“You consider their motivations, their ideological biases and their conflicts of interest. You interrogate their advice, and weigh it against that of their critics. You exercise diligence. You ask questions. You trust in evidence, not in people. You think for yourself.”
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“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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a gem from George Will in National Review, The ‘Settled’ Consensus du Jour excerpts: Four core tenets of progressivism are: First, history has a destination. Second, progressives uniquely discern it. (Barack Obama frequently declares things to be on or opposed
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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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an excellent and thorough piece- What is “Science” from the blog The Arts Mechanical– it is rich with references and worth reading all the links embedded in the article. That’s the problem with corrupting science by using it to drive
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From The Truth Wears Off by Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker: An excellent article on the publication bias- keep in mind that in order to be peer reviewed it has to be published- although up to a third of
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From Matt Ridley and Benny Peiser at The Wall Street Journal, Your Complete Guide to the Climate Debate; To put it bluntly, climate change and its likely impact are proving slower and less harmful than we feared, while decarbonization of the
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From The Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley, The Myth of Basic Science Innovation is a mysteriously difficult thing to dictate. Technology seems to change by a sort of inexorable, evolutionary progress, which we probably cannot stop—or speed up much either.
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from The 97 Percent Solution by Ian Tuttle at National Review: Surely the most suspicious “97 percent” study was conducted in 2013 by Australian scientist John Cook — author of the 2011 book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand
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from The Washington Post, For decades, the government steered millions away from whole milk. Was that wrong? But even as a Senate committee was developing the Dietary Goals, some experts were lamenting that the case against saturated fats, though thinly
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from Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish, A Tour of Our Decadent Civilization Excerpt: The decadents are great categorizers. They know where everything should belong. They employ armies of bureaucrats to operate vast filing systems which never quite work as planned. They
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from The WSJ, Scientific Fraud and Politics excerpt: Similar bias contaminates inquiries across the social sciences, which often seem to exist so liberals can claim that “studies show” some political assertion to be empirical. Thus they can recast stubborn political
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From a lecture given at Caltech by writer Michael Crichton in 2003 entitled Aliens Cause Global Warming Stepping back, I have to say the arrogance of the model-makers is breathtaking. There have been, in every century, scientists who say they
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Whether their views are right or wrong on a particular issue, the scientific community has taken on a partly theological character, with top scientists achieving something of the role of supreme clerics. This approach ignores the reality that widely held
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from Nature.com, Twenty tips for interpreting scientific claims excerpts: Bias is rife. Experimental design or measuring devices may produce atypical results in a given direction. For example, determining voting behaviour by asking people on the street, at home or through the
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from Jonah Goldberg in The National Review, All Hail Science excerpts: Why does the Left get to pick which issues are the benchmarks for “science”? Why can’t the measure of being pro-science be the question of heritability of intelligence? Or the
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One of my favorite blog postings this year is The Left is Too Smart to Fail by Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish. Science is for Stupid People is equally worthy and an excellent companion piece to the first article. Excerpts: Tysonism is why
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Book Review: ‘The Big Fat Surprise’ by Nina Teicholz What if the government’s crusade against fat fed the spread of obesity by encouraging us to abstain from foods that satiate us efficiently? from The Wall Street Journal by Trevor Butterworth
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from Popular Technology. Net 97% Study Falsely Classifies Scientists’ Papers, according to the scientists that published them Shaviv: “Science is not a democracy, even if the majority of scientists think one thing (and it translates to more papers saying so),
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From Faith in Science by Glenn Reynolds in the New York Post: Excerpts: In fact, given that Americans have grown broadly more skeptical of institutions in general, it’s not surprising that conservatives are more skeptical of scientific institutions than they
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