EA - Let's Fund: Better Science impact evaluation. Registered Reports now available in Nature by Hauke Hillebrandt

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Let's Fund: Better Science impact evaluation. Registered Reports now available in Nature, published by Hauke Hillebrandt on February 26, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Cross-posted from my blog - inspired by the recent call for more monitoring and evaluationHi, it's Hauke, the founder of Let's Fund. We research pressing problems, like climate change or the replication crisis in science, and then crowdfund for particularly effective policy solutions.Ages ago, you signed up to my newsletter. Now I've evaluated the $1M+ in grants you donated, and they had a big impact. Below I present the Better Science / Registered Report campaign evaluation, but stay tuned for the climate policy campaign impact evaluation (spoiler: clean energy R&D increased by billions of dollars).Let's Fund: Better ScienceChris Chambers giving a talk on Registered ReportsWe crowdfunded ~$80k for Prof. Chambers to promote Registered Reports, a new publication format, where research is peer-reviewed before the results are known. This fundamentally changes the way research is done across all scientific fields. For instance, one recent Registered Report studied COVID patients undergoing ventilation1 (but there are examples in other areas including climate science,2 development economics,3 biosecurity, 4 farm animal welfare,5 etc.).Registered Reports have higher quality than normal publications,6 because theymake science more theory-driven, open and transparentfind methodological weaknesses and also potential biosafety failures of dangerous dual-use research prior to publication (e.g. gain of function research)7get more papers published that fail to confirm the original hypothesisincrease the credibility of non-randomized natural experiments using observational dataIf Registered Reports become widely adopted, it might lead to a paradigm shift and better science. 300+ journals have already adapted Registered Reports. And just last week Nature, the most prestigious academic journal, adopted it:Chris Chambers on Twitter: "10 years after we created Registered Reports, the thing critics told us would never happen has happened: @Nature is offering them Congratulations @Magda_Skipper & team. The @RegReports initiative just went up a gear and we are one step closer to eradicating publication bias.This is big and Registered Reports might soon become the gold standard.Why? Imagine you’re a scientist with a good idea for an experiment with high value of information (think: a simple cure for depression). If that has a low chance of working out (say 1%), then previously you had little incentive to run it.Now, if your idea is really good, and based on strong theory, Registered Reports derisks running the experiment. You can first submit the idea and methodology to Nature and the reviewers might say: ‘This idea is nuts, but we agree there’s a small chance it might work and really interested in this works. If you run the experiment, we’ll publish this independent of results!’ Now you can go ahead spend a lot of effort on running the experiment, because even if it doesn’t work, you still get a Nature paper (which you wouldn’t with null results).This will lead to more high risk, high reward research (share this post or the tweet with academics! They might thank you for the Nature publication).Many people were integral to this progress, but I think Chambers, the co-inventor and prime proponent of Registered Reports deserves special credit. In turn he credited:Chris Chambers @chrisdc77: 'You. That's right. Some of the most useful and flexible funding I've received has been donated by hundreds of generous members of public (& small orgs) via our @LetsFundOrg-supported crowd sourcing fund'You may feel smug.If you want to make a bigger donation (>$1k), click here. There are proposals to improve Regis...