Astral Codex Ten

ClearerThinking.org

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ClearerThinking.org

Article

ClearerThinking.org is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between December 28, 2021 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “is the founder of ClearerThinking.org (which offers free digital tools related to rationality, decision-making and happiness)”; “Spencer Greenberg and his ClearerThinking.org org want to attempt to replicate psychology papers”; “a project of ClearerThinking.org”. It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, African Swine Fever, Alice Evans.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: December 28, 2021
  • Last seen: June 18, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
Spencer Greenberg, $40,000, as seed money for his project to produce rapid replications of high-impact social science papers. Right now, when a new social science paper comes out, we often have to wait as long as several months to discover that it was false. Spencer and his team dream of a world where we can learn that almost immediately, soon enough that it's within the same news cycle and the journals involved feel kind of bad about it. This money will sponsor a pilot, after which he’ll be seeking additional funding - if you think you can help, you can reach him here. Spencer's been involved in rationality and EA about as long as either has existed, blogs at Optimize Everything, is the founder of ClearerThinking.org (which offers free digital tools related to rationality, decision-making and happiness) and runs the Clearer Thinking podcast, with guests including Daniel Kahneman, Tyler Cowen, and Sam Bankman-Fried.
Inline links: here, Optimize Everything, ClearerThinking.org, Clearer Thinking podcast, Daniel Kahneman, Tyler Cowen, Sam Bankman-Fried
ACX Grants: Project Updates
November 04, 2022 · Original source
15: Rapid Replications Of New Psychology Papers (6/10) Spencer Greenberg and his ClearerThinking.org org want to attempt to replicate psychology papers shortly after they are published in the most prestigious journals to help improve scientific incentives. They say they’ve finished their first three replications and are working on launching the site (at which point those first three will become publicly available and they’ll keep working on others). ETA two months or so.
Inline links: ClearerThinking.org
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
At Transparent Replications (https://replications.clearerthinking.org), a project of ClearerThinking.org, we conduct careful replications of new papers in top psychology journals with the goals of improving the reliability of academic psychology and helping the field produce more value for the world. Additionally, we completed a survey of 100 academic psychologists to understand their views on the field, what they believe has improved, what still needs to improve, and what actions would improve it. By conducting this work, we've developed new ideas that we believe are important for improving the field, and that apply in other scientific disciplines as well. In particular:
Inline links: https://replications.clearerthinking.org, ClearerThinking.org
(1) Importance Hacking We believe that "Importance Hacking" is the next frontier for improving social science. This is a term we coined to describe something we observed again and again in our replications, whereby studies with little to no value get published in top journals due to the use of strategies that lead reviewers to misinterpret the work. More precisely, Importance Hacking occurs when a researcher gets a result that is actually not interesting, not important, and not valuable, but writes about it in such a way that reviewers are convinced it is interesting, important, and/or valuable so that it gets published. Despite it not having a name until we coined one for it (though it's related to some more general terms like "hype"), in our survey of academic psychologists, they rated Importance Hacking as a problem that is at as important as p-hacking (which is widely regarded as the cause of the replication crises) by one measure, and even MORE important than p-hacking by a second measure. In our replication work, we also have found that Importance Hacking is a bigger problem now than p-hacking (whereas we believe that 15 years ago we would have found p-hacking to be far more common than we're finding now). For more about Importance Hacking, see: https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/importance-hacking-a-major-yet-rarely-discussed-problem-in-science
Inline links: https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/importance-hacking-a-major-yet-rarely-discussed-problem-in-science
(2) Simplest Valid Analysis Through our replication work, we've come to realize that top journals often publish papers that only do complex analyses when much simpler analyses could have been done, which would have been a valid way to analyze the results. When this happens during our replications, we do the analysis both ways, and we've found that doing so is a fruitful way to uncover serious problems in research that reviewers missed. Therefore, our general guidance is that reviewers should require that the Simplest Valid Analysis be reported in papers, even when a more complex analysis is conducted. And our survey of academic psychologists shows that most of them agree with us on this recommendation, despite this not being standard practice. For more about the Simplest Valid Analysis, see: https://replications.clearerthinking.org/simplest-valid-analysis/
Inline links: https://replications.clearerthinking.org/simplest-valid-analysis/