Superstitions evolved to help us survive

New Scientist

And the same logic applies to heuristics, such as representativeness.

The Scientific Method is self-correcting

Did they dry lab (make up the data) or is something else going on?

Nobel Winner Retracts Research Paper
By KENNETH CHANG
Published: March 7, 2008
A team of scientists including Linda B. Buck, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, has retracted a scientific paper after the findings could not be reproduced.

Mythbusters

From XKCD

Whose myth? Ph.D.'s, of course!

The following article was sent around among the York faculty this week:

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/02/2008020101c/careers.html

This article makes three points about science and teaching:

1. Perspective

Us folks (professors, Ph.D.s, Psychologists) forget that we have a unique perspective about being human and being a college student: we were destined for Ph.D.s. That is, when we subjectively think about our experiences of being a plain old human or our experiences in college, they are being experienced by people who have the special traits which motivate and allow them to go on and excel intellectually.

We forget that we -- like everyone else -- are stuck in their own perspective.

The false consensus effect describes how everyone assumes a false consensus -- if I do x, most people do x. Saying, "teaching this say really had an effect on me in college, so therefore I should teach this way so my students will get the same benefit" is the false consensus effect!

2. Hypotheses

Ok 330 and 332 students: Is this (Clydesdale's work) empirical? Yes, he collects data systematically. Is it experimental? No. He creates no control conditions or other procedures to control for extraneous variables.

Students are often confused about sociology (Clydesdale's area) and social psychology. Both study normal people in social situations. The difference is in the level of study and methodology. Social Psychologists study individuals (i.e. psychology) while sociologists study groups. What attitudes do this social group hold? is a sociology question; how do people come to hold any attitude (the psychological process of attitude formation) is a social psychology question. Social Psychologists, as most psychologists, are experimental. We are more concerned about extraneous variables than realism. Sociologists are more concerned with realism (what is this real group thinking) than defending ourselves from extraneous variables.

3. Teaching

Clydesdale's conclusion is that classroom activities need to focus more on activities than lectures. Just wanted to mention that; my students are often uncomfortable with my teaching methods - for example, this week in Social Psych I won't lecture; I will do activities to teach basic psych skills.

Why we use primary sources

Bewildered, academics pore over sex-trade hysteria

Farley's book cites -- incorrectly -- Brents and Hausbeck's primary research, and arrives at a very different conclusion.

Doubt is our product

As a result of these trends, Lisa Bero says, science has become one of the most powerful tools that private companies can use to fight regulation. The strategy they most often deploy was pioneered by the tobacco industry, which learned to foment scientific uncertainty as a means of staving off regulation. A famous tobacco industry document from 1969 spells out the strategy succinctly: "Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing controversy."
In 2003, Frank Luntz, a political consultant to the Republican Party, recommended using the same strategy to combat public environmental concerns. "Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community," he wrote. "Should the public come to believe the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."
"Some policymakers fail to recognize that all studies are not created equal," says Michaels, the author of a forthcoming book, Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. "This results in the existence of what appear to be equal and opposite studies, encouraging policymakers to do nothing in the face of what appear to be contradictory findings."
Virtually everyone interviewed for this article agrees about one thing: The U.S. government must strengthen its investment in science. The members of Norman Augustine's 2005 National Academies panel continue to call for an immediate doubling of federal investment in basic science, arguing that basic science is a quintessential public good that only the federal government can properly fund. The rewards of basic research are risky and diffuse, making it difficult for individual companies to invest in.
- Liza Lentini, “One Universe, Under God,” Discovery Magazine (Oct, 2007).

Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?

A magazine story from the NYT on how research (in this case medical) is communicated (and miscommunicated) to the public.

Much of what we’re told about diet, lifestyle and disease is based on epidemiologic studies. What if it is just bad science?

The catch with observational studies like the Nurses’ Health Study, no matter how well designed and how many tens of thousands of subjects they might include, is that they have a fundamental limitation. They can distinguish associations between two events — that women who take H.R.T. have less heart disease, for instance, than women who don’t. But they cannot inherently determine causation — the conclusion that one event causes the other; that H.R.T. protects against heart disease. As a result, observational studies can only provide what researchers call hypothesis-generating evidence — what a defense attorney would call circumstantial evidence.

Testing these hypotheses in any definitive way requires a randomized-controlled trial — an experiment, not an observational study — and these clinical trials typically provide the flop to the flip-flop rhythm of medical wisdom. Until August 1998, the faith that H.R.T. prevented heart disease was based primarily on observational evidence, from the Nurses’ Health Study most prominently. Since then, the conventional wisdom has been based on clinical trials — first HERS, which tested H.R.T. against a placebo in 2,700 women with heart disease, and then the Women’s Health Initiative, which tested the therapy against a placebo in 16,500 healthy women. When the Women’s Health Initiative concluded in 2002 that H.R.T. caused far more harm than good, the lesson to be learned, wrote Sackett in The Canadian Medical Association Journal, was about the “disastrous inadequacy of lesser evidence” for shaping medical and public-health policy. The contentious wisdom circa mid-2007 — that estrogen benefits women who begin taking it around the time of menopause but not women who begin substantially later — is an attempt to reconcile the discordance between the observational studies and the experimental ones. And it may be right. It may not. The only way to tell for sure would be to do yet another randomized trial, one that now focused exclusively on women given H.R.T. when they begin their menopause.

science quote

"The job of a scientist is to generate wrong ideas as fast as possible."

-- Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize winning physicist