Less wrong every day

Community for Rigor is an NIH/NINDS funded initiative to create educational materials to teach scientific rigor at scale

What we’re building

Awesome flipped classroom materials

  • Week-long courses
  • 3h long Units
  • 45 min long lab meetings
  • 5 min long cliff-notes
  • Best practices documents

For scientists

  • Professors for use in classroom
  • Students for learning
  • Rigor activists to use in lab meetings.
  • Champions of rigor for teaching everywhere
  • You

The latest from C4R

Less Wrong Every Day

Much of research, arguably the majority, across biomedical science falls short on rigor. Our questions have no answers or have been asked before. Our experiments do not really answer questions or are misleading. Our data analysis approaches find effects if there are none in reality. Our processes make it so that all this is not apparent. And our environment is structured so that incentives encourage bad approaches. The goal of Community for Rigor is to teach rigor. We believe that scientists want to do good science and that teaching them the problems that come from violating the principles of rigor will help make science more useful and meaningful. We will thus produce ridiculously awesome flipped classroom materials to teach the principles of rigor. And we will contribute to build a community of champions of rigor. We will help center rigor within science.

Today, students in most places learn about rigor from their supervisor. Some are good at that. We want to make learning about rigor fun and useful. We believe in interactive flipped classroom learning. And we believe in building a community around rigor.

Our partners

Our timeline

Aug 2022

Project starts

Hurray it’s time to go. We are starting to assemble the team.

Sep 2022

The first four teams start working on materials

Teams from Duquesne, Harvard, JHU, and Smith are starting to work on materials, supported by the UPenn team (photo Jaan Altosaar, One Fact)

June 2023

First materials will be in testing

September 2023

First materials in open soft release

End of 2023

First 8 or so Units ready for testing

End of 2024

First 20 or so Units ready for testing

End of 2024

Running regular schools

2025

First 30 or so Units ready for testing




Embedded email form test

Subscribe to Updates from C4R

* indicates required
Select the updates you’d like to receive: