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New York Times

The New York Times runs an “aliens are maybe real” story

There are many total mysteries out there. We need more to go on than mere mystery to take aliens seriously. One remembers the astronomer who convinced himself recently that space detritus Oumuamua was an extraterrestrial light sail and accused the rest of us of being too dumb to see that. Read More ›

At the New York Times: Defending the failures of social science as “science”

Even while prominent people in that field are coming to terms with the problem. From a New York Times science writer: It is one thing to frisk the studies appearing almost daily in journals that form the current back-and-forth of behavior research. It is somewhat different to call out experiments that became classics — and world-famous outside of psychology — because they dramatized something people recognized in themselves and in others. They live in the common culture as powerful metaphors, explanations for aspects of our behavior that we sense are true and that are captured somehow in a laboratory mini-drama constructed by an inventive researcher, or research team. Huh? Whether many people recognized something in themselves or not, the experiments Read More ›