Forensic Metascience, the GRIM test, and technology for checking papers | James Heathers

James Heathers is the Founder and Director of the Medical Evidence Project, a venture of The Center for Scientific Integrity. He aims to reduce medical harm and improve patient outcomes by identifying and publicizing errors and miscondcut in the medical literature. He uses forensic meta-analytical techniques to detect and deconstruct errors arising from low-quality science and fraudulent work in areas that involve large numbers of patients. CONTACT RANDY: metasciencematters@gmail.com EPISODE LINKS: The original GRIM test paper: http://www1.psych.purdue.edu/~gfranci... Machine-readable documents: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1... Chaos in the Brickyard: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s... Books: The Man Who Only Loved Numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man... The Emperor of All Maladies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emp... OUTLINE: 0:00 - Introduction 5:27 - How James has been the last couple days, and his radio voice 6:40 - Writing the first book on Forensic Metascience 10:47 - James' PhD work on heart rate variability 14:12 - Starting to work on metascience 18:40 - The GRIM test 26:40 - Programmatically scaling statistical checks 33:25 - Centering quantitative results and peripheralizing narrative in scientific papers 39:36 - AI for metascience, unearthing data underneath narrative 48:11 - Pursuing cases of misconduct 52:45 - Founding and Directing the Medical Evidence Project 56:10 - Incentives for positive data, post-publication review, challenging the binary of positive and negative data 1:05:41 - Advice and resources for listeners 1:12:40 - Optimism over pessimism 1:16:58 - Outro