Category Archives

Archive of posts published in the category: Science

Covid Progressivism

“In its Wilsonian form, progressivism is a system in which the elected branches attempt to permanently outsource many of the country’s key political decisions to an ostensibly disinterested technocracy. When that technocracy is trusted, as it was for a while in the early 20th century and again in the 1950s and early to mid 1960s, those attempts enjoy a sufficient degree of support. When that technocracy is not trusted, as was the case after the fall of Robert McNamara and during the malaise-ridden 1970s, those attempts create a mighty backlash.”

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The Cost of Politicizing Science

“So those who believe in science as philosophy are increasingly estranged from science as an institution.”

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Framing Speculation as Proof

“One motivation: Pessimism sells. “You don’t get blamed for being too pessimistic, but you do get attention. It’s like climate science. Modeled forecasts of a future that is scary is much more likely to get you on television.”

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The Ignorance of Experts

Science begins with guessing and then proceeds to proof.
Scientists is a susceptible to cognitive biases as any human and must work to overcome them.
Separating the cranks from the visionaries requires judgment and patience.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Politics can and often do pollute science.

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The Excitement Bias

“We saw that the bias in psychological research is in favour of publishing exciting results. An exciting result in psychology is one that tells us that something has a large effect on people’s behavior. And the things that the studies that have failed to replicate have found to have large effects on people’s behavior are not necessarily things that ought to affect people’s behaviour, were those people rational. “

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Pal Review

This is the consequence of political consensus ruling over scientific inquiry. Scientific objectivity is thwarted by intellectual McCarthyism. Dissent is demonized, careers are destroyed. It is more like religious fanaticism than science. Yet they have been able to brand the right with the pejorative of being anti-science. Moral superiority justifies illiberalism. Obvious conflicts of interests are ignored.

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The Media Disease

from The New Yorker, EVERYBODY’S AN EXPERT by Louis Menand Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more

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The March Against Science

How Progressives Cherry-Pick Science They Like from Mona Charen at National Review Science, however, to be respected, must be purely the search for truth. The organizers of this “March for Science” — by acknowledging that their demonstration is modeled on

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The True Anti-Intellectuals

Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe writes a wonderful piece to start the year,  What experts predict, reality will contradict “I think that you listen too much to the soldiers,” wrote the British statesman Lord Salisbury to the viceroy of

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Imposing Moral Supremacy

from Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe, Healey’s Exxon witch-hunt: As a citizen and a politician, Healey is fully entitled to condemn fossil fuels, decry global warming, and express scorn for those who don’t agree with her and Gore. As

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When Ideas Start Having Sex

The internet gave rise to Google and Facebook. The iPhone gave rise to Uber. The ideologies are important only to the extent that they facilitated ideas. Our current development is less dependent on assets and physical capital than ideas. We

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Publication Bias

from Olivia Goldhill at Quartz, Many scientific “truths” are, in fact, false: For example, there’s massive academic pressure to publish in journals, and these journals tend to publish exciting studies that show strong results. “Journals favor novelty, originality, and verification of

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