Happily, we live in a time where challenging dogmatic ideas about the world is not punishable by being burnt at a stake. We know the earth is spherical, that the Earth revolves around the sun, and innumerable other facts about our tiny place in this immense universe. These breakthroughs have come when thinkers push back at conventional wisdom with careful reasoning to build new …
Heuristics take flight!
Sitting in an airplane makes me feel more in touch with my own mortality. It’s hard not to feel vulnerable when I think about soaring through the air in a fragile metal tube at 600 miles per hour. Do you remember your last flight? The roaring engines, the seats shaking during take off and landing, and the unsettling feeling in your stomach as …
Changing Winds in Science Funding
Bias can taint scientific research, as conclusions are sensitive to the conscious and unconscious choices scientists make in study design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation. A naive, utopian vision of science would have its practitioners completely impartial, unbiased and objective. Scientists would rely solely on the evidence to construct their conclusions about the world, without an eye towards dogma or financial gain. Of course, …