“Don’t Interfere with my Art”: On the Disputed Role of Preregistration in Exploratory Model Building

Recently the 59th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in New Orleans played host to an interesting series of talks on how statistical methods should interact with the practice of science. Some speakers discussed exploratory model building, suggesting that this activity may not benefit much, if any at all, from preregistration. On the Twitterverse, reports of these talks provoked an…

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Transparency and The Need for Short Sentences

Recently I came across an article by Morton Ann Gernsbacher, entitled “Writing empirical articles: Transparency, reproducibility, clarity, and memorability” (preprint). The author covers a lot of ground and makes a series of good points. Also, as one would hope and expect, the article itself is a joy to read. Here is a fragment from the section “Recommendations for Clarity” —…

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