Debunking Denialism

Are we rapidly approaching a technological singularity where intelligent computers and robots recursively self-improve into a superintelligent paperclip maker who annihilate the planet and all life on it in order to fill the universe with more paperclips? Is the apparent cosmic silence strong evidence that the origin of life was nearly impossible? Can the human mind survive destructive teleportation or uploading to computer servers and will self-replicating nanobots consume all life on earth? Or is this just the last in a long list of flawed doomsday prophecies that are based on false empirical premises, faulty logic, technobabble and pseudoscience?

A recently published book by Olle Häggström, Professor of mathematical statistics at Chalmers University of Technology, called Here Be Dragons attempts to address some of these issues. The different writings by Häggström have been critically examined on this website before, particularly his uncompromising defense of statistical significance, p values and the NHST procedure. In his defense, Häggström has written decisive refutations of the creationist abuse of mathematics, climate change denialists and anti-science postmodernists.

In this first installment, we take a closer critical look at if ancients maps really had dragons designating dangerous places, threat of biological weapons of mass destruction, the case of Stanislav Petrov and faulty warning systems for nuclear attacks, dual use of concern research and the Soviet offensive bio-weapons program, and his objections to the way science funding is done by the Swedish Research Council. Although credit is given where credit is due for his defense of mainstream climate science and his criticisms of geoengineering projects, his uncritical discussion of induced meat intolerance is taken to task.

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Looks like Häggström has decided to re-join the crucial discussion of p values and NHST again, despite refusing to continue after our last encounter because he claimed (without evidence) that my writings were a “self-parody”. This is reminiscent of childish and narcissistic posters on Internet forums who writes a post about how they are leaving the forum because of this or that perceived insult, yet stays around to continue posting. Tiresome and pathetic, especially since he apparently considers a link to the ASA position statement on Twitter to be equivalent to “spewing Twitter bile”. Talk about being easily offended to even the smallest amount of (fair) criticism.

Häggström recently managed to get a paper of his defense of NHST published in the journal Educational and Psychological Measurement. Perhaps “managed” is not quite the correct word, as it is a journal with a very low impact factor of 1.154 and is either in the middle or the bottom half of journals in mathematical psychology (8 out of 13), educational psychology (30 out of 50) and interdisciplinary applications of mathematics (46 out of 99). Perhaps a low quality psychology journal is the only place Häggström can get his rabid defense of NHST published? Well, that and a paper from a conference held in Poland. Not exactly impressive stuff.

Ironically, at the very same day he wrote his blog post about his new “paper”, the prestigious American Statistical Association published a position statement severely criticizing NHST. A previous article on this blog discusses several aspects of it in greater detail. Häggström claims that he agrees with the ASA, yet his paper in EPM attempts to refute NHST critics, both those he call “strongly anti-NHST” and those he labels “weakly anti-NHST”.

Some of the problems with new NHST defense by Häggström

There are too many errors and problems in his paper to recount in this space, but we can look closer at a couple of them:

(1) Häggström presents the NHST situation as a debate, thereby committing the fallacy of false balance.

There is no debate about NHST. The vast majority of papers published discussing NHST are very critical and there have been hundreds and hundreds of such papers published in the past 20 years. Today, there are hardly any papers published defending NHST and those that do defend NHST are few and far between. This shows that Häggström does not have a sufficient command of the NHST literature which is, as we shall see, a recurring theme. It also demonstrates that he most likely deliberately deploys a pseudoscientific debating methods against his opponents called false balance. This is because he, as a self-identified scientific skeptic with substantial experience from the fight against climate change denialists, known full well that it is socially effective to attempt to undermine the scientific consensus position by portraying it as if there were a debate with two equally legitimate sides. It is not.

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The edifice of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is shaken to its core once more. On March 6th, the American Statistical Association (ASA) revealed to the world that they’d had enough. For the first time in its history since being founded in 1839, they published a position statement and issued recommendations on a statistical issue. This issue was, of course, p values and statistical significance. The position statement came in the form of a paper in one of their journals called American Statistician, together with a press release on the ASA website. The executive director of ASA, Ron Wasserstein, also gave an interview with Alison McCook at the website Retraction Watch and the Nature website has a news item about it.

What was the central point of the position statement?

The press release (p. 1) summed it up quite nicely:

“The p-value was never intended to be a substitute for scientific reasoning,” said Ron Wasserstein, the ASA’s executive director. “Well-reasoned statistical arguments contain much more than the value of a single number and whether that number exceeds an arbitrary threshold. The ASA statement is intended to steer research into a ‘post p <0.05 era.'"

In other words, ASA acknowledges that p values was not supposed to be the central way to evaluate research results, that basing conclusions on p values and especially if the results are statistically significant or not cannot be considered well-reasoned and finally, that the scientific community should move in a direction that severely de-emphasize p values and statistical significance. Coming from a world-renowned statistical association, this is a stunning indictment of the mindless NHST ritual.

The final paragraph of the preamble to the position statement (p. 6) also points out that this criticism of NHST is not new:

Let’s be clear. Nothing in the ASA statement is new. Statisticians and others have been sounding the alarm about these matters for decades, to little avail. We hoped that a statement from the world’s largest professional association of statisticians would open a fresh discussion and draw renewed and vigorous attention to changing the practice of science with regards to the use of statistical inference.

ASA seems to share the sentiment among many critics of NHST, namely that there are several valid objections to NHST and that these have been raised as very serious problems for many decades with very little progress.

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It is time for another entry in the mailbag series where I answer feedback email from readers and others. If you want to send me a question, comment or any other kind of feedback, please do so using the contact form on the about page.

Nothing in the world is 100% safe or 100% effective. Everything you do carries some degree of risk: you can get hit by a car at a pedestrian crossing, choke when drinking water, accidentally fall when walking on gravel and so on. The challenge is to figure out if the benefits of something outweigh the risks, and if that is the case, then the product is reasonably safe and effective. It the risks clearly outweigh the benefits, the product is unsafe or ineffective.

These challenges are given substantial attention in the research and development of all medical products and certainly vaccines. This is due to several reasons: a dangerous product would be unlikely to pass the stringent regulatory checks and safeguards, a dangerous vaccine would just be pulled of the market, there is a very small profit margin for vaccines compared with other products (since most vaccines are only given once or a couple of times during life compared with other products that need to be taken every day) etc.

There are real risks with vaccines (as with any medical product), but these are either mild or very, very rare. However, what greatly irritates scientists, medical doctors and scientific skeptics is that anti-vaccine activists make up imaginary risks that are either enormously scientifically implausible (that smallpox vaccines turned people into cows) or have been repeatedly refuted by a massive amount of scientific research (such as most modern anti-vaccine claim). Read more of this post

Today, mainstream media is increasingly distrusted. One aspect of this is their enormously substandard reporting on science and frequent scientific errors in other areas.

Previously, we have examined an article written by journalist and columnist Lisa Magnusson, whereby she claimed that blood donation rules where “pure moralism”. In reality, there is substantial evidence for eligibility criteria, coming both from governmental agencies, independent experts and non-governmental activist groups. Unfortunately, she has repeated this kind of failure to fact-check in yet another article, this time about antibiotics.

In her editorial, Magnusson makes several scientific errors. She claims that antibiotic resistance makes bacteria spread uncontrollably, despite the fact that the largest decline occurred before antibiotics. She blames the antibiotic usage in the animal industry which she claims is given to healthy animals, but this was made illegal in Sweden for almost 30 years ago, and illegal in the entire EU 10 years ago. She also ignores the fact that the most common antibiotics in the Swedish animal industry have very little overlap with the kinds of antibiotics that are used in therapeutic settings, that these resistance genes commonly occur in nature already, and that humans use 4-7x more antibiotics than are used in the meant industry. Magnusson also implies that antibiotics treat inflammation, but this is rarely the case and fails to acknowledge that the celebrity artist herself clearly says that she uses antibiotics for her acne primarily for vanity. Read more of this post