Unsystematic Likes #6

Interesting pieces from around the web

With the vast bulk of my discipline at a conference for the Labor Day weekend, here’s some non-political science content

Can Historians Repeat Themselves?

“Age of Invention: Does History have a Replication Crisis?”, Age of Invention, Anton Howes

Historical myths, often based on mere misunderstanding, but occasionally on bias or fraud, spread like wildfire. People just love to share unusual and interesting facts, and history is replete with things that are both unusual and true. So much that is surprising or shocking has happened, that it can take only years or decades of familiarity with a particular niche of history in order to smell a rat. Not only do myths spread rapidly, but they survive — far longer, I suspect, than in scientific fields.

One enduring trope in the battles over academic prestige among STEM, humanities, and social science types—all of which are really battles for funding or survival—concerns how non-STEM fields are constantly at pains to show that they impart critical thinking and skills. This happens to be true. But it is not clear that they are teaching only those skills, as opposed to the kind of glib bluster that PPE degrees in the UK promote, and it is very far from clear that there’s sufficient systematic attention given to how to actually impart those skills, rather than hoping that they’re picked up by osmosis. Howes’s essay discusses what the results of non-systematic review and trust-based systems look like outside of disciplines where there are (at least some) rewards for replication and falsification.

Trump 2, Boogaloo

“The World is Contemplating a Second Trump Administration”, The Wall Street Journal, Stacy Meichtry, Austin Ramzy, and Bojan Pancevski

Trump has also threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a move that his former national security adviser John Bolton recently described as a near certainty if he is elected again.

Some governments are moving to lock in military assistance to Ukraine to strengthen security there in case a newly elected Trump scales back U.S. support. Members of the Group of Seven wealthy nations are trying to reach bilateral agreements with Kyiv to provide weapons that meet NATO standards.

“There’s a strong possibility Trump might be re-elected,” said Benjamin Haddad, a French lawmaker from President Emmanuel Macron’s party. “It forces us Europeans to read the writing on the wall and take more responsibility.”

The 2020 election was decided by a much narrower margin in the electoral college-relevant states than I think has really sunk into a lot of people’s heads. Biden’s margin was about 50,000 votes combined in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. The popular vote-electoral college vote split matters a lot. If I were a non-American head of government, I’d also be thinking about how to make my policy robust against the presidential candidate who’s currently leading/tied in the polls. But maybe I’d also begin thinking about how to get some wins for the United States and Biden personally.

Reverse Psychology

“I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is”, Experimental History, Adam Mastroianni

So if you hear that 60% of papers in your field don’t replicate, shouldn't you care a lot about which ones? Why didn't my colleagues and I immediately open up that paper's supplement, click on the 100 links, and check whether any of our most beloved findings died? The answer has to be, “We just didn't think it was an important thing to do.” We heard about the plane crash and we didn't even bother to check the list of casualties. What a damning indictment of our field!

A sprawling, rollicking essay here, and one that asks a shockingly provocative question: if an “important” paper is retracted and nobody cares, was it ever important after all? Political science and IR seem less susceptible to this particular kind of Freakonomics/Psychology Today gamesmanship (our big errors tend to be theoretical), but there’s also a real reason to begin asking similar questions. If we lost our top 100 articles, would we have to revise any textbooks? If not, then what are we doing?