The GM Labeling Law to End All Labeling Laws
Campaigners for the Orwellianly-named “Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015” falsely demonize those who want GM labeling as anti-science.
Read more...Category Archives: Science and the scientific method
Clinical Trial Transparency Effort Encounters Deafening Silence in US Launch; Agnotology or Anechoic Effect?
A successful initiative in the UK to obtain more registration and publication of clinical trial data has had its US launch utterly ignored , not simply the mainstream media but also the logical suspects in the medical trade press and scholarly journals..
Read more...Media Hypes Praluent, the Next Expensive “Blockbuster” Not Yet Shown to Benefit Patients
Another example of the corruption of science: the press falls all over itself hyping Praluent, a new cholesterol-lowering drug with remarkably inconclusive clinical trial data behind it. As Roy Poses points out, “The clinical benefit of the drug was not evident in this trial.”
Read more...Bill Clinton, Paid to Speak to Biotech Conference, Extolled $1000 Pill to Prevent “Liver Rot,” Despite Lack of Evidence that It Does
What won’t the Clintons do if the price tag is high enough? Now Bill is playing drug detailman.
Read more...Some Pointers on How to Catch the Dubious Use of Statistics
A long standing pet peeve is how the use of figures has been fetishized in political discourse and in our society generally, to the point where many people too easily swayed by argument that invoke data (I discussed this phenomenon at length in the business context in a 2006 article for the Conference Board Review, […]
Read more...Naomi Oreskes: The Hoax of Climate Change Denial
How climate change denialists have opened up a new front in their attacks on climate science.
Read more...The Empirical Shift in Economics
What’s at stake: Rather than being unified by the application of the common behavioral model of the rational agent, economists increasingly recognize themselves in the careful application of a common empirical toolkit used to tease out causal relationships, creating a premium for papers that mix a clever identification strategy with access to new data.
Read more...Connections in the Modern World: Network-Based Insights
Lambert here: For people who like to “connect the dots,” there is actually a mathematically grounded discipline that studies such networks (or graphs) formally.
Read more...The War on Genetically-Modified-Food Critics
Debunking the idea that genetically modified food has been proven to be safe.
Read more...John Helmer: Amazing Pentagon Weapon Penetrates Putin’s Brain Before He Was Born – President Reagan’s Brain Secret Confirmed, With Poroshekno’s and Nuland’s
If you’ve read The Men Who Stare at Goats, you already know that the defense establishment has a peculiar fondness for funding quackery. But this is still a doozy.
Read more...Happiness and Satisfaction Are Not Everything: Improving Wellbeing Indices
Yves here. I’m using this post as an object lesson in what is right and wrong with a lot of economics research to help readers look at research reports and academic studies more critically. That often happens with post VoxEU articles; they have some, or even a lot, of interesting data and analysis, but there’s often some nails-on-the-chalkboard remarks or a bias in how the authors have approached the topic. Readers, needless to say, generally pounce on these shortcomings.
Here, the authors take up a legitimate topic: are surveys on wellbeing asking the right questions?
Read more...Philip Pilkington: Is Economics a Science? Dogmatic Economics Vs. Reflective Economics
You can’t talk about whether economics is a science without getting clear on what you mean by “science”.
Read more...Philip Pilkington: The Great Unwinding – Some Thoughts on the Incoherence of Mainstream Economics
Mainstream economics today can be made to say anything. But in being able to do this it says nothing.
Read more...Facebook Users Regularly Treated Like Guinea Pigs
A new Wall Street Journal story probes the frequency and casualness with which Facebook ran experiments with the explicit aim of manipulating users’ emotions. Some commentators pooh poohed the concern about the study, saying that companies try influencing customers all the time. But the difference here is that manipulation usually takes place in a selling context, where the aims of the vendor, to persuade you to buy their product, are clear. Here, the study exposed initially, that of skewing the mix of articles in nearly 700,000 Facebook subscribers’ news feeds, was done in a context where participants would have no reason to question the information they were being given.
While the controversial emotions study may have been Facebook’s most questionable study, it is the tip of an experimentation iceberg.
Read more...The Crapification of Biomedical Research
An urgent warning from PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
Read more...In the context of such progress, it is remarkable that even the most successful scientists and most promising trainees are increasingly pessimistic about the future of their chosen career. Based on extensive observations and discussions, we believe that these concerns are justified and that the biomedical research enterprise in the United States is on an unsustainable path.
