@devezer.bsky.social, thank you

That’s totally fair. There are a range of equally valid ways of addressing these issues

If it’s possible to get such a range of results with analyses that all pass peer review, it would be possible to present a carefully chosen selection of results to be sensationalistic or extra publishable. Preregistration directly addresses that issue

As you say, it’s tricky to convey the whole context in a short media article. This is in the context of @elliotgould.bsky.social’s phd thesis about researcher degrees of freedom. This is an empirical demonstration of how much freedom there might be to find particularly publishable results. 1/

I think it’s easy and understandable to get immersed in your research context -empiricists reading empirical articles, theorists reading theoretical articles. The concerns raised in those literatures become what those people consider. I think deliberate cross pollination is important to solve that

Yeah, it’s really hard to distill a complicated and nuanced discussion into a news piece that serve its purpose for the ecological audience as well as meta-researchers. I feel that the news article struck a nice balance but the format is limited

I said this because when I present these results people want to know which is the right answer and wish we’d simulated an answer so we could say how right different models were. There isn’t a single right answer. Thinking about right and wrong misses the point

For those that already recognise this our findings might be banal. We hope that our results can provide grist for these people to make that argument. We also hope that our results will encourage a more nuanced view of ecological inference and interpretation more generally

We work in a context where differences in findings between studies are attributed almost exclusively to differences in the environmental conditions or ecology of the species. We believe it’s important to draw attention to the fact that different analytic choices also have a substantial impact

Feel free to read our article for a full discussion of how we feel our results contribute to the way people conduct and interpret findings in ecology. ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v....