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Vaguely interesting (Mar 7)

(1)  “If there’s one takeaway from the ASA statement, it’s that p-values are … simply one piece of a puzzle that should be considered in the context of other evidence.”

(2)  “‘At this point we have to start over and say, This is Year One,’ says Inzlicht, referring not just to the sum total of ego depletion research, but to the entire field of social psychology.” (Kurzban has been pointing out for years now that ego depletion research doesn’t hold up.)

(3)  “As [evidence-based medicine] became more influential, it was also hijacked to serve agendas different from what it originally aimed for. Influential randomized trials are largely done by and for the benefit of the industry. Meta-analyses and guidelines have become a factory, mostly also serving vested interests. National and federal research funds are funneled almost exclusively to research with little relevance to health outcomes. We have supported the growth of principal investigators who excel primarily as managers absorbing more money. Diagnosis and prognosis research and efforts to individualize treatment have fueled recurrent spurious promises. Risk factor epidemiology has excelled in salami-sliced data-dredged papers with gift authorship and has become adept to dictating policy from spurious evidence. Under market pressure, clinical medicine has been transformed to finance-based medicine. In many places, medicine and health care are wasting societal resources and becoming a threat to human well-being. Science denialism and quacks are also flourishing and leading more people astray in their life choices, including health.”

(4)  “By making race and nationalism the text rather than the subtext of Republican politics, Trump threatens not only the party’s agenda but the self-conception of its intellectual class.”

(5)  “With the rise of Donald Trump, most of the media attention during this primary season has focused on the wide rifts within the Republican Party. But that’s obscured the extent to which the 2016 presidential primary is also exposing important divisions in the Democratic Party.”