This is a quick guide on how to solve an annoying flaw in how RStudio works on Windows 10. By default, it places user-installed packages on OneDrive. Packages are code, not data, and should be installed locally, not on a network drive. …

CNN’s “fact-checking” effort is remarkable. Today, they purported to fact check President Trump’s claim that our nuclear arsenal is “tired”, meaning old. They said that “experts reject that characterization of the US nuclear arsenal”. This surprised me because I thought everyone knew that our arsenal was old, because it is…

There are surprising errors in a recent New Republic article titled “Most Veterans Say America’s Wars Are a Waste. No One’s Listening to Them.” The errors are simple and somewhat glaring. Neither the New Republic nor author Adam Weinstein have responded to two notifications of the errors. …

When you do a text search on Amazon, by default you’ll usually get suboptimal results. There’s an alternative, much better results page. In this example, we’ll search for fire extinguishers. Here’s the default results page: Notice the Fire Extinguishers section I’ve marked with an arrow on the left pane. You’ll…

I’m a social psychologist with a growing interest in how political ideologies compromise fact-checking. Today I’m going to review a very unusual example. There are certain epistemological structures and types of bias that recur in a lot of the fact-checking we've seen so far, but this example doesn't fit those…

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said that she planned to “run train on the progressive agenda”. The comment made no sense given what it means to “run train” on someone, and it was alarming given, again, what it means to run train on someone. If you don’t know what run train…

This is a quick note on altered data in Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac (2013). This was a false, garbage study published by the journal Psychological Science. Take a look at these columns below. They’re survey item responses on a 1–4 scale, from the dataset Lewandowsky posted at Bristol:

The US government recently brought a fraud case (PDF) against Monex Precious Metals. This reminded me that I’ve wanted to write this quick essay for a long time, with useful tips on how to buy precious metals as cheaply as possible. So many people overpay. It especially bothers me when…

Disqus: Logging into the Disqus homepage via Twitter does not work. Nothing happens. (The reason you would log into the Disqus homepage is to see all your comment activity and replies in one place.) …