Comment on Open thread, August 4 - 10, 2014

Tue, 05 Aug 2014 22:25:42 GMT

Most drug new drugs fail clinical trials.

I'd generalize that to something like

collecting published results in medicine, psychology, epidemiology & economics journals gives an unbiased idea of the sizes of the effects they report

which is wrong at least twice over (publication bias and correlation-causation confusion) but is, I suspect, an implicit assumption made by lots of people who only made it to the first stage of traditional rationality (and reason along the lines of "normal people are full of crap, scientists are smarter and do SCIENCE!, so all I need to do to be correct is regurgitate what I find in scientific journals").

Discuss