Journalists are suckers. Marks. Vics. Boobs. Rubes. You get the picture. Where are the classically street-trained reporters, the descendants of Ring Lardner and Joe Liebling, the hard-bitten journos who would laugh in the face of a press release? Today, nowhere … Continue reading
Should Columbia University fire this guy just cos he says things like this: “You may think magic is make believe but this little bean has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight loss cure for every body type—it’s green coffee … Continue reading
Gur Huberman points to an article on the financial crisis by Bethany McLean, who writes: lthough our understanding of what instigated the 2008 global financial crisis remains at best incomplete, there are a few widely agreed upon contributing factors. One … Continue reading
Blogger Echidne pointed me to a recent article, “The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality,” by Marco Del Giudice, Tom Booth, and Paul Irwing, who find: Sex differences in personality are believed to be comparatively … Continue reading
After reading the Rewarding Strivers book, I had some thoughts about how to make the college admissions system more fair to students from varying socioeconomic backgrounds. Instead of boosting up the disadvantaged students, why not pull down the advantaged students?
Here’s the idea. Disadvantaged students are defined typically not by a bad thing that they have, but rather by good things that they don’t have: financial resources, a high-quality education, and so forth. In contrast, advantaged students get all sorts of freebies. So here are my suggestions: Continue reading
Robert Frank defends carbon offsets at the sister blog. I’m sympathetic to much of Frank’s argument; in particular, the fact that Al Gore has a big house isn’t much of an argument against carbon offsets. (If the crops are failing and the flood waters are rising, it won’t be much help to stand on a street corner shouting: But Al Gore had a big house!)
But I’m not happy with the example that Frank chooses to illustrate his point. He writes: Continue reading
Mark Levy pointed me to this. I don’t know anything about this area of research, but if true, it’s just an amazing, amazing example of the importance of measurement error:
The 20th century warming trend is not a linear affair. The iconic climate curve, a combination of observed land and ocean temperatures, has quite a few ups and downs, most of which climate scientists can easily associate with natural phenomena such as large volcanic eruptions or El Nino events.
But one such peak has confused them a hell of a lot. The sharp drop in 1945 by around 0.3 °C – no less than 40% of the century-long upward trend in global mean temperature – seemed inexplicable. There was no major eruption at the time, nor is anything known of a massive El Nino that could have caused the abrupt drop in sea surface temperatures. The nuclear explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki are estimated to have had little effect on global mean temperature. Besides, the drop is only apparent in ocean data, but not in land measurements.
Now scientists have found – not without relief – that they have been fooled by a mirage.
Lizzie blamed the news media for a horrible bit of news reporting on the ridiculous claim that “the climate crisis is causing certain grapes, used in almost all champagne, to be on the brink of extinction.” The press got conned … Continue reading
The post below addresses a bunch of specifics about Harvard, but for the key point, jump to the last paragraph of the post. Problems about Harvard A colleague pointed me to this post by Christopher Brunet, “The Curious Case of … Continue reading
Andy Wheeler writes: I think this back and forth may be of interest to you and your readers. There was a published paper attributing very large increases in homicides in Philadelphia to the policies by progressive prosecutor Larry Krasner (+70 … Continue reading
Palko points to a ten-year-old post on 3-D printing. Here he is back in 2013: We’re talking about people (particularly journalists) who have an emotional, gee-whiz reaction to technology without really thinking seriously about the functionality. [They] can be spotted … Continue reading
Dean Eckles writes: You might find this paper interesting: We find a pronounced “hockey stick” pattern: Over the past two decades the textual analogs of cognitive distortions surged well above historical levels, including those of World War I and II, … Continue reading
The police department, is like a crew It does whatever they want to do In society you have illegal and legal We need both, to make things equal So legal is tobacco, illegal is speed Legal is aspirin, illegal is … Continue reading
A few days ago we discussed a meta-analysis that was published on nudge interventions. The most obvious problem of that analysis was that included 11 papers by Brian Wansink and 1 paper by Dan Ariely, and for good reasons we … Continue reading
Nick Brown writes: You might enjoy this… Some researchers managed to include 11 articles by Wansink, including the “bottomless soup” study, in a meta-analysis in PPNAS. Nick links to this post from Aaron Charlton which provides further details. The article … Continue reading
Last year my co-bloggers and I posted 565 entries on this blog. Here’s a list of all them, in decreasing order of number of comments. You can draw your own conclusions from all this. A tale of two epidemiologists: It … Continue reading
Shane Frederick points us to this article from 1999, “Stereotype susceptibility: Identity salience and shifts in quantitative performance,” about which he writes: This is one of the worst papers ever published in Psych Science (which is a big claim, I … Continue reading
James Lasdun reviews a book by Ariel Sabar telling the story of a conman who sold a fake Bible-related document to a Harvard professor, leading to academic publications and media publicity before the whole thing fell apart. The most amusing … Continue reading
“Trump’s Base Nurses Anger Over Election” was the headline of a story in today’s newspaper. There was something “colorless green ideas” about this headline, which made me think, Lucky Jim-style, of some permutations: Nurses Anger Trump’s Base Over Election Election … Continue reading
We spend some time talking about junk science, or possible junk science, most recently that book about sleep, but we have lots of other examples such as himmicanes, air rage, ages ending in 9, pizzagate, weggy, the disgraced primatologist, regression … Continue reading
