- Tale of two workers. “Worker A is in the bottom quintile of income. . . .Worker B is in the upper quintile of income. . . .Worker A is a college drop-out. . . . .Worker B has a Bachelor of Arts, a Masters, and a doctorate.”
- Citizen scientists. “More than a decade ago, in hopes of advancing research on the rare genetic disease that afflicts her children, Sharon Terry let two different researchers draw their blood for study. But when she asked for the results of the investigations, the scientists gave her a startling response. Information generated from her own children’s DNA, they said, didn’t belong to her.”
- Ten academic frauds.
Thanks to Tucker Max, Dave Lull and Chuck Currie.
I just want to thank you for continuing to call attention to academic fraud.
Did you see this story on the mouse research diet?
https://blog.cholesterol-and-health.com/2011/11/this-just-in-infamous-lard-based-high.html
Just curious to hear what appealed about the “Tale of Two Workers.” It’s a cute reversal, but the reversal changes the way you view the worker”s” — the initial framing describes two situations that anyone would describe as typical, and the twist turns it into a situation that anyone would describe as exceptional. Which supports the point made at the end, that “it’s all in how you tell the story,” but also vitiates the apparent point of the story, which is that more fortunate people aren’t obliged to help less fortunate people because less fortunate people could do it themselves if they tried. (A proof of principle doesn’t necessarily mean much if the phenomenon still doesn’t happen very often. It may be true that anyone could write the next Harry Potter, but no amount of hard work will change the fact that most people won’t.)
Of course, the implied conservative/libertarian moral may be more mine than the author’s. And I do think it’s interesting how Worker A’s “disadvantage” and Worker B’s “advantage” are not as incompatible as they seem when the framing implicitly opposes them. That might be the most interesting thing about the story.
“A tale of two workers” was a very cool and creative story. A movie having a twist is par for the course, but this story had two, and did it in a few minutes instead of a few hours.
A more interesting tale than the “two workers” is the story of the massive, silent campaign to push memes like this, to distract from the obscene concentration of societal wealth in the hands of the top .1% of the population — largely financial titans and CEOs (with lapdog compensation committees.)
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/inequality-trends-in-one-picture/
Just curious to hear what appealed about the “Tale of Two Workers.”
I just thought it’s a good story. The ending surprised me. If I wanted to draw some lesson from it, it wouldn’t be what you say (“more fortunate people aren’t obliged to help less fortunate people because less fortunate people could do it themselves if they tried”); it would be that life is less predictable than we usually assume.
the story of the massive, silent campaign to push memes like this, to distract from the obscene concentration of societal wealth in the hands of the top .1% of the population
Where is this story told? It’s not told in the link you provided.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjgBLwH3Wc&feature=youtu.be
this medical doctor changed her diet and reversed her MS symptoms so that she was able to walk again, after having been wheelchair-bound.
Seth, that link spoke more to the concentration of wealth. Here are some more links that speak more to the propaganda effort:
https://guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/07/koch-brothers-database-2012-election
https://bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-02/koch-brothers-flout-law-getting-richer-with-secret-iran-sales.html
https://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/06/nation/la-na-koch-brothers-20110206
https://huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/04/herman-cain-koch-brothers_n_1076835.html
https://nytimes.com/2011/02/22/us/22koch.html?pagewanted=all
https://thenation.com/blog/165077/koch-brothers-alec-and-savage-assault-democracy