Like Ioannidis, Tetlock found a correlation between the prominence of experts and their fallibility. The more wrong the experts were, the more visible they were in the media. The reason, he conjectured, is that experts who make dramatic claims are more likely to get air time on CNN or column inches in The Washington Post, even though they are likelier to be wrong. The winner’s curse strikes again.
For comic relief, I told my students about a maze study, cited by Tetlock, that pitted rats against Yale undergraduates. Sixty percent of the time, researchers placed food on the left side of a fork in the maze; otherwise the food was placed randomly. After figuring out that the food was more often on the left side of the fork, the rats turned left every time and so were right 60 percent of the time. Yale students, discerning illusory patterns of left-right placement, guessed right only 52 percent of the time. Yes, the rats beat the Yalies! The counterintuitive lesson, I suggested, is that the smarter you are, the more likely you may be to “discover” patterns in the world that aren’t actually there.

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The Perils of Unleashing Students’ Skepticism [via]

But perhaps the most serious misrepresentation in news-media coverage of this affair was the depiction of cultural anthropology as overrun by “postmodern fluff-heads” on a crusade against science. In the mid-1990s, when the “science wars” were at their height, and you had to be either for or against Foucault, there might have been some truth in such a characterization. Those were the years when it was fashionable to talk about “the social construction of scientific knowledge.” As a sign of the times, the Stanford University anthropology department split into two departments, one of anthropological sciences and one of sociocultural anthropology.
But times have changed. The two Stanford departments have remarried; the French anthropologist Bruno Latour, high priest of the “social construction of science” school, has long since published an anguished article in Critical Inquiry—”Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”—worrying about the tacit complicity between “postmodernist” social thought and oil companies seeking to deny the reality of climate change.
In my experience, younger cultural anthropologists tend to describe themselves as pragmatists, and they see the debates in the 1980s and 1990s about “writing culture” and the politics of knowledge, which were so formative for an older generation, as a part of the discipline’s history they have assimilated and are moving beyond. While the self-identified scientific anthropologists were filling my inbox with angry messages about the hegemony of antiscientific postmodernists, many anthropologists who use French critical theory in their work also e-mailed me to ask if the word “science” could not be restored, given its importance to colleagues. It is important to note that throughout this whole episode of e-mails, blogs, and news-media coverage, not a single anthropologist whom I am aware of insisted that the word “science” should stay excised.

— What if They Had a Science War and Only One Side Showed Up? [via]

As far as the cupcakes in this article go, I would try one to be polite if offered one, but nothing beats a delicious cupcake made out of pure, vitamin D-rich butter, regular flour, and farm-fresh eggs.

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Kate commenting on Tasty Vegan Food? Cupcakes Show It Can Be Done

Right, ‘cause the cow put all that vitamin D in that pure butter?

Quick — what is the “paradigm” of medicine, to which my correspondents claim to be alternative? Give up? Good for you, because there isn’t one. People are complicated and there are all sorts of entirely different things that can go wrong. Physicians don’t fall back on a paradigm to fix everything, they do whatever is likely to work. Antibiotics, surgical excision of tumors, hormonal therapy, receptor blockers, physical therapy, nutrition, prostheses, cancer chemotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, social support, surgical repair of joint trauma, monoclonal antibodies, antivirals, vaccinations, and so on and so forth, are all specific ways of addressing various, often entirely unrelated problems.
The only “paradigm” physicians worry about is whether something works or not. The way you find that out is to subject it to rigorous testing. It’s often helpful to understand as much as possible about the underlying biological processes that are making a person sick. It can help guide an efficient search for new therapies, and help select the right one for a particular case. But it isn’t always necessary — some remedies are just “empirical,” as they say, i.e. they are known to work but people aren’t sure why. Doctors aren’t above using these, even if they’d generally prefer to know what’s going on.

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Alternative Healing Paradigms

tip: paradigms (like privilege!) may be hard to see when you are immersed in them.

I find it truly bizarre when I talk to people (okay if we’re being real the only people that really rile me up when they do this are MDs/med students) who are convinced that there is not cultural/moral/social influence on biomedicine, but rather all truth/behavior/procedure/therapies are derived from pure empirical research. Why aren’t y’all reading Kuhn?

The autopsy is an examination of the body as machine, a hardware hack on hopeless equipment. As with some bugs you may never find out what went wrong. There may be several ailments: a pancreatic cancer, say; a cirrhotic liver. The evidence of death is incontrovertible, but the cause is an eel slipping out of your hands.
And the pathologists are one step up from a butcher. I have seen evisceration performed where the cutting scalpel was held in a man’s curled fist, not gingerly balanced between fingertips as a surgeon would do. This is not the fine art of dissection.
But what dissection could do the brain justice, or any of the organs? We sneak around biological functions with our words, our diagrams of neural networks, our schemata of the digestive system. Because the body speaks chemistry, an assembly language we cannot understand - and our top-level object-oriented speech will never agreeably classify - they are held captive by a picture we have created in words. The only way to understand the viscera is to be elbow-deep in them.
So this is how it works, the hack, the evisceration: cut around the neck and down the torso, peel back the layers of skin and fat. Open the ribcage - no special equipment needed here, just an ordinary breadknife. Peel back the skin of the neck, dissect out the tongue and throat. The organs are freed and lifted out, all the way back to the spine. The liver is bigger than you thought it was; the lungs smaller.

— The Autopsy [via]