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Comic strip writer Randall Munroe illustrated some of the failings of this threshold for scientific publication: The comic shows some scientists testing whether jelly beans cause acne. After finding no link, someone recommends they test different colors individually. After going through numerous colors, from salmon to orange, none are found to be related to acne, except for one: The green jelly beans are found to be linked to acne, with a p-value less than 0.05. But how many colors were examined? Twenty. And yet, explaining that this might be due to chance does little to prevent the headline declaring jelly beans linked to acne. John Maynard Smith, a renowned evolutionary biologist, once pithily summarized this approach: “Statistics is the science that lets you do twenty experiments a year and publish one false result in Nature.”
The Half-Life of Facts
Samuel Arbesman
Although leaders come in many varieties, one dynamic is fairly universal: the courtiers (minus the cynical types, see below) will tend to idealize those in power. They will see their leaders as smarter, cleverer, more perfect than is the reality. This will make it easier for them to justify their fawning behavior. This dynamic is similar to what we all experienced in childhood: we idealized our parents in order to feel more secure about the power they had over us. It was too frightening to imagine our parents as weak or incompetent.
The Laws of Human Nature
Robert Greene
“Not everything that counts can be counted,” goes a famous saying, “and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Superforecasting
Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner
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