My previous post discussed the myths surrounding the “replication crisis” in psychology/neuroscience research. As usual, it became way too long and I didn’t even cover several additional points I wanted to mention. I will leave most of these for a later post in which I will speculate about why failed replications, papers about incorrect/questionable procedures, and other actions by the Holy Warriors for Research Truth cause such a lot of bad blood. I will try to be quick in that one or split it up into parts. Before I can get around to this though, let me briefly (and I am really trying this time!) have a short intermission with practical examples of the largely theoretical and philosophical arguments I made in previous posts.

Science is self-correcting

I’ve said it before but it deserves saying again. Science self-corrects, no matter how much the Crusaders want to whine and claim that…

GP2 Testing, February 2006
GP2 Media Service

I’d expected him to look older. I suppose its only natural with someone you’d been reading about for years, but he’d been such a constant part of the motorsport landscape for such a long time that I’d imagined he’d already be the finished article. He’d been a mini-megastar in England since his karting days. Even as a child I remember seeing his face on TV, on the news, on ITV’s karting show with DJ David ‘Kid’ Jensen, Blue Peter, through the pages of Autosport and Motoring News. He was a future world champion. That’s what we’d always been told. That’s what we’d always believed. And here he was, this future F1 superstar. I’d expected him to be taller. I’d expected him to be broader… I’d expected him to look older.

But there he stood on the pitwall in his ASM F3 overalls, a…

When I was in first year in secondary school in 1997, a girl in the year above me was pregnant. She was 14. The only people who I ever heard say anything negative about her were a group of older girls who wore their tiny feet “pro-life” pins on their uniforms with pride. They slagged her behind her back, and said she would be a bad mother. They positioned themselves as the morally superior ones who cared for the baby, but not the unmarried mother. They are the remnants of an Ireland, a quasi-clerical fascist state, that we’d like to believe is in the past, but still lingers on.

The news broke last week of a septic tank filled with the remains of 796 children and babies in Galway. The remains were accumulated from the years 1925 to 1961 and a common cause of death was malnutrition and preventable disease…

I wasn’t going to comment on this, because I thought, it’s obviously horrible.  I thought no human could possibly convince themselves that putting spikes beneath other human beings is an act of mercy. I thought not even the most cold-hearted intellectuals (you know, the ones with hooks for faces, and scars that run across their souls) could see spikes on the ground, and reach the conclusion that they are for the benefit of the homeless.

I was wrong.

There are some in this wonderful world of the armchair genius who believe that putting spikes under the mentally ill is a good thing. They think that if people can’t sleep where they usually do, they will be encouraged to stop sleeping rough. Like, it’s a choice. Imagine Homeless Doug. Doug often sleeps in doorway 34. Doorway 34 isn’t much. But it’s all Doug has. One night Doug returns to…