I'm tired of the endless posts over Why We Sleep. The book attempts to cover hundreds of studies in an accessible way, and it largely succeeds. It's certainly fluffy at times (as are all popular books, by necessity), but if you didn't like its message, nitpicking at minor points doesn't refute the central thesis, and pretending it does is below the standards of even internet flame wars.
Like, this kind of exchange is exactly why academics try to avoid randos from the internet. They tend to seize on one point, declare victory, and refuse to change their minds. And when the academic doesn't grovel in compliance, they declare academia to be a failure. As far as I'm concerned, UC Berkeley responded perfectly.
Falsifying data is not being 'fluffy', it's academic misconduct. You might not personally care about this but academic norms exist for a reason. Universities are trusted institutions precisely because they follow these norms.
But" Why We Sleep" is not intended for an academic context, right?
I mean, obviously it wouldn't pass a "peer-review" analysis, but that is exactly what happens every time in science pop readings. Either we eliminate every science reading that is not strictly papers, or we accept some misinformation here and there.
No, but the post is largely a quote of a blog post (the guy who declared UC Berkeley a failure), which is in turn a followup on a different blog post.
I respect Andrew Gelman, but in this case I think he jumped to fit this into a pattern where it doesn't belong. I've looked into all the criticisms of Why We Sleep (which, again, covers hundreds of studies), and there's no p-hacking, there's no fraudulent data, there's no piles of studies retracted, and there's no crisis of replication. Literally the worst criticism is that one bar of a bar graph is removed, in a way that doesn't even change the point of the single sentence referring to it. There are simply better targets out there than sleep.
Yes, I copy-pasted that comment because this is my tenth time commenting on guzey's critiques, and I'm tired of writing new ones.
I still don't think that trimming a graph in a way that doesn't even change the conclusion of the sentence that refers to it (having less than 8 hours of sleep increases injury risk, and it's still true upon included the omitted bar, which barely even changes the average) is worth trashing an entire 300 page book. Academia isn't about following a set of rigid rules, as if it were some endless high school project. It's about finding the truth, and I've seen no evidence that this was harmed at all here.
I agree that academia isn't only about following a set of rigid rules, but following rigid rules is certainly partly what academia is about. For example, you must include all data. Omitting data is research misconduct.
> I still don't think that trimming a graph in a way that doesn't even change the conclusion of the sentence that refers to it … is worth trashing an entire 300 page book.
You're strawmanning. The trimming is simply the most obvious of many errors found in a single chapter. There are other known errors as well as (probably) unknown errors.
That said, I think we should be forgiving when people make mistakes as long as they own up to them. Neither the author, the publisher nor the university have demonstrated much of a commitment to research integrity in this case. That's my main complaint.
Like, this kind of exchange is exactly why academics try to avoid randos from the internet. They tend to seize on one point, declare victory, and refuse to change their minds. And when the academic doesn't grovel in compliance, they declare academia to be a failure. As far as I'm concerned, UC Berkeley responded perfectly.