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Sunday, November 01, 2009

Where's the Science at ScienceBlogs?

Andrew Gelman, a respected political scientist and statistician, has expanded his set of blogs and has started writing one at ScienceBlogs, so I decided to see what ScienceBlogs was all about.

It's about a lot of stuff, but science doesn't seem to be particularly prominent. It seems to be more of a place to do religion bashing. Here's four out of the six most recent posts across the many bloggers at ScienceBlogs (all by different bloggers):

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: I Could've had Religion

Ray Comfort meets the Evangelist's Nightmare

Against multiculturalism (multireligionism)

Christopher Hitchens doesn't like Mother Theresa

There's more, but I think my point is made. Four out of the last six. I don't see much "Science" in these, although the boundaries of social science are wide.

Perhaps I should take more of a sample before I give up on the site, but for now I'll pass.

4 comments:

  1. You're not looking hard enough:

    http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2009/10/tiljander.php

    for example :-)

    (I came here via mt, BTW)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Belette, now that I know where to look, maybe I'll look again. ;)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Or try this one:
    http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/11/why_do_we_bad_things.php?utm_source=combinedfeed&utm_medium=rss

    It's a functional MRI study

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  4. Or go back to Effect Measure and read the current post, which includes this observation:

    "... this win-win agreement with labor. It wasn't a concession in the substantive sense because it just contractually commits the hospitals to do what they are either legally or medically required to do, anyway. Of course it isn't always the case that rationality and commonsense prevail. Many hospitals have blithely looked the other way when it came to protecting their workers and patients from infectious disease, either on the grounds that you never give in to labor demands, no matter how warranted or rational, or because it would be too expensive to do what is needed for the sake of their workers and patients.

    It's good to see labor and management working toward a common purpose. It would be even better to see more of it."

    ----
    Now you may think that's sermonizing -- but it's public health in action. Some call public health socialism, but none of those people understand biology or epidemiology or accept that concepts like 'herd immunity' apply to Homo sapiens.

    ReplyDelete