Stuart Ritchie
Psychologist and science writer; wrote Science Fictions on how research goes wrong, and writes the newsletter of the same name.
Stuart Ritchie did not write this page. What is this?
It collects the places they publish and what they have said there, each linked to the source. They have no account here. Is this you? Claim it, correct it, or ask us to remove it from ppll.
Where they publish
Newsletter Science Fictions His newsletter on bad science and how to spot it. Has a feed.
Recent
- Science Fictions links for November 2024 2 Dec 2024 Alzheimer's: still not cured
- Science Fictions links for October 2024 2 Nov 2024 Including a good scientific report about the bad scientific reports published in Scientific Reports
- Science Fictions links for September 2024 30 Sept 2024 Case dismissed! And many other stories of science gone wrong
Show 17 more
- Science Fictions links for August 2024 31 Aug 2024 "Honey, I spent three hundred million dollars on a fake scientific publisher" - and so much more
- Science Fictions links for July 2024 31 Jul 2024 The Marshmallow Test ROASTED; sneaky referencers CAUGHT RED-HANDED; plagiarists TOTALLY UNPUNISHED; and much more
- Science Fictions links for June 2024 30 Jun 2024 Lock them up! Fraudulent scientists, that is
- Science Fictions links for May 2024 31 May 2024 A delicious blend of honey, lithium, and magic mushrooms. And really quite a lot of scientific fraud
- Science Fictions links for April 2024 30 Apr 2024 Plagiarism at Harvard (again); retractions at Stanford (again); and a whole bunch of other stuff from the world of bad science
- Science Fictions links for March 2024 31 Mar 2024 An Open Science embarrassment; a slew of profiles of dodgy researchers; AI taking over scientific writing; and much more
- Science Fictions links for February 2024 29 Feb 2024 Yes, that well-endowed rat is here, but so is loads of other stuff
- Science Fictions links for January 2024 28 Jan 2024 Good and bad AIs in research; a scandal in Boston; science gangsters; loads of data on the screwedness of scientific publishing
- Science Fictions links for December 2023 23 Dec 2023 Ruin your Christmas by reading depressing stories about bad science!
- Science Fictions links for November 2023 19 Nov 2023 The most interesting, amusing, and depressing bad-science stuff on the internet
- Science writing update, October 2023 edition 13 Oct 2023 Ineffective drugs, amnesia about genetics, Dolly the sheep, and lies about vaping - plus a huge list of interesting links about bad science
- Science writing update, September 2023 edition 10 Sept 2023 Should we fear ultra-processed foods? Is BMI useless? Do strip clubs reduce sex crimes? And tons of links about bad science
- Science writing update, August 2023 edition 9 Aug 2023 Why I was right about the LK-99 "room-temperature superconductor" - plus all the usual updates and collected links
- Announcing my new podcast: The Studies Show 25 Jul 2023 In which Tom Chivers and I talk about a scientific controversy every week
- Science writing update, July 2023 edition 11 Jul 2023 Anti-anti-misinformation; diet drinks on trial; scientists should git gud at debating; vaccinating bats; real aliens; and vaping... IN MICE. Plus lots of interesting science-related links
- Science writing update, June 2023 edition 10 Jun 2023 Breastfeeding vs. infant formula; ultra-processed foods vs. 30 plants a week; AI vs. the human race; being lonely vs. smoking cigarettes. It's all here, plus a bunch of other interesting science links
- Science writing update, May 2023 edition 7 May 2023 Politicising Long COVID; Biden's cognitive abilities; the Hitler hoax; missing the point about the AI apocalypse; and how evil are the rich, really? Plus a collection of cool science links
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 10 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
The replication crisis is not an aberration; many of the things we believe are wrong
We know how easily these practices can distort the scientific record and give us false-positive, nonsense results.
Science isn't storytelling Said 27 Dec 2022
A scientific paper should not be built around a take-home message, because that invites cherry-picking and hiding the results that did not fit.
This, as was noted on Twitter, is a recipe for bad studies: it encourages the cherry-picking of results that went your way and the hiding of those that didn’t.
Science isn't storytelling Said 27 Dec 2022
Deciding your conclusion before you look at the data is one of the most reality-distorting things a scientist can do.
Having a pre-existing conclusion—a “take-home message”—in mind is one of the most reality-distorting influences on our thinking.
Science isn't storytelling Said 27 Dec 2022
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Compressing a piece of research into a journal paper's word count is itself a distortion of what was found.
The mere act of squeezing a complex process into a few thousand words—limited by a journal-imposed word count—is itself a distortion of reality.
Science isn't storytelling Said 27 Dec 2022
A scientific paper is a description of results, not a story.
A scientific paper isn’t supposed to be a story.
Science isn't storytelling Said 27 Dec 2022
Published effect sizes shrink as more studies are done, and that decline is what the replication crisis is made of.
The decline effect is the idea that scientific findings get smaller over time. That is, initial findings tend to report effect sizes that then crumble away—sometimes to nothing—with subsequent research.
How growth mindset shrank Said 11 Oct 2022
A hyped effect shrinking to a small but real one as the studies improve is a sign that a field is working, not failing.
Initial massive exaggeration of the importance of an effect gives way to more realistic, much smaller effects (which might still be useful) after people start doing better studies.
How growth mindset shrank Said 11 Oct 2022
A tiny, unreplicated study should not be publicised to millions of people as though it were settled.
More generally, you’ve got to wonder if Dweck considered whether the results of this very small, to my knowledge unreplicated, study were really ripe for publicising to literally millions of people
How growth mindset shrank Said 11 Oct 2022
Conflicts of interest in science may be unavoidable, and they are still a bad thing.
And that’s because, whereas this scientist is right that conflicts of interest of some kind are probably inevitable, conflicts are a bad thing.
Science is political - and that's a bad thing Said 29 May 2022
Scientists treat a political conflict of interest as something to be proud of, which they would never do with any other kind.
I’ve noticed that, instead of treating them like other kinds of conflicts—where you put your hands up and admit to them but then do your best to make sure they don’t influence your science—scientists sometimes revel in political conflicts.
Science is political - and that's a bad thing Said 29 May 2022
Beliefs others hold too
The replication crisis is not an aberration; many of the things we believe are wrong 2 hold this
We know how easily these practices can distort the scientific record and give us false-positive, nonsense results.
Science isn't storytelling Said 27 Dec 2022
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter, especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.