For this pre-holiday issue of The Stute, I’m reprinting an edited version of an essay I originally wrote 15 years ago for The New York Times.
Posts published in “Scientific Curmudgeon”
I watched a conversation recently between journalist Robert Wright and physicist Lawrence Krauss on “the origins of the universe, quantum weirdness and the limits of scientific knowledge,” according to an announcement from event host Union Theological Seminary.
I was at a workshop on the mind-body problem—where scientists and philosophers debated, among other questions, whether dark energy might be conscious—when reality intruded.
In my last column, I confessed that my personal feelings toward proponents of a scientific claim affect my judgment of the claim.
Assessing scientific claims is hard enough when you stick to empirical evidence. When personal factors intrude, which they invariably do, such assessments get even trickier.
I’ve been hard on social science, even suggesting that “social science” is an oxymoron. Social science has enormous potential, however, especially when it combines rigorous empiricism with a resistance to absolute answers.
After decades of being told that mammograms save lives by detecting breast cancer early, women are now learning that these tests often lead to false alarms, more technically known as “overdiagnosis.”
Will closer ties between the Pentagon, the world’s largest military machine, and Silicon Valley, arguably the world’s greatest engine for technology innovation, make the world safer?
I just attended a meeting of scholars, journalists, activists and others on polarization in politics and science. I was asked to kick off a discussion of “what is settled and what is contested” in the climate-change debate.
This year, physicists are celebrating the 100th anniversary of general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity. Although I’m an Einstein fan, I feel compelled to deplore one aspect of his legacy: the widespread belief that science and common sense are incompatible.