Science 2.0

The standing desk fad, and disastrous future outcomes for those who followed it, happened because epidemiologists correlated sitting and 'higher risk' of death. Obviously there is a 100 percent chance of dying but correlation looks for rows of behaviors, like eating cilantro or skydiving, and disease outcomes. Find enough correlation and you can declare statistical significance. Unfortunately, you can even do that with coin flips to show coins are prejudiced against landing on heads. Or tails.

If you want to find the demographic that most likely thinks chiropractors, massages, meditation, and yoga are medicine, find middle-aged women in a rich country. They just don't mention it to their doctors, even though physicians ask what else they are doing or taking, including things like supplements. 

Vaping devices, e.g. the unfortunately named e-cigarettes, were a valuable tool for smoking cessation and harm reduction, with better results in ending smoking than nicotine patches and gums.Then suddenly they were everywhere, a market so large that a tobacco company whose primary business was cigarettes spent billions for a small stake in Juul, which had become the leader in vaping products. Now they have written 90 percent of that investment down because it turns out that while nicotine is addictive, vaping never had the 'cool' factor of cigarettes. Cigarettes were boosted in culture by film and television prevalence but vaping never attained that kind of traction.

Few researchers would commit half of each day to science if they were doing it for free but they are no different than other occupations in believing that economic necessity is a bubble surrounding...themselves.(1)Publishing is not exempt from the double standard. Two generations ago being "peer-reviewed" in a top journal didn't mean much. Krebs, of the famous Krebs cycle, was rejected by Nature because they already had too many articles so he went elsewhere. He still got a Nobel prize for his work.

In today's Washington Examiner, I detail how the Biden administration did an end-run around their own scientists - and what that will do to the price of food.  How ridiculous is the new level imposed on a popular weedkiller for America's most important crop? It is equivalent to government saying you should not be exposed to the sun for more than one second every 10 years or you will get skin cancer. 

One thing that must annoy psychiatrists is that everyone will try to claim expertise in their field if they want to make a political point - in the case of a recent paper it is literally humanities scholars who want more mask and vaccine mandates.To achieve that, and despite having nothing we might consider qualifications, they used profiling to suggest a clinical diagnosis. They did it by creating their own custom analysis to claim that while other studies showed there were lots of reasons people might not like to wear a mask, opponents casually claiming they were selfish or even narcissistic are clinically correct.Let's unpack that. 

Newly-discovered historical information adds weight to the belief that given what was known in the mid-19th century, Gregor Mendel, the Austrian (Moravian, now part of the Czech Republic) Monk was even further ahead of his time.  So advanced his work was criticized by some as 'too good to be true' despite surviving every challenge.Resentful scientists may have later tried to claim he must have used more than science but today he is seen as so ahead of his time his work is uncontroversial. Yet at the time the science community ignored him, perhaps because he was a religious leader and not a career scientist, and perhaps because he had no desire to self-promote, or perhaps because it was too advanced for the existing science community to accept.

The wage gap between genders has always had some cultural traction but there were also always odd pockets where it was worse - including what you wouldn't have expected. Environmental groups had far more women but the wage gap between what they paid men and women was alarming compared to engineering, where there were fewer women as a total percentage but no meaningful pay disparity.

Prior to the 1980s, most thermometers were both inaccurate and not placed using scientific methodology. But tree rings need time and ice cores even longer, which means for recent periods of time have to rely on observational claims and hope to control for their accuracy.

In the 1960s and '70s, population apocalypse stories were popular. Movies like "Soylent Green" and books like "The Population Bomb" and "Ecoscience" provided dystopian views of the future, where science would fail and government would be forced to get drastic, with forced sterilization and abortion needed until the number of people got down to a limit farming could sustain.That never happened. Progress did. Companies created new agricultural tools, herbicides were created that avoided resistance. Then we got GMOs. First in insulin, then they saved the papaya in Hawaii, and then we got common products like corn, soybean, and cotton. Food got more plentiful and more affordable.

The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision has been overturned, which means that the Supreme Court ruled that the right to an abortion is not federally protected by the US Constitution (in the 1973 case, that it couldn't be illegal under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment), and is instead up to states as per the enumerated powers part of the Constitution. As most of you know, when the Constitution was written, states were concerned about replacing one autocratic centralized government with another, so the Constitution, and then the immediate Bill of Rights, were written to specify that if it was not in the Constitution, it was left to states.

The value of bees in pollination is overstated, outside the on-demand almond grower market the pollination done by bees would be taken up by 400,000 other species if bees disappeared tomorrow, but that doesn't mean they are not an important part of the ecosystem in other ways.