What do you have against Matt Walker?
Nothing, really. He’s no worse than most researchers.
Why do you have a website patterned after Fire Joe Morgan?
Because I liked Fire Joe Morgan, a lot, and although I’m not as clever or skilled as any of their writers, it’s a model we should see more often. Besides, I think that sabermetrics is basically how science should be done: very open and transparent.
Academic research cannot be trusted because of widespread fraud, manipulation, cheating, deception, researcher degrees of freedom, questionable research practices, etc. Actually, think that about sums it up; don’t need the etc.
I care about information, research, and knowledge, and I want it to be good. I don’t want it to be bad. Good research has been done before, and will be done again. I want more of that, and less of the bad.
Academics struggle from the inside to criticize anyone, for fear of reprisal or reputational harm. Many of the cheats and manipulators are in positions of power. Many don’t want things to change because academia is a career like anything else, and so it’s about personal advancement. Certainly university administrators, grant funders, trustees, and anyone else in positions of high-level authority, don’t want to do the serious work of constructing multidisciplinary, purposeful, collaborative science.
C.f. Andrew Gelman, who I’ll quote often on this site, because he’s right about almost everything.
I’m never going to be an academic, so I can shout into the void.
Just because science is “closed” doesn’t mean it’s bad or done wrong.
But you can’t really know, can you?
There’s no excuse nowadays for any of science to be closed. I doubt there ever really was an excuse, but now, no, there isn’t. Science is simple at its heart: you drop a rock and measure how long it took for it to fall. You tell people where you dropped it from and how long it took to drop, and how much the rock weighed. Then you tell other people. Then they try it.
You don’t tell people that an object dropped at a certain rate, in fact, it reversed course and flew up in the air, what a surprise–and then call them bad names when they request your notes.
If we want to build a credible, cumulative knowledge base, then any field purporting to present research must practice open science. Open science can also be done badly and data can still be faked, but it’s a lot harder to pull this off.
Who are you?
If you know how the Internet works, you can find out who I am pretty easily.