Month: September 2022

GOOD SCIENTISTS ARE LOOSING THE PR WAR. "Scientists are lousy communicators. They appeal to people's heads, not their hearts or guts. Scientists think of themselves as guardians of truth. Once they have spewed it out, they feel the burden is on the audience to understand it and agree." We need to join the real world. http://www.newsweek.com/why-scientists-are-losing-public-relations-war-69571 View in LinkedIn

MANUFACTURING BIOMEDICAL KNOWLEDGE. "Conflicts of interest" - which have been the subject of intense debates over the last two decades. Regardless of the ongoing debate and attempts by numerous editors to reign in conflicts of interest, the current state of affairs is still far from satisfactory, as Chalmers, the past director of the Cochrane Centre, recently noted." http://www.scielosp.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0034-89102009005000076&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en View in LinkedIn

CONTROVERSY SELLS PAPERS. "In one study of U.S. media, Max and Jules Boykoff found that more than half of all stories on global warming from 1988 through 2002 gave equal time to denialists, with another 35 percent giving space to them while recognizing the consensus view." http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/manufactured-ignorance View in LinkedIn

SILENCED SPRING. "We find an excellent account of revisionist attacks on Rachel Carson (now blamed for deaths from the banning of DDT), and a good explanation of the links between recent authors of antienvironmentalist screeds and right-wing think tanks." http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/manufactured-ignorance View in LinkedIn

BOOKS ON NEWSPEAK. "David Michaels’s Doubt Is Their Product (2008), Ross Gelbspan’s The Heat Is On (1997), James Hoggan’s Climate Cover-Up (2009), Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science (2009), David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz’s Deceit and Denial (2002), Robert Procter, Cancer Wars (1995)." http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/manufactured-ignorance View in LinkedIn

WHY TRUTH HIJACKERS ARE PERSUASIVE. "First, they skillfully invoke values that are shared by the scientific community and the American public alike, like free speech, skeptical inquiry; (2) highly specialized scientific experts can’t spare the time to engage in careful public communication; (3) any dissent by any scientist is then seen as evidence that there’s no consensus." http://lnkd.in/dazmtq2 View in LinkedIn

"A BLACK SWAN EVENT is an event in human history that was unprecedented and unexpected at the point in time it occurred. However, after evaluating the surrounding context, domain experts (and in some cases even laymen) can usually conclude: “it was bound to happen”. http://blackswanevents.org/?page_id=26 View in LinkedIn

STATISTICAL OUTLIERS. "The Black Swan application aids users in finding Black Swan events throughout modern history. For this purpose, the application identifies outliers in statistical data and associates them with historic events. An outlier is a point in a statistic that does not “fit” in the overall trend, e.g., an inflection point in a curve." http://blackswanevents.org/?page_id=26 View in LinkedIn

"THE BLACK SWAN: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a book by the essayist, scholar and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book focuses on the extreme impact of certain kinds of rare and unpredictable events (outliers) and humans' tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events retrospectively. This theory has since become known as the black swan theory." http://lnkd.in/daxa8Xs View in LinkedIn

"PROPERTIES OF A BLACK SWAN: the Black Swan is a rare event; it has a massive impact; it has retrospective predictability. While most people are happy with thinking about what they do know, Taleb takes great pains throughout The Black Swan to try and focus his readers on what we don't know — which is far more relevant to the black swan problem." http://lnkd.in/dMvr7Ae View in LinkedIn