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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
Carl Sagan was a coauthor of the first paper warning of a nuclear winter, and when he campaigned for a nuclear freeze by trying to generate “fear, then belief, then response,” he was advised by an arms-control expert, “If you think that the mere prospect of the end of the world is sufficient to change thinking in Washington and Moscow you clearly haven’t spent much time in either of those places.”
Enlightenment Now
Steven Pinker
you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.
Thinking in Systems
Donella H. Meadows
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