Scientists and the economic crisis, ctd.
Via the Jack Stilgoe post I just discussed, Colin Macilwain exhorts scientists to deal with a world in crisis: Those involved in science policy sometimes seem t...
Category: Society
Mixed feelings about science literacy outreach, part 2
As much as it annoys me, I can’t bring myself to complain too much about Marcelo Gleiser’s short essay: This shaping of our worldview is not restric...
People are scary in a way that numbers are not
Two months ago TNC inveighed against reformers who depend solely on statistics to explain human motivations. They are blind to the possibility that changes lead...
Politicians’ scientific beliefs, indicators, and cultural markers
Liberal bloggers have been attacking National Review’s Kevin Williamson for arguing politicians’ scientific beliefs don’t matter: Why would an...
Bias in scientists
Writing in the Times, Cordelia Fine justifies confirmation bias as a tool that facilitates discovery: Scientists are not immune. In another experiment, psycholo...
Hypocrisy happens
Cogitating some more on “The Politics of Demarcation” by Paul Newall and Michael Pearl, I understand their dismay when scientists don’t stick ...
Evolutionary psychology, demarcation, and grand unified theories
Last week evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa published the highly controversial “Why Black Women are Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women.&...
Obama is a politician, not a philosopher
I’m glad to see Ryan Myer blogging again after a long break. His recent post does a typically good job dissecting the Obama administration’s ratchet...
The fallacy of attribution
I think, on some level, when we marvel at how the world has become more egalitarian, we think about King and Lincoln. But do we think about that changes relatio...
Maybe the scientific method just isn’t that powerful
But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: cl...