This is just as true in science as in other disciplines:
Two Johns Hopkins economists recently wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled, “Jerome Powell Is Wrong. Printing Money Causes Inflation.” Their argument is that Federal Reserve chair Powell is mistaken in his assertions that there is not a close relationship between money and inflation.
[The economists offered a chart … ]
I learned of this WSJ nonsense via an e-mail from Jay Cordes. Jay is not an economist, but he does know data and he knows that predictions of human behavior are never as precise as indicated in the WSJ:
“Okay, I’m calling bullcrap on that chart below. No “predictions” ever match up that well with reality. What’s the trick?”
The moral is that if you encounter empirical claims that are implausible (like Asian-Americans being prone to heart attacks on the fourth day of every month or hurricanes being deadlier if they have female names), or results that are too good to be true, they probably aren’t true.
Gary Smith, “Detecting BS data: If it’s too good to be true, it probably is” at Mind Matters News (February 28, 2022)
Takehome: Business prof Gary Smith: A recent Wall Street Journal article shows a near-perfect link between inflation and money. But a link that near-perfect raises suspicions. Precise predictions of human behavior are implausible and rarely match up to the far more complicated reality
Oh, while we are here anyway, about the Asian American heart patients and also the hurricanes, see:
The British Medical Journal’s top picks in junk medical science. In its legendary Christmas edition, the Journal highlights the worst offenders. The publicized studies have twisted and tortured data to come up with suspicious or ridiculous conclusions. Here’s how they did it.
and
Female hurricanes: How a mass of hot air became a zombie study. When a reporter first asked me about a study claiming that “Female Hurricanes are Deadlier than Male Hurricanes,” I was sceptical. Do sexist humans die because they don’t take hurricanes with female names seriously? No, the study is seriously flawed.