Simon Columbus

They say GOLD_07 made an error. I say GOLD_07 took her sweet time cruising around the hedge. Days get monotonous, always heading straight for the flowers and right back to the hive. GOLD_07 would like a more adventurous life, but the oscillations is all she can get away with.

I've also found obviously fraudulent papers in this journal. I see no reason to believe that they perform serious peer review at all.

And some fun for the end:

My sister, about 4yo, at a petting zoo: after intently watching the little goat kids, she turns around and says, "mum, mum, do you remember how tasty they are?"

Ostmann, actually. Damn.

Don't tell me that Ostwald is related to the spice manufacturer

📢 Call for papers!

We are organizing the 6th Early Career Workshop in Quantitative Political Economy on 14-15 May 2026 at King’s College London!

Keynote: Shanker Satyanath (NYU)

No fee, travel grants might become available!

Submit at: tinyurl.com/qpe2026

I bet 88% don't even open the email, already making you an outlier for having read it

Ja aber ich bin doch Theoretiker. Mit den Experimenten können sich andere die Hände dreckig machen.

Yes.

Die Psychologen streiten sich, ob psychische Erkrankungen Kategorien, Netzwerke, oder hierarchische latente Variablen sind und am Ende baut einer ein noch besseres Mikroskop und schwupps erscheint der Homunkulus, der irgendwo im Hippocampus die Strippen zieht. Das wär doch mal was.

Angesichts der Tatsache, dass das bestehende Paradigma der Psychologie (wenn man's so nennen will) auch irgendwann ersetzt werden wird, wäre es doch lustig, wenn einer der Crackpots am Ende recht hat.

This person has logged 137 'activities' on PURE. I am surprised that 'logging 137 activities on PURE' isn't one of them -- but I guess then she'd never get done updating.

Perhaps you received a mysterious noreply email asking you to evaluate some publications 'for novelty'. Looked kinda dubious? Yup, that's the one.

So what's up with this 'metascience novelty indicators challenge'? 🧵

Those two are fairly simple, though my B.Sc. diploma came with several appendices (but the one that says "language of instruction: English" was not sufficient for UKVI -- they wanted a separate letter from the university to confirm that I do, in fact, speak English).

Yikes.

Abstract: What motivates people to contribute to Wikipedia? Have you heard of Nupedia? Why do software engineers contribute code to open source projects? Why do technology companies release their large language models as "open weight"? Why has participation declined on Stack Overflow since the release of ChatGPT, but not on the programming subreddit? Why do some crowdfunding sites succeed while others fail? Underlying each of these questions is a more fundamental one: how can social scientists, computer and information scientists and practitioners use social science theories combined with information technology to increase contributions to public goods? To explore this question, my book, "Digital Public Goods", introduces (1) case studies from the technology sector to set up the problems; (2) social science theories of motivation, production, informational nudges, identity and teams, goal setting, and reputation, together with their field implementations using information technologies, as solutions; and (3) experimental evaluations of these theories and solutions. The goal of this book is to merge the latest research in the scholarly literature with successful practices used by digital platforms to provide scholars, students and practitioners with the intellectual tools they need to develop an understanding of digital public goods provision.

Cooperation Colloquium this week:

Yan Chen @yanchenl.bsky.social

Digital public goods: Crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and user-generated content

Date: February 13
Time: 15:00 UTC+1 (Vienna) / 9 ET (NYC)

Sign up: list.ku.dk/postorius/li...

Also, €200 for a print-out? My diploma is some fancy parchment with a wax seal and all, and I got that for free.

(I did actually collect my official diploma only four years after defending; it'd been with the beadle's office the entire time. Can't say I particularly missed it during those years.)

What the hell. I will never again complain about bureaucracy here.

Okay, I will.

But still. What the hell.

Millennials definitely do know (or at least the one's I'd interact with).

On the reliability and reproducibility of qualitative research With my collaborators, I am increasingly performing qualitative research. I find qualitative research projects a useful way to improve my un...

New blog post, inspired by the excellent recent qualitative paper by Makel and colleagues: On the reliability and reproducibility of qualitative research.

I reflect on how I will incorporate realist ontologies in my own qualitative research.

daniellakens.blogspot.com/2026/02/on-r...

There is a strange tendency in psychology in the face of shortcomings to call not for stronger evidence, but for weaker claims. Humility is a virtue, but it shouldn't become an excuse for lack of ambition.

New work by my amazing St Andrews colleague Amalia Bastos

📢 Call for Hidden Papers & Data on Ingroup Favoritism in Dictator Games

We look for unpublished and hard-to-access experimental studies for our meta-analysis!

Inclusion criteria: no deception, adults, manipulation of group membership of dictator game recipients.

All tips and data very welcome!

Garbage in, garbage... in?

Useful thread, though I hope somebody will create a spreadsheet (or Wikipedia entry, perhaps).

And then let's not forget the abusers and bullies who aren't famous enough to have received emails from Epstein.

What Do We Owe the Insufferable? When mental illness exhausts our emotional capacities

What Do We Owe the Insufferable?

When mental illness exhausts our emotional capacities

www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/what-do-we...

If you liked the Rensin piece discussed here, you might also enjoy Rensin's book The Complications, it's a similar mix of autobiography and science writing (or at least the 2/3 I listened to today are).

Abtract: Prosocial behavior is key to addressing global collective-action challenges. Two prominent tools to promote prosociality are incentives and the use of conditional preferences, yet existing evidence is mixed and largely based on WEIRD populations. We study how incentives and conditionality shape prosocial behavior across diverse cultural contexts, and how cultural characteristics moderate these effects. 15,600 participants from 42 countries completed an online experiment in which prosociality was measured as the donation of earned bonus points to international charities (e.g., UNICEF). In the incentive condition, donors received additional points worth half of the donated amount. In the conditionality treatment, participants could condition their donation on the share of other donors in their country. Preregistered analyses show that incentives increase prosocial behavior overall, but that their effectiveness varies across societies. Incentive effects are stronger in societies where the reputational costs of benefiting personally from prosocial acts are lower, that is, where incentivized donors are perceived as relatively more likable. Conditional giving also increases prosocial behavior, yet the effects are larger in societies characterized by a higher prevalence of conditional preferences and stronger generalized fairness concerns. Together, these findings highlight that the effectiveness of behavioral interventions depends systematically on cultural context, underscoring the importance of moving beyond WEIRD samples not only for advancing theory, but also for culturally tailored policy design.

First Cooperation Colloquium of the year:

Caroline Graf (University of Zürich):
Boosting prosocial behavior through incentives and conditional giving: Experimental evidence from 42 societies

Friday, January 30 | 15:00 UCT+1 Vienna / 9:00 ET NYC

Sign up: list.ku.dk/postorius/li...