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...Category Archives: Science and the scientific method
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.
Gaius Publius: “Erring on the Side of Least Drama” — Why Climate Scientists are Inherently Conservative
Climate scientists are understating their findings to a significant degree. “Least drama” might be too kind a characterization. “Self censorship” might be closer to the mark.
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Virtual Worlds and the Future of Economics
Varoufakis spoke with Senior Editor Peter Suderman about what he learned as a video game economist, the failings of his chosen academic profession, and how computer games and virtual online worlds might be the future of macroeconomics.
Read more...Philip Pilkington: Why Economists Fail to Make ‘Rational’ Judgments and Why You Should Too
Economists flunk one of their own tests, and that says a lot about what “economics” really is about.
Read more...Columbia Tosses Out Star Faculty Researchers for Failing to Pay 80% of Their Own Way
From a reader: “two eminent professors with decades of serious work have been dumped unceremoniously by Columbia because they could no longer bring in the grant millions for the university business to extract rent from. This is Ivy-league neoliberalism at its worst thanks to the spineless Democrats/Obama White House allowing government science funding to get pummeled while Bush’s tax cuts are preserved. “
Read more...Determined Ignorance on Climate Change: Still Impervious to Facts
Climate change is a hard policy question to address because it pits those who believe in evidence against those committed to knowing as little as possible.
Read more...The Embattled Climate Scientist Who Fought Back
Real News Network interviewed climate scientist Michael Mann, who has come under vicious and persistent attack by right-wing groups who decided to play a reductivist game and focus their attack on one chart Mann developed which became important in popular discussions of climate change.
Read more...Philip Pilkington: Abstraction, Language and Modelling in Economics
Alciphron is the title of the book by the philosopher George Berkeley that was most popular in his own time and is probably his least popular in ours. But in the Seventh Dialogue, Berkeley sketches out some very interesting ideas on human language — something that he recognised as being an absolutely central philosophical question and one that bears directly upon economics.
Read more...