The Control Group Is Out of Control
It was an interesting read, but the author showed absolutely no clue why pre-registration was important.  The point is to avoid selection bias.  If the same exact study is done 100 times, but only the best 50 results get included in your study, a meta analysis of those results is going to show a strong statistical bias.  No amount of waving around the word "Bayesian" can fix this - the only way to fix it is pre-registration of honest results.<p>Why am I so certain of this?  Because of the following passage:<p><i>By my count, Bem follows all of the commandments except [6] and [10]. He apologizes for not using pre-registration, but says it’s okay because the studies were exact replications of a previous study that makes it impossible for an unsavory researcher to change the parameters halfway through and does pretty much the same thing.</i><p>But that misses the whole point.  Whether the studies had the same or different parameters is irrelevant - the fact that you see the ones that worked out and don't see the ones that didn't is the only thing that matters.  And the fact that the meta analysis didn't get this right makes the output statistical garbage.  No further discussion needed.