99% of all numbers provided to support an argument — be it in scientific or popular media — have no value whatsoever unless they come with proper mention of at least the confidence intervals, the size of the sample and its properties, or other means of making reliability comparable such as standard deviation.
For those who know what science means in its very original sense it is obvious that the exact sciences are at least the lesser of two evils. No one wants contused lacerations.
If there was a commandment for “(really) good liars” it might be: You shall not use fallacious arguments. A “bad liar” — heck, who would not want to be bad from time to time — might just as well juggle with fallacies, and hope for the listeners logical illiteracy.
The Fallacy Files is one of Internet’s finest collection of examples of fallacious reasoning, see for instance “appeals to ignorance“. Moreover, Fallacy Files comes with a weblog, a comprehensive taxonomy of logical fallacies, and more.
Bad Science is the tempting apple that does not fall far from the tree of fallacious reasoning. “If you ever doubted the dangers of fallacious reasoning” says Gary N. Curtis, author of the Fallacy Files, you should read Losing the Lottery by Ben Goldacre, “guardian” of Bad Science.
If you’re unlucky enough, fallacious reasoning could put you behind bars for the rest of your life for “murders” you didn’t commit, and which in fact may not be murders at all.
— Gary N. Curtis, Fallacy Files
A nurse called Lucia de Berk has been in prison for 5 years in Holland, convicted of 7 counts of murder and 3 of attempted murder. An unusually large number of people died when she was on shift (…)
— Ben Goldacre, Bad Science
If I myself was only safe from fallacy.
Some say science is about truth. It is not about lies. What could science of science be? The truth about no lies? Says who? And do we know that it is the truth? Isn’t science also about questioning and analysis? Hence, what do we know about analysis of analysis?
Science “refers to a system of acquiring knowledge (…) aimed at finding out the truth” (Wikipedia, 2006-03-03). So we assume that knowledge is not truth. Probably that’s why to know is derived from “view”, as are “vision”, “witness” and the German “Wissen”. What do we know about knowledge?
No, not me. I am a liar.
I am trapped in a feedback loop. Please, don’t cut it!
