Category: Data Analysis

Upon Reflection, Ep. 10: Great Minds Do Not Think Alike

This time I read my 2022 paper in Review of Philosophy and Psychology titled, “Great Minds Do Not Think Alike: Philosophers’ Views Predicted by Reflection, Education, Personality, and Other Demographic Differences“. As the title suggests, various psychological factors predicted variance in philosophers’ answers to classic philosophical questions. This raises questions about how psychological and demographic differences can explain philosophical differences. There are also implications for scientific psychologists as well as academic philosophers.

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5 Ways To Overcome Junk Data From mTurk (and online surveys more generally)

The data quality on Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) has suffered for years now (Byrd, 2023; Chandler & Paolacci, 2017; Moss & Litman, 2018; Chmielewski & Kucker, 2019; Ahler et al., 2020; Kennedy et al., 2020; MacInnis et al., 2020). There are a few ways to protect online survey data quality. In this post, I will briefly cover five strategies for weeding out junk data in online research (not just via mTurk), from easiest to hardest.

Continue reading 5 Ways To Overcome Junk Data From mTurk (and online surveys more generally)

What good is reflective reasoning?


Philosophers and cognitive scientists tend to think that reflective reasoning will improve our judgments and decisions. The idea reflection will lead us to test our judgments by “looking for their coherence with our beliefs about similar cases and our beliefs about a broader range of …issues” a la reflective equilibrium. This sounds intuitively plausible. But is it true? In this post I briefly present some research suggesting that reflective reasoning often, but does not always improve our judgments and decisions.  Continue reading What good is reflective reasoning?

Two Years In The Life Of A Grad Student: Time Logging Data

I have had some side gigs in graduate school that involved creating invoices for hourly work—web development, copyediting, research assistance, etc. I used Toggl to log my time. At some point, I realized that I could log all of my work time—not just the billable time. So in 2018 and 2019, I logged all of my work time. In this post, I will summarize the 2018 and 2019 data and mention some take-aways for 2020.

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The Minds Online Conference Is Starting!


From September 5 to September 30, there is an exciting, free, online conference about the philosophy and science of mind: the (second annual) Minds Online conference! Loads of wonderful scholars are sharing and commenting on each other’s research — and you can access and participate in all of it!

Here are a few things to note for those who are new to online conferences.

  • Sessions: There are four sessions, each with a different topic and its own keynote.
  • Timeline: Each session lasts one week. (So the conference lasts four weeks).
  • Participating: You can read papers starting the weekend before their session. And you you can comment on papers on Monday through Friday of their session.

So head on over and enjoy the wonder that is conferencing from the comfort of your home, office, favorite coffee shop, etc.

Here’s the program: http://mindsonline.philosophyofbrains.com/minds-online-2016-program/

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Fact-checking is not enough: We need argument-checking


I see more fact-checking on Facebook than I used to. While I’m glad to see fact-checking catching on, fact-checking isn’t enough â€” or so I’ll argue in this post.

1. Fact-checking: The problem

Let’s say that you and I agree on all the facts. Now let’s say that we start arguing. Will we agree? Will we even argue well? Not necessarily!

After all, we can reason badly even if we agree on the facts. Specifically, we can jump to conclusions that don’t follow from the facts. So fact-checking our argument(s) won’t necessarily fix all the problems with our argument(s).

2. Bad Arguments

Consider some of the claims that people make:

University and Department Rankings: A Custom Solution

Lots of people pay close attention to the US News National University Rankings. But those rankings assume all users have the same priorities. Moreover, some people want field-specific rankings that compare universities at the department level (e.g., the Philosophy department at Harvard vs. the Philosophy department at MIT). Ranking-obsessed philosophers have had the Philosophical Gourmet Report to rank philosophy Ph.D. programs since at least 1996—1989 if you count the pre-internet version. For many reasons, academic philosophers are becoming more vocal about their criticism of these philosophy rankings (e.g., Bruya 2015, De Cruz 2016 2018). In this post, I will propose a (new?) custom ranking system. This system will address common complaints about philosophy’s existing ranking system: a custom ranking system will be more versatile, up-to-date, and generalizable.

1.  THE COMPLAINTS

The complaints about the rankings are voluminous — what else would you expect from philosophers? In lieu of an outline of every blog post and every public statement, I provide a list of major themes that fall into three different categories: the practice of ranking, the current process of ranking, and the current leadership of the ranking.

Complaints About Ranking

  1. Rankings might misrepresent the magnitude of the differences between departments.
  2. Rankings might indicate a false sense of hierarchy and/or prestige.
  3. Ordinal lists just aren’t that informative.

Complaints About Process

Continue reading University and Department Rankings: A Custom Solution