An absolutely irreproducible conversation with Nicole Nelson Artwork

How do you know?

It’s ironic that in an era of big data, truth sometimes seems more elusive than ever. To make better choices about how to manage our lives, our work, and our environment, we need to use the best possible information to guide us. But even with great data, humans don’t always make great choices- we misinterpret, we oversimplify, we fail to see fallacies in logic or flaws in the data itself- and even our most rational examinations of the numbers are fundamentally human, shaped by culture, prior experience, and our internal biases.In this podcast, we explore the process of how data becomes information, information becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes belief- and how, in turn, belief shapes the way we take and interpret data. From young learners to practicing scientists, the ways we incorporate information into our worldview is affected by our experiences. We combine social and data science perspectives with the study of how humans learn, in order to examine not just what we know, but how we know it.

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How do you know?

An absolutely irreproducible conversation with Nicole Nelson

October 17, 2022 • Christie Bahlai

What happens when we can't reproduce our work- or someone else's? What does it mean about the science- and ourselves?

Today on the podcast, we're talking to Nicole C. Nelson, an associate professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an affiliate of the Holtz Center of Sciences and Technology Studies.

Nicole's work examines scientist's assumptions about the natural world and how these assumptions shape scientific practice. In her award-winning book, Model Behavior, she examines how animal behavior geneticists' beliefs about their systems shape the research with most models.

Her work has been applied to clinical practice in oncology, working with researchers as they applied novel genomic technologies to chemotherapy resistant cancers. She's currently studying the scientific reproducibility crisis.

Here's a link to one of the studies on graduate students and their responses to irreproducibility that she describes in our conversation.

A complete transcript of the episode is available here.