Rationally Speaking #182 - Spencer Greenberg on "How online research can be faster, better, and more useful"

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2017

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode features mathematician and social entrepreneur Spencer Greenberg, talking about how he's taking advantage of the Internet to improve the research process. Spencer and Julia explore topics such as: how the meaning of your research can change dramatically when you ask people *why* they gave the answers they did on your survey, how the sheer speed of online research can help us solve the p-hacking problem, and how to incentivize scientists to share their data and methods.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today's episode of Rationally Speaking is sponsored by Givewell, a nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding charities and publishing their full analysis to help donors decide where to give.
0:09.2	They do rigorous research to quantify how much good a given charity does, how many lives does it save, or how much does it reduce poverty per dollar donated?
0:17.4	You can read all about their research or just check out their short list of top recommended evidence-based charities to maximize the amount of good that your donations can do. It's free and available to everyone online. Check them out at give well.org. I also want to let you all know about this year's Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, being held in New City, June 29th through July 2nd.
0:38.3	I'll be there taping a live podcast, and there will be lots of other great guests, including
0:42.4	the skeptics guide to the universe, my former co-host, Massimo Piliucci, the amazing James
0:47.4	Randy, and keynote speaker Mike Massimino, former NASA astronaut.
0:51.9	Get your tickets at nexus.org, n-E-C-S-S-S-Oorg.
1:09.0	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
1:14.8	I'm your host, Julia Galeff, and with me is today's guest, my very good friend Spencer Greenberg.
1:19.9	Spencer is a mathematician with a PhD in Applied Math from NYU, where his work mainly focused on machine learning.
1:26.7	And now he is running a startup incubator called Sparkwave
1:30.2	that focuses on projects with significant positive social impact.
1:36.0	And what that means primarily is ways of doing social science research
1:41.8	that are faster and more rigorous and more directly socially
1:48.1	useful than is the norm. So his projects are the main project at Sparkwave through which he
1:56.1	runs this research and publishes modules using the research is clearerer Thinking. So you can check out his work
2:01.8	at clearerthinking.org. And that's what we're going to be talking about today, ways to improve
2:06.1	the way social science research is done and make it more useful to society using the internet and
2:10.1	or machine learning. Spencer, welcome to the show. Hi, Julia. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.
2:15.8	Why don't you start with some examples of the kinds of projects you're working on at SparkWave,
2:22.3	and specifically at Clearer Thinking?
2:24.3	Sure, very happy to do that.
	...

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