secrets-of-mental-math-malestrom

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Secrets of Mental Math
investigating possible scientific fraud there is a boundary problem
in detecting a fraudulent signal within the background noise
of mistakes and sloppiness that is a normal part of the scientific
process. The investigation of research notes in a laboratory affiliated
with Nobel laureate David Baltimore by an independent
committee established by Congress to investigate potential fraud
revealed a surprising number of mistakes. But science is messier
than most people realize. Baltimore was exonerated when it
became clear that there was no purposeful data manipulation.
2. Does this source often make similar claims? Pseudoscientists
have a habit of going well beyond the facts, so when individuals
make numerous extraordinary claims, they may be more than
just iconoclasts. This is a matter of quantitative scaling, since
some great thinkers often go beyond the data in their creative
speculations. Cornell’s Thomas Gold is notorious for his radical
ideas, but he has been right often enough that other scientists
listen to what he has to say. Gold proposes, for example, that oil
is not a fossil fuel at all, but the by-product of a deep hot biosphere.
Hardly any earth scientists I have spoken with take this
thesis seriously, yet they do not consider Gold a crank. What we
are looking for here is a pattern of fringe thinking that consistently
ignores or distorts data.
3. Have the claims been verified by another source? Typically
pseudoscientists will make statements that are unverified, or
verified by a source within their own belief circle. We must ask
who is checking the claims, and even who is checking the checkers.
The biggest problem with the cold fusion debacle, for example,
was not that scientists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischman
were wrong; it was that they announced their spectacular discovery
before it was verified by other laboratories (at a press