Assorted Links

• Top ten excuses for climate scientists behaving badly. For example, “the emails are old” and “the timing is suspicious”.
• Scientific retractions are increasing. My guess is that retractions are increasing because scientific work has become easier to check. Tools are cheaper, for example.
• More Dutch scientific misconduct. “Professor Poldermans published more than 600 scientific papers in a wide range of journals, including JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine.”
• The next time someone praises “evidence-based medicine”, ask them: What about Accutane? It illustrates how evidence-based medicine encourages dangerous drugs. You can’t make lots of money from cheap, time-tested things that we know to be safe (such as dietary changes) so the drug industry revolves around things that are not time-tested and therefore dangerous — far more dangerous than dietary changes. Evidence-based medicine, which says that certain tests (expensive) are much better than other tests (cheap), provides cover for this. Because the required tests are so expensive, they are allowed to be short.

Thanks to Allan Jackson.