Writing
Be Specific
by Natalie Goldberg
Click here to read the article: “Be Specific”
Despite Public Pledges, Leading Scientific Journals Still Allow Statistical Misconduct and Refuse to Correct It
by Cory Doctorow
#research, #logos, #ethos, #systemanalysis, #cognitivebias, #reportinginformation, #science
A leading form of statistical malpractice in scientific studies is to retroactively comb through the data for “interesting” patterns; while such patterns may provide useful leads for future investigations, simply cherry-picking data that looks significant out of a study that has otherwise failed to prove out the researcher’s initial hypothesis can generate false — but plausible-seeming — conclusions.
To combat this practice, many journals have signed up to the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT), a set of principles requiring researchers to publicly register, in advance, what data they will collect, and how they will analyze it, and to prominently note when they change methodologies after the fact, so that readers can treat any conclusions from these changes with additional care. CONSORT-compliant journals also promise to accept, review, and expeditiously publish correction letters when the papers they publish are found to have breached CONSORT standards.
Evidence-based medicine ninja Ben Goldacre (previously) and colleagues reviewed every single paper published in five leading CONSORT-signed-up journals (New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, British Medical Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine) for six weeks, and, when they detected statistical practices that violated CONSORT principles, they informed the journals in writing and recorded and published their replies, and tabulated the findings, producing a league table of the journals that do the most to live up to their commitments to good statistical practice. They also analyzed the reasons that journals (and researchers) gave for not publishing corrections, and point out the wide gaps in the journal editors’ and researchers’ understanding of good statistical practice.
The results are very bad. While the vast majority (76%) of papers adhered to CONSORT standards, the out-of-compliance papers were very unlikely to be corrected, and when they were, it took a very long time (median: 99 days).
Two journals — JAMA and NEMJ — refused outright to publish a single correction (by contrast, the Lancet published 75% of the corrections letters).
All the underlying data, correspondence and other materials have been published on an excellent website [compare-trials.org/], and Goldacre and co have presented their findings in a paper [https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-019-3173-2] on Biomedcentral.
Before carrying out a clinical trial, all outcomes that will be measured (e.g. blood pressure after one year of treatment) should be pre-specified in a trial protocol, and on a clinical trial registry.
This is because if researchers measure lots of things, some of those things are likely to give a positive result by random chance (a false positive). A pre-specified outcome is much less likely to give a false-positive result.
Once the trial is complete, the trial report should then report all pre-specified outcomes. Where reported outcomes differ from those pre-specified, this must be declared in the report, along with an explanation of the timing and reason for the change. This ensures a fair picture of the trial results.
However, in reality, pre-specified outcomes are often left unreported, while outcomes that were not pre-specified are reported, without being declared as novel. This is an extremely common problem that distorts the evidence we use to make real-world clinical decisions.
COMPare: a prospective cohort study correcting and monitoring 58 misreported trials in real time [https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-019-3173-2] [Ben Goldacre, Henry Drysdale, Aaron Dale, Ioan Milosevic, Eirion Slade, Philip Hartley, Cicely Marston, Anna Powell-Smith, Carl Heneghan and Kamal R. Mahtani/Biomedcentral]
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Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist — the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of many books, most recently Radicalized and Walkaway, science fiction for adults, In Real Life, a graphic novel; Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, a book about earning a living in the Internet age, and Homeland, a YA sequel to Little Brother.
Despite Public Pledges, Leading Scientific Journals Still Allow Statistical Misconduct and Refuse to Correct It by Cory Doctorow appeared on Boing Boing on 15 February 2019 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully
by Stephen King
Click here to read the article: “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully”
How to Become a Writer Or, Have You Earned This Cliche?
by Lorrie Moore
Click here to read the article: “How to Become a Writer”
How To Write With Style
by Kurt Vonnegut
Click here to read this article: “How to Write with Style”
Shitty First Drafts
by Anne Lamott
Click here to read this article: “Shitty First Drafts”
Tlilli, Tlapalli / The Path of the Red and Black Ink
by Gloria Anzaldúa
Click here to read this article: “Tlilli, Tlapalli / The Path of the Red and Black Ink”
Writing in the Age of Distraction
by Cory Doctorow
#argument, #systemanalysis #cognitivebias #analysis #sharedvalues #advice #langu age #writinglife
We know that our readers are distracted and sometimes even overwhelmed by the myriad distractions that lie one click away on the Internet, but of course writers face the same glorious problem: the delirious world of information and communication and community that lurks behind your screen, one alt-tab away from your word-processor.
The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn’t help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from. Every now and again, when I see a new website, game, or service, I sense the tug of an attention black hole: a time-sink that is just waiting to fill my every discretionary moment with distraction. As a co-parenting new father who writes at least a book per year, half-a-dozen columns a month, ten or more blog posts a day, plus assorted novellas and stories and speeches, I know just how short time can be and how dangerous distraction is.
But the Internet has been very good to me. It’s informed my creativity and aesthetics, it’s benefited me professionally and personally, and for every moment it steals, it gives back a hundred delights. I’d no sooner give it up than I’d give up fiction or any other pleasurable vice.
I think I’ve managed to balance things out through a few simple techniques that I’ve been refining for years. I still sometimes feel frazzled and info-whelmed, but that’s rare. Most of the time, I’m on top of my workload and my muse. Here’s how I do it:
Short, regular work schedule
When I’m working on a story or novel, I set a modest daily goal — usually a page or two — and then I meet it every day, doing nothing else while I’m working on it. It’s not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it’s entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes. Writing a page every day gets me more than a novel per year — do the math — and there’s always 20 minutes to be found in a day, no matter what else is going on. Twenty minutes is a short enough interval that it can be claimed from a sleep or meal-break (though this shouldn’t become a habit). The secret is to do it every day, weekends included, to keep the momentum going, and to allow your thoughts to wander to your next day’s page between sessions. Try to find one or two vivid sensory details to work into the next page, or a bon mot, so that you’ve already got some material when you sit down at the keyboard.
Leave yourself a rough edge
When you hit your daily word-goal, stop. Stop even if you’re in the middle of a sentence. Especially if you’re in the middle of a sentence. That way, when you sit down at the keyboard the next day, your first five or ten words are already ordained, so that you get a little push before you begin your work. Knitters leave a bit of yarn sticking out of the day’s knitting so they know where to pick up the next day — they call it the “hint.” Potters leave a rough edge on the wet clay before they wrap it in plastic for the night — it’s hard to build on a smooth edge.
Don’t research
Researching isn’t writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don’t. Don’t give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day’s idyll through the web. Instead, do what journalists do: type “TK” where your fact should go, as in “The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite.” “TK” appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is “Atkins”) so a quick search through your document for “TK” will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards. And your editor and copyeditor will recognize it if you miss it and bring it to your attention.
Don’t be ceremonious
Forget advice about finding the right atmosphere to coax your muse into the room. Forget candles, music, silence, a good chair, a cigarette, or putting the kids to sleep. It’s nice to have all your physical needs met before you write, but if you convince yourself that you can only write in a perfect world, you compound the problem of finding 20 free minutes with the problem of finding the right environment at the same time. When the time is available, just put fingers to keyboard and write. You can put up with noise/silence/kids/discomfort/hunger for 20 minutes.
Kill your word-processor
Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, “correcting” your spelling, criticizing your sentence structure, and so on. The programmers who wrote your word processor type all day long, every day, and they have the power to buy or acquire any tool they can imagine for entering text into a computer. They don’t write their software with Word. They use a text-editor, like vi, Emacs, TextPad, BBEdit, Gedit, or any of a host of editors. These are some of the most venerable, reliable, powerful tools in the history of software (since they’re at the core of all other software) and they have almost no distracting features — but they do have powerful search-and-replace functions. Best of all, the humble .txt file can be read by practically every application on your computer, can be pasted directly into an email, and can’t transmit a virus.
Realtime communications tools are deadly
The biggest impediment to concentration is your computer’s ecosystem of interruption technologies: IM, email alerts, RSS alerts, Skype rings, etc. Anything that requires you to wait for a response, even subconsciously, occupies your attention. Anything that leaps up on your screen to announce something new, occupies your attention. The more you can train your friends and family to use email, message boards, and similar technologies that allow you to save up your conversation for planned sessions instead of demanding your attention right now helps you carve out your 20 minutes. By all means, schedule a chat — voice, text, or video — when it’s needed, but leaving your IM running is like sitting down to work after hanging a giant “DISTRACT ME” sign over your desk, one that shines brightly enough to be seen by the entire world.
I don’t claim to have invented these techniques, but they’re the ones that have made the 21st century a good one for me.
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Cory Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author and the co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. His website is craphound.com. This essay originally appeared in the online magazine Locus on 7 January 2009.
Writing in the Age of Distraction by Cory Doctorow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Attributions
88 Open Essays – A Reader for Students of Composition & Rhetoric, edited and compiled by Sarah Wangler & Tina Ulrich is licensed under CC BY 4.0
