Posts in: science

Some of the best blog posts are rants, and Andrew Gelman just published one, about reckless disregard for the truth. Here is why he thinks the term “bullshit” does not apply:

In my post, I asked what do you call it when someone is lying but they’re doing it in such a socially-acceptable way that nobody ever calls them on it? Some commenters suggested the term “bullshit,” but that didn’t quite seem right to me, because these people seemed pretty deliberate in their factual misstatements.

I disagree. Whether the bullshitter is deliberate should not matter, and many do indeed BS with a specific goal in mind. In the examples he lists those are inflating the impact of a paper and getting paid for expert testimony in favor of big tobacco. Indeed, dig deep enough and you will find hunger for money and prestige to be at the root of much bullshit.

A few good links to start the week:

I have mentioned before that I am not a fan of IQ as a measure of anything other than un-intelligence and have linked to Taleb’s short essay on it from way back in 2019. Well, that same year Sean McClure wrote an even more thorough account of why testing intelligence as done today is pseudoscience, and you get to learn much more about models, biases, and the scientific method. Recommended long read.

Some good links from the past week:

Once a decade, I am obligated to read a book from Eric Topol. Ten years ago it was during a rotation at Georgetown where they were handing around copies of The Creative Destruction of Medicine like candy. Of course, if those books had truly been candy they would have been of the sort that quickly congeals into an inedible hard lump because nothing in The Creative Destruction… aged well.

Well this year Topol has a book out on aging, and if it weren’t for some high-profile endorsments I would not be paying it two cents. But then I saw Nassim Taleb praising its rigor and scholarliness, highlighting as an example that Topol cites multiple trials for each claim. One can hope the trials he cites actually back up the claims, and to confirm that is indeed the case I now have Super Agers on the pile. Kindle version only: physical space in our library is too precious for Topol.

📚 Finished reading: Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows. Much like Nassim Taleb who started with probability and statistics only to end in the territory of ethics and values, Meadows starts with algorithms and quantities but ends with higher purpose and transcendence. A book to be re-read.

If you say that “$1 of research investment yields $5 in returns to the economy” — as some do — but then clarify that under those $5 you have a lot of laboratory-building and infrastructure-supporting — as some did — what point exactly are you trying to make? As ever, there is much wisdom in r/Jokes.

If all we had to do is trust the scientific method, why does homeopathy still exist (but not lobotomies)?

Another good podcast episode: neurosurgeon Theodore Schwartz talking to Tyler Cowen. Dr Schwartz is a bigger believer in science than yours truly:

COWEN: Do you think there are areas of science, though, where the institutions are so screwed up that you don’t actually trust the product of what is coming out, and there’s some systematic bias in the ideas being generated?

SCHWARTZ: I think, yes, there’s always going to be politics involved, and we always come to any problem from a unique single perspective, and institutions are going to have their biases. Yes, that is true, but in the long run, the scientific method will figure it out, and there will be one right answer. That institution — whatever their bias is — will be proven wrong in the long run. Now, those people might be dead and won’t be able to apologize at that point.

The problem, of course, is even when the scientific method does figure something out, people still keep doing things the old way, and no, generational change does not help. Witness homeopathy, kyphoplasty, vitamin C for colds, and — more relevant to Tyler’s question — the amyloid plaque hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease. Abandoning lobotomies was an aberration, zombie medicine is the rule.

Finally, a definition of “paradigm” I can understand:

So let’s get clear: a paradigm is made out of units and rules. It says, “the part of the world I’m studying is made up of these entities, which can do these activities.”

In this way, doing science is a lot like reverse-engineering a board game. You have to figure out the units in play, like the tiles in Scrabble or the top hat in Monopoly. And then you have to figure out what those units can and can’t do: you can use your Scrabble tiles to spell “BUDDY” or “TREMBLE”, but not “GORFLBOP”. The top hat can be on Park Place, it can be on B&O Railroad, but it can never inside your left nostril, or else you’re not playing Monopoly anymore.

From Adam Mastroianni, and the rest of the article is even better.

When “I don’t think I need to say much more” is followed by two more paragraphs of text the writer is not making the point they think they are making. The text in question is a defense of plagiarism which amounts to “what I copied wasn’t that original to begin with”. Hardy-har-har. (ᔥNassim Taleb)