Q-and-A

SORTEE member voices: Dylan Gomes

[SORTEE Member Voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Dylan Gomes.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Postdoctoral Researcher.
 

Research and/or work interests: I am broadly interested in the wildlife conservation (especially human-impacts to wildlife), statistical methods (particularly LMM/GLMM), and the cultural and institutional practices in science (especially regarding sharing data and code, statistical/methodological choices, peer-review, and the hierarchical nature of research institutions and how this hierarchy influences author lists and workloads).
 

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SORTEE member voices: Gerald Carter

[SORTEE Member Voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Gerald Carter.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Assistant Professor.
 

Research and/or work interests: animal behavior, cooperation, communication, cognition, reciprocity, bats.
 

What do you see as the greatest challenge facing the open / reliable / transparent science movement?:
I think the greatest challenge for open, reliable, and transparent science is changing actual human behavior rather than just identifying what everyone should do. Scientists are less rational and altruistic than we think we are, and many of the traditional academic incentives are completely misaligned against the incentives for good science. For example, the academic goal of being influential does not ensure the scientific goal of being correct. We need academic incentive structures that both align with our higher collective scientific goals and also recognize and exploit the lower self-centered human goals of scientists. For example, science converges on truths by pitting our biased ideas against each other, demanding that we use evidence and logic to convince our worst critics, and forcing us to change our ideas when presented with counter-evidence. This process requires that we are rewarded for criticizing popular ideas, admitting to errors, and being uncertain and careful. Yet, our current academic system mainly rewards the opposite: being agreeable, seeking popularity and conformity, hiding mistakes, and being overconfident. How do we change academia to incentivize different behavior? That’s the challenge as I see it.  

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SORTEE member voices: Melina de Souza Leite

[SORTEE Member Voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Melina de Souza Leite.
 

Date: 2 July 2021.
 

Position: PhD Candidate.
 

Research and/or work interests: Community Ecology, Landscape Ecology, Demography.
 

What’s an open science practice or topic that you’ve changed your views on within the last few years? Why?:
I’ve learned a lot about the importance of standardized data management protocols (at least in the same project!), especially for metadata. Messy data, even if available in open repositories, don’t help much! :).  

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SORTEE member voices: Kaitlin Kimmel

[SORTEE Member Voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Kaitlin Kimmel.
 

Date: 2 July 2021.
 

Position: Postdoc.
 

Research and/or work interests: Causes and consequences of biodiversity changes; functional traits; causal inference.
 

What strategies/approaches do you think are most likely to lead to a research culture change?:
I think that adapting pre-registration and the registered report format will drastically improve our science. I know that we often do not distinguish between exploratory and confirmatory analyses - we usually just write the paper that we think will be the most interesting at the expense of being more transparent. I also think it is a good practice to think about what questions we really want to answer before starting an analysis.
 

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