Respectful Insolence
Archives for March 9, 2011
You, my readers, have been complaining about flakiness in Sb that goes above and beyond the usual technical flakiness of the site. So have many other readers, in particular PZ’s. After a couple of days where the blog loaded slow as the proverbial molasses in Minnesota in January, our benevolent but not particularly communicative overlords…
Via Stupid Evil Bastard, here’s a great cartoon that points out the red flags that indicate most of the major red flags of quackery (click to embiggen and see the whole cartoon): I have to admit. The main ones are all there.
Confusing correlation with causation. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. These are two of the most common errors human beings make. Indeed, they’re natural errors that our brains appear hard-wired to make, and, without scientific training, it’s virtually impossible to avoid making the conclusion that, because two occurrences correlate with each other they must be related…