Papers vs. Authority

We Were Warned. So What.

Insights, Issues Public Experts Face, Public Expertise for Research Organizations / By

“You were warned.”

What an arrogant, infantilizing, alienating, counterproductive communications tactic.

Well, we feel guilty and stupid now, so of course we’ll absorb your wisdom more attentively next time. Count on it.

Manu Lall and Paulina Concha of the Columbia Water Center published an op-ed this week for The New York Times, alerting us to the tens of thousands of dams in the United States that are in danger of failing, as the two in Central Michigan failed last week.…

Research’s Market Failure: The End of the Beginning

Insights, Issues Public Experts Face, Public Expertise for Research Organizations / By

Take a look at these eye-popping stats, from journalist and technologist Frederic Filloux’s recent essay, “COVID-19’s General Blindness is Also a Journalistic Failure”:

  • A search query for the phrases “global pandemic” or “global pandemic preparedness” from 2009-2019 turned up 1,400 results in JAMA, 30 papers in ArXiv and 17,000 results in Google Scholar.
…

Nefarious? Or Just Science?

Insights, Miscellaneous / By

Conservatives are biologically and neurologically different from liberals. Science says so.

If you follow politics at all in the United States, you’ll have heard that claim, and even perhaps read about some of the individual studies supporting it. Social or political conservatives, these studies have found, are more reactive to threats, more easily disgusted, more dogmatic and more receptive to authoritarian structures and leaders.…

You Are Already More Precise

Insights, Issues Public Experts Face, Moving from Expert to Public Expert / By

Watching pundits deploy other people’s research is like watching kids play with lit M80s: the best outcome to hope for is that nothing bad happens and it’s over quickly. Every other outcome is much, much worse.

Which is to say: Bret Stephens’ recent column for The New York Times citing a discredited study (cowritten by at least one author with white nationalist sympathies) advancing (as the Times’ correction put it) “a genetic hypothesis for the basis of intelligence​” among Ashkenazi Jews is exceptional only in the stupidity of its cherry-picked research, not the fact that it cherry picked.…