How McKinsey Helped Turn Big Pharma into a Rent Extraction Business
How McKinsey contributed to the devolution of Big Pharma.
Read more...Category Archives: Science and the scientific method
Gaius Publius: It Wasn’t Just Exxon — They All Knew
Exxon was not the only oil major that knew decades ago about global warming and chose to launch an agnotology campaign.
Read more...The Scientific Limits of Understanding Complex Social Phenomena
Economists, for the most part, resist the idea that economics can never be a scientific enterprise. Sadly, that posture has proven profitable for them.
Read more...Medical Educators Launch Trials of Increased Sleep Deprivation of Physician Trainees Apparently in Violation of the Nuremberg Code
In a likely violation of the Nuremberg Code, a study increased the sleep deprivation of medical residents above already-high current levels.
Read more...Rajiv Sethi: Race and Police Bias – Threats Perceived When There Are None
Sethi takes issue with a New York Times article that took the astonishing view that combatting bias would have little impact on the rate of police killings of blacks.
Read more...Worse Than Fossil Fuels? Why Bioenergy Is Not Green
Why bioenergy is much more costly in environmental terms than its boosters would have us believe.
Read more...How Monsanto Solicited Academics to Bolster Their Pro-GMO Propaganda — Using Taxpayer Dollars
Contrary to what most consumers believe, the pro-GMO research that was presented as independent was paid for by Monsanto.
Read more...Don Quijones: Mexican Gourmet Chefs Sharpen Knives in Monsanto GMO War
GMOs have had a hard time in Mexico.
Read more...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...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.
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