Winner's curse

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Those who follow LL's posts on the public presentation of science may be interested in a recent essay by Neal Young, John Ioannidis, and Omar Al-Ubaydli , discussed in the Economist under the title "Publish and be wrong".

The original essay is Neal S. Young, John Ioannidis, Omar Al-Ubaydli, "Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science", PLoS Medicine.

In the past, Ioannidis has explained "Why most published research findings are false". And that's before the press gets hold of them.

This work is about the economics, sociology, and psychology of the processes that tend to lead to falsehood — or more charitably, that tend to promote selection, exaggeration, and over-interpretation. But there's a linguistic side as well, which is partly terminological and partly rhetorical, as we've tried to document over the years.



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