Tag: Experts

Modern politicians lack the personal authority of ancient kings and so they appeal to The Science to impose their schemes on the population. This is how science becomes corrupted by politics, says Prof James Alexander.

Britain’s leading scientific journal, Nature, has published an article declaring that public health "has not been politicised nearly enough" and must therefore be "aggressively" politicised. Yes, you read that right.

At the start of the pandemic, leading virologists tried to dismiss the lab leak as a "conspiracy theory". A new poll has found that in 25 of 26 countries, more people believe the lab leak than the natural origin theory.

Another study has found that social scientists can't forecast better than laymen or simple models. While they might be able to explain what *has* happened, they don't have much insight into what *will* happen.

Social scientists were asked to predict how effective different interventions would be at changing people's behaviour. They did worse than a simple model that said none of the interventions would work.

How much can we trust peer review? A new study finds that only 23% of reviewers say "reject" when a paper has a Nobel Prize winner on it, but 65% say "reject" when the same paper is authored by an unknown researcher.

A study has found that social scientists are no better than laymen at forecasting social change in the US. This highlights a problem with "expertise": in many domains, it doesn't line up with credentials.

Western countries are planning to impose a price cap on Russian oil. But this is deeply unserious idea. If such ‘magic beans’ tactics worked, they would have been used by oil consumers against OPEC long ago.

A new freedom of information request has revealed that *another* author of the infamous Lancet letter, which referred to "conspiracy theories" about Covid origins, gave the lab leak credence in a private email.

The epiforecast group at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine recently held a competition to forecast cases and deaths. They found that self-declared experts performed slightly worse than non-experts.