academic science
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On Nobel laureate Linus Pauling’s contribution to the climate crisis.
When scientists behave unethically, more people distrust science.
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On time-traveling information and quantum mechanics.
K (who is better at reading the internet than I am) asked me, “Have you seen all those reports about future actions dictating the past?” I promptly rolled my eyes. Thinking, which ones? Because there are a lot of “scientific” studies of that ilk. One of my favorites (“favorite” here meaning “most laughably silly) is…
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On Alice Goffman’s ‘On the Run’ and extrapolate-able truth.
Many people have criticized Alice Goffman’s ethnography On the Run. The first set of criticisms I noticed were from people who claimed that she misrepresented black urban life by studying the particular group of people on whom she centered her book (examples here and here). Now Goffman is being accused of felony-level crimes and, by virtue…
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On violence against women (part three): rape, evolution, and the dangers of partial truths.
This is third in a series. Read Part 1 and Part 2. Were you sired by a jerk? Don’t worry! You can still be good! I’m mostly familiar with two theories addressing the question, “Why do men rape?” One comes from feminism, like the thesis put forward in Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: violence against women…
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On Linda Tirado’s Hand to Mouth (until devolving into senseless tangents about cash transfers as medicine, the U.S. criminal justice system, work as exercise, and flawed science).
As long as you think feeling angry is fun (does it say awful things about my personality that I do?), Linda Tirado’s Hand to Mouth is a fun little book. Unlike Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Tirado’s main focus isn’t analyzing why people are poor — she states, bluntly and in my opinion correctly, that the…
academic doublethink, academic science, Alia Crum, An Investigation of Exercise and the Placebo Effect, at-will employment, bizarre data interpretation, court fees, Dixie Stanforth, economic injustice, Ellen Langer, Emily Willingham, Evil Dave versus Regular Dave, Exercise and the Placebo Effect, flawed science, Hand to Mouth, hotel cleaning as exercise, John Oliver, Linda Tirado, low-wage work, Mindset matters, municipal fees, On the Run, overcriminalization, police abuses, poverty, psychology, replication crisis, scientific studies that can’t be replicated, speeding, The New Jim Crow, Tirado, traffic laws, Walter Scott, work as exercise, worker protections -
On the PubPeer lawsuit, scientific fraud, and anonymity.
There are some problems with academic bioscience. That much seems to be well agreed on. There are a lot of contributing factors — the pyramid-scheme-like training & employment setup, the recent propagation of soft money positions (universities hiring without setting aside money for salaries, expecting salary money to come out of research grants instead), a…
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On the creepy parallel between gene duplication and oppression – as inspired by a passage from Karen Armstrong’s “Fields of Blood.”
“If, as has been shown for ethnographically documented hunter-gatherers, women in the most meat-dependent foraging societies spend less time procuring food and more time engaged in the production of technology and performing nonsubsistence tasks, then Clovis women likely spent the majority of their time not gathering plants. In this sense, equating women solely with plant…
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On child abuse and drawing conclusions from data.
If you’re looking for a good strategy for having a bad weekend, I’ve got one: you could go to your local library and borrow Ross Cheit’s book The Witch-Hunt Narrative. Cheit ruined my weekend. And his work is out there, ready to ruin yours too! Not that his book isn’t good. It is. I’d write…
Frank Brown Cloud 