Jul 1, 2025 02:24 PM
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2...s-per-day/
EXCERPT: Who cares? So what if some fake statistics gets passed around through the news and social media? Why should we be bothered (other than the usual reason)?
I can’t answer for everybody on this one; I’ll just say that I see this kind of thing as a sort of debasing of the currency of discourse. Part of this is a simple crowding out: the NPR and ESPN segments devoted to this crap, the episodes of Freakonomics and Sean Carroll and all the rest, represent time that could’ve been spent on real science.
But also it degrades the notion of science itself. All sorts of people–NPR listeners, Andrew Huberman listeners, the students at Stanford’s Class Day–are told that this stuff is science. And now look what we have at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: reliance on discredited fraudulent research and citations of fake papers... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: Who cares? So what if some fake statistics gets passed around through the news and social media? Why should we be bothered (other than the usual reason)?
I can’t answer for everybody on this one; I’ll just say that I see this kind of thing as a sort of debasing of the currency of discourse. Part of this is a simple crowding out: the NPR and ESPN segments devoted to this crap, the episodes of Freakonomics and Sean Carroll and all the rest, represent time that could’ve been spent on real science.
But also it degrades the notion of science itself. All sorts of people–NPR listeners, Andrew Huberman listeners, the students at Stanford’s Class Day–are told that this stuff is science. And now look what we have at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: reliance on discredited fraudulent research and citations of fake papers... (MORE - missing details)