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Crows recognize human faces and hold grudges against those who have threatened or mistreated them. They even pass these grudges along to their fellow crows.
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It’s what separates us from the animals …. Except the weasel.”
the most important principle in bullshit studies is Brandolini’s principle.
“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than [that needed] to produce it.”
So here we have a hypothesis that has been as thoroughly discredited as anything in the scientific literature. It causes serious harm to public health. And yet it will not go away.
This is Brandolini’s principle at work.
The computer security professional posting to a tech forum could be a kid in his mom’s basement. A fourteen-year-old girl in a chat room could be an undercover cop. The oil heiress in your in-box is undoubtedly a scam artist.
what if someone argued that smoking doesn’t cause cancer—but rather that cancer causes smoking? Crazy as it sounds, this is precisely what Ronald A. Fisher, one of the greatest statisticians of all time, tried to argue.
If migrating geese arrive in early September every year and coho salmon begin to run later in the month, we might assume that the geese have something to do with calling the fish up the rivers.
While accurate, you’re unlikely to hear a talking reptile say something like this in a Super Bowl commercial.fn3
most likely, the majority of your friends have more friends than you do. This is not true merely because you are the kind of person who reads a book about bullshit for fun;
What are the consequences of using training data that treats sexual preference as binary (gay or straight) instead of as a continuum?
In addition to passing their genes to their offspring, parents sometimes pass a second layer of nongenetic information about what genes to activate, when. This became known as epigenetics.
“Astronaut’s DNA No Longer Matches That of His Identical Twin, NASA Finds,”
On Twitter, Scott Kelly joked, “What? My DNA changed by 7%! Who knew? I just learned about it in this article.
A chimpanzee’s genome is only 2 percent different from a human’s. In fact, Kelly’s genes themselves didn’t change. The way his genes were expressed did. In other words, there were persistent changes in the rates at which about 7 percent of his (unchanged) genes were being translated into proteins.
At a May 2018 hearing of the US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, Representative Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) speculated that perhaps rising sea levels could be attributed to rocks falling into the ocean.
It is comforting that like Aesop’s crow,fn6 Representative Brooks understands the consequences of putting rocks in water.
when the candidate is a woman, letter writers are more likely to hedge in their assessments, more likely to mention the candidate’s personal life, and less likely to describe the candidate as standing out above other applicants. These gender differences in recommendation letters could be driving some of the gender inequality
writers use words associated with exceptionalism and research ability when describing men, and words associated with diligence, teamwork, and teaching when describing women.
What’s a well-actually guy? It’s the guy who interrupts a conversation to demonstrate his own cleverness by pointing out some irrelevant factoid that renders the speaker incorrect on a technicality.
