DeLong & Lang Revisited: Fairy Tales edition

Well before all the recent controversies over replicability, DeLong and Lang wondered whether file-drawer effects mightn't mean that all economic hypotheses were, in fact, false. If statistically insignificant empirical results get filed away rather than published, it's hard to tell which hypotheses really are supported in the literature. Meta-analyses have gotten better since then, and funnel plots can help indicate whether file drawer effects have been important.

Neil deGrasse Tyson points to the problem in another area:

All previous times the Hare beat the Tortoise, nobody wrote a fable about it.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) August 21, 2015