not to mention researchers) of focussing on Effect Sizes, Estimation (CIs), and Meta-Analysis, and will demonstrate esci in jamovi.

Some Other Presentations

Brian Nosek, Dorothy Bishop, Julie Rohrer, Sarah de Rijcke…, among many other notable folks, are presenting. As usual for AIMOS, a wonderfully broad spread of disciplines is represented.

There are ample slots for Hackathons (actually help build stuff, formulate policy…) and unstructured discussions.

What’s Missing: Discussion of Creativity?

I hope it’s in there somewhere and I’ve just missed it. Decades ago I taught a unit to our third year psych undergraduates ‘Philosophy and Methodology in Psychology’. We used the lovely little book ‘What is this thing called science?‘ by Australian philosopher Alan Chalmers. I was struck by how focussed the philosophy of science discipline was on evaluating and critiquing theories. That’s fine, but hardly the whole story. Very little attention was paid to the creative process of generating new and perhaps better theories. Yet, surely, that’s where scientific insight and ingenuity is especially needed? Not to mention in the development of new techniques.

Psychology has a long tradition of studying creativity, of building models, and assessing ways to enhance creativity. Even back then in my unit we spent several weeks discussing studies by psychologists of the creative process in science, which used an impressively wide range of methodologies.

In the summary of his keynote address, Brian Nosek states that: “Metascience studies how the system [i.e., science] works, proposes how it should work, develops interventions to change how it works, and evaluates whether those interventions are having the desired effects.” The study of scientific creativity fits squarely in that definitional ambit. I’d love to see more of it in metascience research.

An email from the organisers a few days ago stated that 250+ folks have registered. Still plenty of room online. Get pumped!

Geoff