White men invented everything!
Over the last decade or so I’ve seen a very strange pattern that was once at the margins, but is now at the center of culture. Take something banal, such as literacy or war, and claim that it was invented and perpetuated by heterosexual white men. In the late 2000s, this started happening in academic […]
A return of the gods
I have mentioned Alister McGrath’s The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World several times on this weblog. When I first read this book, about twelve years ago, its overall argument seemed unpersuasive. It was already clear then that the United States was going through a wave of secularization, […]
Preference falsification in our time and evermore
One of the main reasons I listen to the Secular Jihadists podcast is that there’s an earnest honesty from the hosts which is fading from our society in public discourse. Though I’m not a “New Atheist” personally (just an atheist), I don’t mind, and even appreciate, people who can discuss the reality that according to […]
Across the chasm of Incommensurability
The Washington Post has a piece typical of its genre, A Chinese student praised the ‘fresh air of free speech’ at a U.S. college. Then came the backlash. It’s the standard story; a student from China with somewhat heterodox thoughts and sympathies with some Western ideologies and mores expresses those views freely in the West, […]
Winning the battle against post modernism by losing the war for the soul of science
Over 20 years ago Paul Gross and Norman Leavitt wrote Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. To me the book was revelatory and a shock; my own experience with “anti-science” was mostly with Creationists. This was only a few years before the Sokal affair. In the wake of that it seems that […]
There are no shortcuts to knowledge
As many of you know, right before the election I made a $50 bet with Hank Campbell that Nate Silver would get at least 48 out of 50 states correct for the 2008 presidential election. I also got one of Hank’s readers to sign on to the same bet. Additionally, a few readers and Twitter followers […]
Deceiving with data
Matt Yglesias on the enthusiasm for data mining in economics:
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers hail the way increases in computing power are opening vast new horizons of empirical economics.
I have no doubt that this is, on the whole, change for the…
The “Shaggy assertion” – just pretend you’re right
As most long time readers know I generally screen to at least a cursory level comments by people who have not posted before. Except for purposes of entertainment only I won’t publish Creationist comments. Naturally some comments are offensive, bu…
Prediction is very hard
Nate Silver has an important post, Herman Cain and the Hubris of Experts. It’s not really about Herman Cain. Rather, it’s about the reality that pundits tend to underestimate uncertainty and complexity. Saying you don’t know isn’t as satisfying as making a definitive categorical assertion. This manifests particularly in the domains of sports and politics […]
The cultural construction of truth
If you know of John Ioannidis‘ work, Jonah Lehrer’s new piece in The New Yorker won’t be a surprise to you. It’s alarmingly titled The Truth Wears Off – is there something wrong with the scientific method? Here are some sections which you can’t get without a subscription, and I think they get to the […]
Social science isn’t “science”?
Update: The title is way too strong as a reflection of my opinion. I’ve added a question mark.
A friend once observed that you can’t have engineering without science, making the whole concept of “social engineering” somewhat farcical. Jim Manzi has an article in City Journal which reviews the checkered history of scientific methods as […]