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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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The great thing about being a bureaucrat in a dictatorship is you can take credit for everything that happens in your personal fiefdom and treat people like garbage and there is no recourse.   Well, almost no recourse.   Those guys working for Saddam Hussein didn't fare all that well when their boss started floating rumors he had weapons of mass destruction, but generally the life of a senior guy in a dictatorship is pretty good.
The Wall Street Journal took the Marc Hauser controversy (barely noticed here, because it's evolutionary psychology, which is sort of apodictically evident as bad science so we didn't react to it) and used his suspect data on monkey cognition to slap progressives.

We like to make fun of pseudoscience, mostly because it is hypocritical.   It simultaneously says real science is insular and close-minded and BIG and therefore resistant to awesome new ideas, like there being ghosts in my attic(1), but wants science legitimacy so uses faux-science techniques and then maps the data to the topology they want to achieve, like 'this must be a ghost.'

Always wanted to fight actual hordes of locusts and see what that whole Sodom place was all about?
It only takes a look at the Science 2.0 entry on Wikipedia to know their system is flawed (1) - anyone can create an entry but in order to edit it, like what Science 2.0 is, you have to document for some stranger on Wikipedia that you know what you are talking about, even if you're one of few people who knows what the topic is about.
Dr. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy fame has been a Science 2.0 favorite since the moment we came online and for almost a decade prior to that.  He combines wit and no-nonsense skepticism with the kind of creative reflex that makes fundamental science concepts understandable by virtually everyone who doesn't hate getting a little smarter.