Bad Science

Bioassay bashing is bad science.

The Spheres of Influence, “Assessing Assays” (Schmidt 2002), in the May 2002 issue of EHP criticizes the National Toxicology Program rodent bioassay (NTPRB) without discussing its importance in regulation and public health. The Spheres article (Schmidt 2002) does not express concern for the validity of alternative transgenic methods proposed to replace the NTPRB for detecting carcinogens. By fo...

The Good and Bad Science of Autism

The natural selection of bad science

Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor methods results partly from incentives that favour them, leading to the natural selection of bad science. This dynamic requires no conscious strategizing-no...

Last Words Googleology is Bad Science

The World Wide Web is enormous, free, immediately available, and largely linguistic. As we discover, on ever more fronts, that language analysis and generation benefit from big data, so it becomes appealing to use the Web as a data source. The question, then, is how. The low-entry-cost way to use the Web is via a commercial search engine. If the goal is to find frequencies or probabilities for ...

The natural selection of bad science Paul

Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor methods results partly from incentives that favour them, leading to the natural selection of bad science. This dynamic requires no conscious strategizing—no...