Interesting interview from Vox with the author of "Why most published research findings are false" (and many other articles), including personal tidbits:
He even has a mythical origin story. He was raised in Greece, the home of Pythagoras and Euclid, by physician-researchers who instilled in him a love of mathematics. By seven, he quantified his affection for family members with a "love numbers" system. ("My mother was getting 1,024.42," he said. "My grandmother, 173.73.")
and thoughts on how to improve science:
Recently there’s increasing emphasis on trying to have post-publication review. Once a paper is published, you can comment on it, raise questions or concerns. But most of these efforts don’t have an incentive structure in place that would help them take off. There’s also no incentive for scientists or other stakeholders to make a very thorough and critical review of a study, to try to reproduce it, or to probe systematically and spend real effort on re-analysis. We need to find ways people would be rewarded for this type of reproducibility or bias checks.
