Comments on: Edge question 2011

By: An Assyrian genome for the taking (and more) | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine

Mon, 16 May 2011 06:40:51 +0000

[...] (from genomics to biomarker self-monitoring) may finally allow us to push past the problem of false positives which John Ioannidis [...]

By: Friday Fluff – May 13th, 2011 | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine

Sat, 14 May 2011 01:04:22 +0000

[...] Comment of the week, in response to “Edge question 2011″: At business school (at a well-respected, major research university) one of my profs prided herself [...]

By: Chris T

Chris T — Fri, 13 May 2011 23:09:22 +0000

I wish many scientists would internalize these:

“The easiest person to fool is yourself.”
or
“Everyone is biased, especially you.”

By: Matt B.

Matt B. — Fri, 13 May 2011 19:45:47 +0000

My answer: Statistics. Especially the fact that you can’t generalize from one datum.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Thu, 12 May 2011 16:41:59 +0000

If this is true in medicine, just think how true it must be in economics and other social sciences. In academics the rewards can be enormous.

By: juan

juan — Thu, 12 May 2011 15:18:11 +0000

At business school (at a well-respected, major research university) one of my profs prided herself on being the most “scientific” of our professors. That was her reputation and she liked to brag about how rigorous and “scientific” her classes were. What her approach consisted of was to demand that any claim made by a student be backed with a citation in the literature. That was it. You can imagine what kind of science gets produced in MBA literature and the quality of studies used to prove or disprove various management fads.

(She was also a huge proponent of using Myers-Briggs test to make hiring and staffing decisions. I consider Myers-Briggs to be one step up from astrology personally.)

Anyway, it was scientism at it’s best. And, given the non-science backgrounds of a typical MBA class, maybe that’s all that can be hoped for — to get them to look past just the management fad books at Borders. I don’t know. Still, it was an odd style. Any analysis without a citation was dismissed as just personal opinion, while any citation, regardless of the quality of the paper, carried gravitas. An in-class discussion was like a debate on scripture — except each side was quoting scripture from holy books that nobody else in the room had ever heard of before that moment.

By: dave chamberlin

dave chamberlin — Thu, 12 May 2011 13:07:32 +0000

“What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody”s Cognitive ToolKit?”

1) Making humble pie taste good
2) Magic bricks that gravitate towards TV’s
3) Invisible carnivores that only eat stoopid people.

I tried to read the real answers but everybody was trying to act profound and clever. I gave up when one blue ribbon intellectual started his soliloquy with “watching professional wrestling”