J Andrés Delgado-Ron MD, MSc

Hey! I just wrote about that yesterday. People should read more Robert Merton. Defining how scientific questions are identified and what resources to use to answer one is as important as the scientific method itself.

How ironic, I keep reading on substack that we should ignore Philosophy.

Science Beyond the Scientific Method How Scientists Find Questions Worth Asking

How to estimate the effect of walking? Look at what happens when the city installs a new transit stop.

Want to monitor side effects of a drug? Survey a sentinel population where prescription rates are high.

These are *strategic research materials*
andresdelgadoron.substack.com/p/the-inesca...

Can we attach these papers when we send manuscripts for peer-review SVP

Science Beyond the Scientific Method How Scientists Find Questions Worth Asking

Science Beyond the Scientific Method
open.substack.com/pub/andresde...

You make me laugh more often than I expected

Why Scientific Practice Cannot Escape Philosophy: A Case Study open.substack.com/pub/andresde...

I tried using them, they wouldn't bulge.

This is my favorite telenovela, highly recommended arxiv.org/pdf/2602.15171

In 2015 the Open Science Collaboration (OSC) (Nosek et al 2015) published a highly influential paper which claimed that a large fraction of published results in the psychological sciences were not reproducible. In this article we review this claim from several points of view. We first offer an extended analysis of the methods used in that study. We show that the OSC methodology induces a bias that is able by itself to explain the discrepancy between the OSC estimates of reproducibility and other more optimistic estimates made by similar studies. The article also offers a more general literature review and discussion of reproducibility in experimental science. We argue, for both scientific and ethical reasons, that a considered balance of false positive and false negative rates is preferable to a single-minded concentration on false positive rates alone.

Overestimated effect sizes and underestimated power explain the Open Science Collaboration's (2015) low reproducibility rates.

Preprint by Almudevar & Almudevar (2026): arxiv.org/abs/2602.15697

If you imagine something, did it happen? Why absence of evidence ≠ evidence of absence

If you imagine something, did it happen?
Why absence of evidence ≠ evidence of absence
andresdelgadoron.substack.com/p/if-you-ima...

Secondary finding: CORR seems a better journal than JBJS based on the difference (or lack of) in the three included metrics.

Sleeping Beauty in the ICU How neuroscientists know if unconscious people are still 'there'

People often ask if #ChatGPT is conscious. In doing so, they overlook a bigger mystery that has eluded scientists during the last couple of decades:

Are humans in vegetative state conscious?

Maybe we can extrapolate a few lessons from one field to the other:

open.substack.com/pub/andresde...

A few days back I sent Mark a paper that could be broadly interpreted as "humans are thought experiments," given statistics are thought experiments too, meta-science would be thought experiments doing thought experiments about thought experiments, which sounds too much like panpsychism for my liking

This reminds me a lot of the sociological aspect of the free software movement (particularly regarding purism) and how the technocratic strategy in the discourse (i.e., breaking away from the state) ended up empowering elites as well.

Yes, this is not controversial, but the age restrictions are in place not only due to how harmful something is, but about the agency people are allowed due to how susceptible they are assumed to be.

But let us return to the problem from the beginning of this section, whether the truth condition is a necessary condition of knowledge. If it were, then, according to alethic absolutism, scientific knowledge could not evolve, change, or cease to exist because a true scientific theory cannot become either truer or false. At this point, a suggestion may arise (and does arise) that instead of truth, we should speak of degrees of truth or of approximation to truth (see, e.g., Ladyman, 2002, 232–233). The problem with this proposal is that an approximately true scientific theory is false, or as proponents of the approximation account of knowledge say, ‘approximations are not strictly true’ (Buckwalter & Turri, 2020, 94). Thus, if we consider the truth condition as a necessary condition of knowledge, approximations cannot be knowledge. Given that many scientific theories are approximations, knowledge would boil down to strictly true theories. However, knowledge understood in this way could neither evolve nor disappear, which is contrary to the fact that, at least in the realm of science, the evolution and disappearance of knowledge is an everyday affair. Therefore, the proposal to abandon the truth condition as a necessary condition of knowledge is at least worth considering.

Non-Factive Knowledge

"The proposal to abandon the truth condition as a necessary condition of knowledge is at least worth considering."

Open Access: doi.org/10.1007/s121...

Yes, you just used it.

should say 50% more

Florida man loses consciousness, wakes up speaking Swedish People who change languages, scientifically speaking

Florida man loses consciousness, wakes up speaking Swedish
open.substack.com/pub/andresde...

Mother?

I find it easier to share the post rather than hunting for the sources again, "bud." The other option is not giving any source, like the people you just complained about.

The Lessons Scientists Cannot Teach Without Their Worst Adversaries Why some philosophers think we should embrace pseudoscience, but not in the way you think

Asking people how they know and teach you is often more useful than correcting them. But correcting them is also useful. andresdelgadoron.substack.com/p/the-lesson...

Trying harder to be socially connected doesn’t always make men less lonely. We actually found the opposite.

Read the study: oss.jomh.org/files/articl...

#socialconnection #loneliness

Concerns regarding research integrity.

Very nice response to claims of UFO in pre-Sputnik plates
arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21946

I am not an astronomer, but valid concerns are measurement bias, selection bias, selective reporting, lack of confounder adjustment (regarding nuclear tests and UFOs)

Everybody's backyard John Tukey said that the best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone’s backyard. It’s a great quote. While it more obviously reflects the tendency of applied statistician...

Many thanks to @avrilkennan.bsky.social for the invitation to speak at the next hrci.ie board meeting later this week. The talk is on Impact by design: The importance of ensuring rigorous research methods right from the start.

Related thoughts here (ICYMI):
statsepi.substack.com/p/everybodys...

Check the whole thread

I am not sure I follow why this is surprising. Experiments are a form of causal inference. However, the field of econ relies a lot on "natural" experiments, which provide a better view of real-world effects.

Stop Formatting Before the Desk Reject: A Proposal for Staged Submissions Many flagship journals reject most manuscripts at the desk-review stage, with rates of 40–80% being common

Stop Formatting Before the Desk Reject

Proposal from @bnbakker.bsky.social and @jakobkas.bsky.social for a staged submission process when submitting manuscripts to academic journals.

#AcademicSky #PhDSky #AcWri