Two cheers for evidence-based policy
Daniel Davies has a post at the Long and Short and a follow-up post at Crooked Timber about the implications for evidence-based policy of non-replicability in science.
Two quotes:
So the real ‘reproducibility crisis’ for evidence-based policy making would be: if you’re serious about basing policy on evidence, how much are you prepared to spend on research, and how long are you prepared to wait for the answers?
and
“We’ve got to do something“. Well, do we? And equally importantly, do we have to do something right now, rather than waiting quite a long time to get some reproducible evidence? I’ve written at length, several times, in the past, about the regrettable tendency of policymakers and their advisors to underestimate a number of costs; the physical deadweight cost of reorganisation, the stress placed on any organisation by radical change, and the option value of waiting.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »