Words per person year and intellectual rigor
Continuing my cursory exploration of semiotics and post-modern thought, I'm struck by the similarity between writing in those traditions, and picking up women. The most-important traits for practitioners of both are energy, enthusiasm, and confidence. In support of this proposition, here is a photo of Slavoj Zizek at his 2006 wedding:

Having philosophical or logical rigor, or demonstrating the usefulness of your ideas using empirical data, does not seem to provide a similar advantage, despite taking a lot of time.
I speculate that semiotics and post-modernism (which often go hand-in-hand) became popular by natural selection. They provide specialized terminologies which give the impression of rigorous thought without requiring actual rigor. People who use them can thus out-publish their more-careful competitors. So post-modernism tends to drive rigorous thought out of any field it enters.
(It's possible to combine post-modern ideas and a time-consuming empirical approach, as Thomas Kuhn did in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But it's uncommon.)
If rigorous thought significantly reduces publication rate, we should find that the rigor of a field or a person correlates inversely with words per person-year. Establishing that fact alone, combined with the emphasis on publication in academics, would lead us to expect that any approach that allowed one to fake or dispense with intellectual rigor in a field would rapidly take over that field.
Too good to be true
A friend recently posted a link on his Facebook page to an informational graphic about the alleged link between the MMR vaccine and autism. It said, if I recall correctly, that out of 60 studies on the matter, not one had indicated a link.
Presumably, with 95% confidence.
This bothered me. What are the odds, supposing there is no link between X and Y, of conducting 60 studies of the matter, and of all 60 concluding, with 95% confidence, that there is no link between X and Y?
Answer: .95 ^ 60 = .046. (Use the first term of the binomial distribution.)
So if it were in fact true that 60 out of 60 studies failed to find a link between vaccines and autism at 95% confidence, this would prove, with 95% confidence, that studies in the literature are biased against finding a link between vaccines and autism.
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