Jonah Lehrer’s piece in the New Yorker is a must read for scientists. The punchline: Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And [...]
Here’s yet another post about bad papers. I’ve commented on a similar topic before. At the time I thought it was really important to call out bad scholarship publicly. It seems like tenured professors are in a unique position to do this, but standards of decorum often get in the way. That’s why including “bad” [...]
I’m a scarred and war-worn veteran of my own miniature version of the “Science Wars.” My wife and I continue to fight many battles over the boundaries and validity of scientific thinking while chowing down on dinner. With that in mind, I can say that the following is absolute bollocks: Dressed up as a belated [...]
This comment captures my feelings fairly well. I still tune in for Developing Intelligence, which is actually about development and intelligence instead of the latest blog-troversy or crackpot outrage-of-the-week.
[The visualization of the week is here.] I’ve had the opinion that climate scientists should provide expositions of the science of climate change at various levels of sophistication so that interested people from different backgrounds can educate themselves about this issue. Instead we seem to get roughly two types of output from climate scientists: useless press releases [...]
My wife is one of those ferociously intelligent people who asks questions until she fully understands something. That really minimizes my opportunities for bullshit around the apartment. On the plus side, I end up understanding what I claim to understand just by virtue of being forced to think clearly enough to explain it. This is, [...]
At the beginning of the summer, I always plan on reading all the things I did not quite get to during other seasons of the year. Though I am often too ambitious, I am making some progress on a number of fronts. The first is Karl Popper’s landmark The Logic of Scientific Discovery. As I [...]
Hilzoy on Will: Where I come from, when someone writes something of the form: “P is not evidence for Q, and here’s why”, it is dishonest to quote that person saying P and use that quote as evidence for Q. If one of my students did this, I would grade her down considerably, and would [...]
When I look at the statistics for this site, I’m often startled by the number of page views I see in a given month. I’ve had months with 20,000 page views, certainly not a lot by any kind of commercial metric, but for a back water blog with approximately 5 regular readers (judging by the [...]
We are moving to a new apartment this weekend. That combined with some rather stressful events this week have delayed part three in my series on science. I wanted to hoist the following from the comments (from commenter Dad): Scientists do more than just try to falsify theories, they also formulate new ones when they [...]