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from the if-everbody-knows,-why-isn't-it-known? dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
They say that hindsight is 20-20, and perhaps nowhere is that more true than in academic research.
"We've all had the experience of standing up to present a novel set of findings, often building on years of work, and having someone in the audience blurt out 'But we knew this already!,'" says Prof. Stefano DellaVigna, a behavioral economist with joint appointments in the Department of Economics and Berkeley Haas. "But in most of these cases, someone would have said the same thing had we found the opposite result. We're all 20-20, after the fact."
DellaVigna has a cure for this type of academic Monday morning quarterbacking: a prediction platform to capture the conventional wisdom before studies are run.
Along with colleagues Devin Pope of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business and Eva Vivalt of the Research School of Economics at Australian National University, he's launched a beta website that will allow researchers, PhD students, and even members of the general public to review proposed research projects and make predictions on the outcome.
[...]Their proposal, laid out in a new article in Science's Policy Forum, is part of a wave of efforts to improve the rigor and credibility of social science research. These reforms were sparked by the replication crisis -- the failure of reproduce the results of many published studies -- and include mass efforts to replicate studies as well as platforms for pre-registering research designs and hypotheses.
"We thought there was something important to be gained by having a record of what people believed before the results were known, and social scientists have never done that in a systematic way," says DellaVigna, who co-directs the Berkeley Initiative for Behavioral Economics and Finance. "This will not only help us better identify results that are truly surprising, but will also help improve experimental design and the accuracy of forecasts."
Journal Reference:
Stefano DellaVigna, Devin Pope, Eva Vivalt. Predict science to improve science. Science, 2019; 366 (6464): 428 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz1704
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 04 2019, @02:48AM (1 child)
Gamblers of the 'Vegas sort never make (manufacture) anything, except bets against each other (and against the "house"). This even applies at the level of playing the markets (a legal and possibly-sophisticated form of gambling).
I guess you could say that investing in a casino is also gambling by the developer that put up the money? However, in nearly every case (except Trump?) the casino owners don't seem to be making a very big gamble--they know their market and human nature going in, and likely have a pretty good idea that their investment will be profitable.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 04 2019, @03:48AM
I'm familiar with a variety of gamblers not of the Vegas sort. Things get very interesting when you allow for insiders to bet. Scandal isn't the only interesting thing you can get out of that. Another is funding your research by winning such bets.
No business model is immune to the problems of oversupply and competition. Being the only casino is a great deal. Being the tenth or twentieth casino in a city is not so great.