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In Defence of Small Effects: Why Any Signal in Language is Amazing

7 minute read

Published:

A few months ago, a paper of mine came back from peer review with a comment I have seen in various forms throughout my career. The reviewer acknowledged that the results were statistically significant, then added, almost as a dismissal: “but the effect sizes are small.” The implication was clear: if the variance explained is modest, the finding is modest. I want to push back on that, not defensively (well, perhaps a little defensively), but because I think this criticism, applied to research on the internal structure of language, fundamentally misunderstands what it would mean to find a large effect, and why finding any effect at all is pretty amazing.

The Lesson of Chelmsford

4 minute read

Published:

Before I knew him, my father was an addict. What follows is not a tragic backstory, nor a tale of overcoming difficulty to become a scientist. It is about what I learned later, as an adult, about the treatment he received, and about how that discovery has shaped how I think about science, evidence, and responsibility in my own research.

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