Fiona Fidler | Will this time be different?

• May 14, 2019
• Speaker: Fiona Fidler
  
• Topic: Will This Time Be Different?
  

The last decade has seen the emergence of a new scientific reform in the social and life sciences, lately known as the Credibility Revolution. The movement is best understood as a broad response to the ‘replication crisis’ in these sciences. By many measures, it is successfully compelling social and culture change within those sciences. This success sits in stark contrast to an earlier, related statistical reform movement. The earlier reform movement was primarily concerned with decreasing overreliance and misuse of Null Hypothesis Significance Testing. The Credibility Revolution and the Statistical Reform movement identify many similar problems and share several common aims, and yet the former appears effective, where the latter has, after six decades, had an almost imperceptible impact on practice. This first half of this talk outlines the history of early statistical reform efforts and poses preliminary answers to the question “why now, and not then?”. The second half of the talk looks at a particular case study of the impact of the current movement, namely the new DARPA SCORE project, which represents a substantial investment in taking stock of the current social science evidence base.