Shouldn't a peer-reviewed paper which purports to tie chemicals produced in the manufacture of natural gas (fracking etc.) to birth defects actually measure exposure (of fetus carriers, i.e. "mothers") to…

Several readers asked me to examine the peer-reviewed study "Assortative Mating on Ideology Could Operate Through Olfactory Cues" by Rose McDermott, Dustin Tingley, and Peter K. Hatemi appearing in the…

This post is one that has been restored after the hacking. All original comments were lost. Everything that can go wrong with a time series analysis has gone wrong with…

It's a doozy, this error of ours. So ubiquitous is it that it's hardly noticeable. Yet it is sinking us into scientism and wild overconfidence. Every time it appears, both…

The gentleman who runs Shadow To Light asked me to take a look at a paper which Sam Harris approvingly quoted. The 2010 peer-reviewed one-page paper shares today's title (sans…

Update 6 Sep 2014 Yet another another another study has claimed "statistical significance", this one by Philip Kokica, Steven Crimpc, and Mark Howdend. "A probabilistic analysis of human influence on…

Phrases like "100 year rainfalls" or floods or whatever for whatever period of time are awful. They convey an improper idea of uncertainty. The phrase "X year event" is based…