Bob Marks and Gary Smith offer a range of startling examples of how the pressure to publish drives a lack of rigor — and sometimes honesty — in analyzing and presenting experimental data. The result is a never ending parade of headlines in health and medicine that are unwarranted and often reversed or impossible to replicate.

Shownotes

01:00 | Data mining and the origin of the term “Texas Sharpshooter Fallacies”02:00 | Fallacy #1: Multiplying targets03:00 | Drinking coffee and pancreatic cancer04:25 | The profusion of health studies and claims06:07 | Fallacy #2: Drawing the target after shooting07:22 | The pressure in academia to publish or perish07:38 | A story from J.P. Ryan’s ESP (Environmental Sample Processor) lab08:54 | Diederik Stapel and fabricated data09:15 | Spurious correlations in big data10:00 | John Ioannidis, the “decline effect”, and the status of flawed medical research11:20 | The health media’s headline clickbait

Resources

The AI Delusion by Gary Smith at Amazon.com“The Mind of a Con Man” at The New York Times on Diederik Stapel’s academic fraudJohn Ioannidis and the “decline effect” at Wikipedia