Sublime

Much of the local research in experimental biology, in spite of its seemingly “scientific” and evidentiary attributes, fails a simple test of mathematical rigor. This means we need to be careful of what conclusions we can and cannot make about what we see, no matter how locally robust it seems. It is impossible, because of the curse of

Every day we are assaulted by scientific or biomedical questions that we don’t even know how to think about, from toxic wastes and “Star Wars” and nuclear energy to acid rain and gene splicing and surrogate motherhood. Many of them are the legacy of scientists who now admit that they didn’t understand how their decisions would affect the quality of

The Lancet in 1998. Twelve years later, it was retracted by its publisher, who described the claims as “proven to be false.” Ten of the paper’s thirteen original coauthors had issued a note of retraction years earlier, in 2004, based on faulty “interpretation” of the study’s data. The main author, the gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, was banned

Although the statistical methods that epidemiologists use when a flu outbreak is first detected are not quite as simple as the preceding examples, they still face the challenge of making extrapolations from a small number of potentially dubious data points.

what’s going on. There are: a) epistemic arrogance and our corresponding future blindness; b) the Platonic notion of categories, or how people are fooled by reductions, particularly if they have an academic degree in an expert-free discipline; and, finally c) flawed tools of inference, particularly the Black Swan–free tools from Mediocristan.

65. Most published research findings are false. Yup, here’s your footnote. (“Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” by John P. A. Ioannidis, PLOS, August 30, 2005, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Le fait que seulement 5 % des personnes qui, de par le monde, auraient besoin des antiviraux disponibles contre le VIH y ont accès montre une fois de plus qu’une des plus grandes inégalités est celle des hommes face à la maladie.