To test their hypothesis about the packing tape, the shoemakers decided to send two…

Posted by on April 9, 2013 Leave a comment (4) Go to comments

To test their hypothesis about the packing tape, the shoemakers decided to send two packages to each of 89 people in the United States. For each recipient, one package featured the Atheist-branded packing tape and one used generic packing tape. All packages were shipped the same day. Yet the Atheist-branded packages took an average of three days longer to reach their destinations. And while only one package from the generic-tape set went missing, nine of the Atheist-branded packages went missing. These (statistically significant) results were recently released on their website.

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Atheist Shoemaker Loses Faith In U.S. Mail : NPR
Is there a bias against “Atheist” mail in the United States? A shoemaker in Berlin sees evidence of it after running an experiment that commentator Tania Lombrozo cites as “a great example of citizen science.”

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  1. Cliff Bramlett April 9, 2013 at 5:51 pm

    I agree about the citizen science. Even if it's done wrong, citizen science, done in the right spirit, still subjects its results to peer review of whatever sort it can manage, which means such errors are likely to get weeded out. Scientific Method for the win!  🙂

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  2. Zephyr López Cervilla April 9, 2013 at 8:10 pm

    "But when and why should scientific claims be presented in forums that aren't peer-reviewed?"
    – As some commenters mentioned, peer-reviewed is guarantee of nothing. In any case, this didn't pretend to be a "scientific claim", but something that happened with the mail with certain regularity (9 out of 89 Vs. 1 out of 89). From this result you can draw your own conclusions.

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  3. Alan Couch April 9, 2013 at 8:16 pm

    Agree +Zephyr López Cervilla and +Cliff Bramlett Regarding the current publishing paradigm – "you're doing it wrong" springs to mind. I reckon real peer review begins after something is published. Citations,  reviews, downloads, shares, +'s , likes, criticism, or worst of all, being ignored – zero attention. This is why I am a strong supporter of open science and open publishing. All that said this example is interesting on a number of fronts.

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  4. Mark Jones April 10, 2013 at 8:20 am

    Wait, I thought it was the Atheists you couldn't trust?  You mean it's the other people? </sarcasm>

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