Science Friday's "Spot the real hypothesis"

Annie Minoff delves into the sins of ad hoc hypotheses using several examples from evolutionary science (including evolutionary psychology). I think this is a fun way to introduce this issue in science and explain WHY a hypothesis is important for good research.

This article provides three ways of conveying that ad hoc hypotheses are bad science.

1) This video of a speaker lecturing about absurd logic behind ad hoc testing (here, evolutionary explanations for the mid-life "spare tire" that many men struggle with).

NOTE: This video is from an annual event at MIT, BAHFest (Bad Ad Hoc Fest) if you want more bad ad hoc hypotheses to share with students.

2) A quiz in which you need to guess which of the ad hoc explanations for an evolutionary finding is the real explanation.

3) A more serious reading to accompany this video is Kerr's HARKing: Hypothesizing after results are known (1998), a comprehensive take down of this practice.

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr. Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales. 2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables. So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes: 1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales. 3) Daily check-in with your students. 1. Teach your students the basics...

Leo DiCaprio Romantic Age Gap Data: UPDATE

Does anyone else teach correlation and regression together at the end of the semester? Here is a treat for you: Updated data on Leonardo DiCaprio, his age, and his romantic partner's age when they started dating. A few years ago, there was a dust-up when a clever Redditor r/TrustLittleBrother realized that DiCaprio had never dated anyone over 25. I blogged about this when it happened. But the old data was from 2022. Inspired by this sleuthing, I created a wee data set, including up-to-date information on his current relationship with Vittoria Ceretti, so your students can suss out the patterns that exist in this data.

Logical Fallacy Ref Meme

So, I love me some good statsy memes. They make a brief, important point that sticks in the heads of students. I've recently learned of the Logical Fallacy Ref meme. Here are a couple that apply to stats class:

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