Bad Science

There’s no money in it, but you knew that when you started on this path. You will do it because you know that knowledge is beautiful, and because if only a hundred people share your passion, that is enough.

Over a hundred years ago, H.G. Wells said that statistical thinking would one day be as important as the ability to read and write in a modern technological society.

Biased by our prior beliefs
[I] followed a golden rule, whenever a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones.

The true cost of something,’ as the Economist says, ‘is what you give up to get it.’
On a larger scale, many p

But it’s not entirely morally neutral. Firstly, the manufacturers of these products sell shortcuts to smokers and the obese; they sell the idea that a healthy body can be attained by using expensive potions, rather than simple old-fashioned exercise and eating your greens. This is a recurring theme throughout the world of bad science.
More t

I can very happily view posh cosmetics—and other forms of quackery—as a special, self-administered, voluntary tax on people who don’t understand science properly. I

In what we call the developed Western world, we seek redemption and purification from the more extreme forms of our material indulgence: we fill our faces with drugs, drink, bad food and other indulgences, we know it’s wrong, and we crave ritualistic protection from the consequences, a public ‘transitional ritual’ commemorating our return to healthier behavioural norms.

pyroligneous acid’, or wood vinegar. This is a brown powder which is highly ‘hygroscopic’, a word which simply means that it attracts and absorbs water, like those little silica bags that come in electronic equipment packaging

‘The true cost of something,’ as the Economist says, ‘is what you give up to get it.’

It did not take some children who were given MMR and some children who weren’t, and then compare the rates of autism between the two groups (this would have been a ‘cohort study’)