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
