How Science So Often Devolves into Quick Fixes and Quackery
4 hours ago Joakim Book
Open a popular magazine of your choice, or even the newspaper of record, and you’ll find a lot of fascinating claims seemingly backed by scientific aura. Eat this superfood and you’ll be healthy; do this minor thing every day and you’ll be successful; have governments just slightly change some condition that faces us hapless humans and we’ll change the world.
A few months ago, I called this image a “pretend world,”
with pretend ideals, pretend money and pretend language. A world of quick fix and quick bucks, where the road to success no longer requires hard work, just papering over whatever defects emerge.
An idea about simple and revolutionary solutions to complicated problems seems to have consumed the chattering classes, our media elites, and our political overlords. In the last two years, I’ve stumbled across several engaging books trying to fight back against at least some of the research that underlies this nonsense: Stuart Richie at King’s College London wrote Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth; his colleague at King’s Bobby Duffy, armed with data from his previous job at the polling firm Ipsos MORI, released Perils of Perceptions: Why We’re Wrong about Nearly Everything; yet another Brit, Tim Harford, published How to Make the World Add Up; and Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West released Calling Bullsh*t: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World.
https://mises.org/wire/how-science-so-often-devolves-quick-fixes-and-quackery
