People Agreeing With Me on the Internet
A couple of things I noticed lately that relate to a few of my posts/ideas.
§ One
Many "scientists should do x" conversations need to be reframed as"the culture of science needs to support x."
— Jacquelyn Gill (@JacquelynGill) May 16, 2013
This is a very nice way to phrase what I wrote about collective action problems in sharing code
§ Two
First of all, a really cool thing, Thomas J. Webb commented on his own paper with a blog update.
In the blog post, he writes (emphasis is mine):
With some trepidation, I opened up the file of R code I'd used for the original analysis. And got a pleasant surprise: it was readable! Largely this was because I submitted it as an appendix to our paper, and so had taken more care than usual to annotate it carefully. I think this demonstrates an under-apprecaiated virtue of sharing data and code: in preparing it such that it is comprehensible to others, it becomes much more useful to your future self. This point is nicely made in a new paper by Ethan White and colleagues on making using and reusing data easier.
Exactly: sharing code makes you write better code.
(hat tip to @mattjhodgkinson on twitter).