The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacies
Gary Smith discusses his book, the AI Delusion, and how the pressure to publish or perish corrupts researchBob Marks and Gary Smith offer a range of startling examples of how the pressure to publish drives a lack of rigor — and sometimes honesty — in analyzing and presenting experimental data. The result is a never ending parade of headlines in health and medicine that are unwarranted and often reversed or impossible to replicate.
Shownotes
- 01:00 | Data mining and the origin of the term “Texas Sharpshooter Fallacies”
- 02:00 | Fallacy #1: Multiplying targets
- 03:00 | Drinking coffee and pancreatic cancer
- 04:25 | The profusion of health studies and claims
- 06:07 | Fallacy #2: Drawing the target after shooting
- 07:22 | The pressure in academia to publish or perish
- 07:38 | A story from J. B. Rhine’s ESP lab
- 08:54 | Diederik Stapel and fabricated data
- 09:15 | Spurious correlations in big data
- 10:00 | John Ioannidis, the “decline effect”, and the status of flawed medical research
- 11:20 | The health media’s headline clickbait
Resources
- The AI Delusion by Gary Smith at Amazon.com
- “The Mind of a Con Man” at The New York Times on Diederik Stapel’s academic fraud
- John Ioannidis and the “decline effect” at Wikipedia
