“Mathiness” is a term coined by economist Paul Romer, who characterized it as a style that “lets academic politics masquerade as science.” […]
Mathiness is the academic’s truthiness. Math makes research seem serious and science-like. For many consumers of research, math creates a barrier of technical sophistication that prevents the evaluation of truth-claims. When that happens, mathiness provides an aura of authority that says, “trust us, not them.”
In my UCLA talk, I opened by sharing that more than thirty years ago NASA called me up and asked me to retract my Master’s thesis, which was a comprehensive policy evaluation of the Space Shuttle program.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Over the past few weeks I have read Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, by Mike Davis. During my time as a scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I spent a lot of time researching impacts of and responses to El Niño and La Niña under the guidance of the one and only Mickey Glantz. I was aware of the 1877-78 El Niño event and its profound impacts, but I never connected its significance to the contemporary climate discourse until recently.
Davis compiles estimates suggesting that more than 50 million people died in the mid-1870s related to extreme weather and climate — That equates to about 4% of global population. Today, that same proportion of the world’s population would be over 320 million deaths, or almost the entire population of the entire United States. We cannot even imagine this magnitude of human suffering.
The proximate cause of the 1870s massive climate impacts was a very strong El Niño even in 1877 and 1878, but that event was also perhaps comparable to strong El Niño events in 1997/98 and 2015/16. What accounts for the massive loss of life in the 1870s? Davis explores this in depth, and the simple answer is colonial rule informed by Malthusian impulses.
The Sound Of Settled Science
10 minute on the heretics of today.
Published This Month In The Journal Of The Blindingly Obvious
Your morning science: Study shows sex could be a better predictor of sports performance than gender identity
Dr John Armstrong, King’s, Dr Alice Sullivan, University College London and George M Perry, an independent researcher from the USA, conducted a study analysing data on the performance of people who competed in the non-binary category of 21 races in the New York Road Runners database.
Outside of purely biological outcomes and criminology, little empirical work has been done to test the theory that gender identity is more important than biological sex as a cause of gender disparities in outcomes. The data set of 166 race times achieved by non-binary athletes within a data set of 85,173 race times was selected as it was the largest available consistently formatted data on non-binary athletes.
Since the race results do not provide the sex of non-binary athletes, the sex of non-binary athletes was either derived from previous races they had run, or where this wasn’t available, the researchers used a novel technique to model the sex of athletes probabilistically based on their given names, using US Social Security Administration data. Race times were used as the outcome variable in linear models with explanatory variables derived from biological sex, gender identity, age and the event being raced.
I don’t ever want to hear another word about the flat-earth people. Not. One. Word.
Y2Kyoto: Follow The Science
Into the void;
A new study by a team of mostly San Francisco Bay Area scientists that found human-caused climate warming has increased the frequency of extremely fast-spreading California wildfires has come into question from the unlikeliest of critics—its own lead author.
Patrick T. Brown, climate team co-director at the nonprofit Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley and a visiting research professor at San Jose State University, said his Aug. 30 paper in the prestigious British journal Nature is scientifically sound and “advances our understanding of climate change’s role in day-to-day wildfire behavior.”
But Brown this week dropped a bomb on the journal—as well as his study’s co-authors who are staunchly defending the team’s work. In an online article, blog post and social media posts, Brown said he “left out the full truth to get my climate change paper published,” causing almost as much of a stir as the alarming findings themselves.
Brown wrote that the study didn’t look at poor forest management and other factors that are just as, if not more, important to fire behavior because “I knew that it would detract from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.” He added such bias in climate science “misinforms the public” and “makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
Thousands of years before ancient people in Central Eurasia learned to farm, hunter-gatherer groups in the subarctic were building some of the first permanent, fortified settlements, challenging the notion that agriculture was a prerequisite for societies to ‘settle down’.
Researchers now think they have dated the earliest known fortifications in the icy north, if not the world, near a curve of the Amnya River in Western Siberia. […]
Traditionally, archaeologists have assumed that foraging communities were not yet societally or politically ‘complex’ enough to build monumental, permanent structures that needed to be maintained or defended.
Yet ongoing research at the Amnya promontory and other archaeological sites around the world suggest that cultivating crops and rearing animals aren’t the only incentives for such activity.
Paper here.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
From the archives of the Space Studies Institute: The Mass Driver (h/t)
Safe and Effective
Oreos Are Better Than Statins for Lowering Cholestrol?
Okay, this is preliminary, highly context dependent, and the initial experiment isn’t even over yet. But it’s still darn interesting.
British Exceptionalism
Unlike Canada, there are still some nations in the world, such as the UK and America, where doctors are not automatically driven from their careers for disagreeing with Covid policy. Dr. John Campbell brings us this engaging interview with Dr. Clare Craig about the myths and reality of virus spread, masking and scientific modeling in the Covid era. Her book is available on Amazon UK.
“There is a problem that we have that modelers… first of all, their entire career is about this sort of event, so they want to spin it and out and exaggerate it….the worse they can make it, the better it is for them so they become the heros…So they’ve got all the wrong motivations and on top of that, if they say 85% are going to be susceptible and they’ve got it wrong, there doesn’t seem to be any consequence for them….They have this massive incentive to always be over-calling it.”
Follow The Science
Then, corner the bastards.
The dossier was so unsettling, one neurologist revealed, that he couldn’t sleep after reading it. It contained allegations that an experimental drug meant to curb damage from stroke — and eyed up for regulatory fast-tracking for fulfilling an unmet medical need — might instead have raised the risk of death among patients receiving it.
The dossier, assembled by whistleblowers and obtained by an investigative journalist, was recently submitted to the US National Institutes of Health, which is finalising a $30mn clinical trial into the medicine. The whistleblowers allege that the star neuroscientist driving the research, Berislav Zlokovic from the University of Southern California, pressured colleagues to alter laboratory notebooks and co-authored papers containing doctored data. The university is investigating; Zlokovic is, according to his attorney, co-operating with the inquiry and disputes at least some of the claims.
The facts of this particular case, set out in the journal Science last week, are yet to be established but research is fast becoming a catalogue of mishaps, malfeasance and misconduct. Rooting out mistakes and manipulation should not have to depend on whistleblowers or dedicated amateurs who take personal legal risks for the greater good. Instead, science should apply some of its famed rigour to professionalising the business of fraud detection. […]
As the Oxford university psychologist Dorothy Bishop has written, we only know about the ones who get caught. In her view, our “relaxed attitude” to the scientific fraud epidemic is a “disaster-in-waiting”. The microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, a data sleuth who specialises in spotting suspect images, might argue the disaster is already here: her Patreon-funded work has resulted in over a thousand retractions and almost as many corrections.
That work has been mostly done in Bik’s spare time, amid hostility and threats of lawsuits. Instead of this ad hoc vigilantism, Bishop argues, there should be a proper police force, with an army of scientists specifically trained, perhaps through a masters degree, to protect research integrity.
What Would We Do Without Experts?
Earlier this week, Patrick Vallance — the United Kingdom’s Chief Scientific Advisor from 2018 to 2023 — gave testimony to the UK COVID-19 Inquiry. Vallance’s testimony drew headlines because in his 2020 diary entries, he wrote that Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been “bamboozled” by the science presented to him by his advisors.
The Sound Of Settled Science
BVA Journals: Neutering is no longer the hallmark of responsible ownership
She is especially keen for vets to understand the breadth of ways in which research has shown the reproductive system contributes to an animals physiology. Take for instance the role of luteinising hormone (LH), which is responsible for triggering ovulation in females and production of testosterone in males — and is a key research focus for Kutzler and colleagues at her lab.
“When we first started looking at it, we found luteinising hormone had receptors on lymphocytes, so these immune cells that are floating around and involved in everything from fighting off viruses, fighting off bacteria, to making antibodies. When we started to review the literature, ‘we found that other people before us had demonstrated there were these receptors in humans, laboratory animals and even in dogs.’
In itself, that didn’t necessarily mean a great deal. Just because a cell has a receptor for a certain hormone doesn’t mean that it actually does anything. If you think of a receptor asa lock and the hormone as the key, you could unlock the door and theres nothing behind it,” she explains.
Indeed, Kutzler suspects the general assumption had been that there was nothing behind the LH receptor lock on the lymphocyte door. ‘Not that there was any science behind it, but it was just: “Why would there be reproductive hormone receptors on lymphocytes? They must not be functional.”
To test the assumption, Kutzler and colleagues collected lymphocytes from both neutered and intact dogs. ‘We grew those lymphocytes in cultures and added increasing levels of LH to see what happened. Did it unlock the door and there was something behind there? Sure enough, what happens is LH induces neoplastic changes in lymphocytes. Among them are cell proliferation, cell adhesion and cell ‘migration into tissue.”
For Kutzler, this provides an explanation for a finding seen in research studies – that lymphoma, along with certain other cancers, occurs in much higher rates in neutered dogs.
“We know that there are a number of serious neoplastic diseases such as lymphoma, haemangiosarcoma, osteosarcoma that can develop after gonadectomy,” says Stefano Romagnoli, professor of small animal reproduction at the University of Padova; president of the Italian Society for Animal Reproduction; and chair of the World Small Animal Veterinary Association reproduction control committee.
“And we also know that some castrated dogs develop prostatic carcinoma. It’s strange; counterintuitive.
I’ve been recommending (with rare exceptions) against routine neutering of my male puppies for at least 25 years, because we knew it was bullshit.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Well, this sucks: Physicists Simulated a Black Hole in The Lab.
Y2Kyoto: Dry Is Wet
Roger Pielke Jr: We know that as climate changes, the impacts are getting worse. We’re seeing more and more flooding going on as a result.
Everybody knows this — it is conventional wisdom.
Not only is the conventional wisdom on flooding wrong, data show that flood impacts as measured by direct economic losses have actually decreased by about 90% since 1940 as a proportion of U.S. GDP. The United States is in fact more resilient to flooding than it has ever been. The reduction in flood impacts is an incredible story of success sitting out in plain sight that is completely ignored, in favor of stories that instead tell us that down is up.
The figure below shows U.S. annual flood damage as a proportion of GDP. In 1940 flood losses amounted to a 2023 equivalent of about $50 billion per year, and in 2022 they totaled about $5 billion, a reduction of over 90%.1
The Sound Of Settled Science
The “cycle of abuse” gets a stick in the spokes.
The sexually abused-sexual abuser hypothesis posits that persons, especially males, who are sexually abused as children are at particular risk of sexually abusing others later in life. We tested this hypothesis by prospectively examining associations between maltreatment and offending in a birth cohort of 38,282 males with a maltreatment history and/or at least one finalized offense. We examined these associations within the context of the wider birth population. Proportionally few boys were the subject of official notifications for sexual abuse (14.8% of maltreated boys, and 1.4% of the birth population); proportionally very few of these sexually abused boys (3%) went on to become sexual offenders; and, contrary to findings typically reported in retrospective clinical studies, proportionally few sexual offenders (4%) had a confirmed history of sexual abuse.
Tunnel vision
Interesting to note that the mainstream media professes this much angst over a drug whose effectiveness and side effects might be problematic, while the safety and effectiveness of another drug that we’ve heard so much about over the past two years warrants little else besides relentless cheerleading.
With limited research on its effectiveness against pain, some experts worry the U.S. may be repeating mistakes that gave rise to the opioid crisis: overprescribing a questionable drug that carries significant safety and abuse risks.
“There’s a paucity of options for pain and so there’s a tendency to just grab the next thing that can make a difference,” said Dr. Padma Gulur, a Duke University pain specialist who is studying ketamine’s use. “A medical journal will publish a few papers saying, `Oh, look, this is doing good things,’ and then there’s rampant off-label use, without necessarily the science behind it.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
Paleontologists in South Africa said they have found the oldest known burial site in the world, containing remains of a small-brained distant relative of humans previously thought incapable of complex behavior.
Led by renowned paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, researchers said in June they had discovered several specimens of Homo naledi – a tree-climbing, Stone Age hominid – buried about 30 meters (100 feet) underground in a cave system within the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO world heritage site near Johannesburg.
“These are the most ancient interments yet recorded in the hominin record, earlier than evidence of Homo sapiens interments by at least 100,000 years,” the scientists wrote in a series of preprint papers published in eLife.
The findings challenge the current understanding of human evolution, as it is normally held that the development of bigger brains allowed for the performing of complex, “meaning-making” activities such as burying the dead.
The oldest burials previously unearthed, found in the Middle East and Africa, contained the remains of Homo sapiens – and were around 100,000 years old.
Paleontology Youtube will be very, very angry.
Where’s The Beef?
Debunking of the latest anti-meat “study”. This one comes out of Harvard. Can be summed up in two words -confounding factors-.
Video is time stamped and includes a transcription.
Food for Thought
A fascinating discussion on everything to do with brain health.
Yes, it’s two hours. No, there’s not a Coles notes version. Yes, we are well aware that not everyone has the time or ability to listen to a two hour podcast but a surprising number of you do seem to have the time to complain about it in the comments every time we post one. There’s plenty of quick hit content on the blog as well.
The first couple of minutes gives you a good overview of the podcast. It is time stamped so you can check out clips on specific topics if you like.