The Brewing Crisis in Science

Henry Miller:

The Golden Goose Award makes use of a formal fallacy, a pattern of reasoning that is illogical and wrong, called "asserting the consequent." It takes the form of: "If A, then B. B, therefore, A." An example would be: "If Warren Buffett owned the British Crown Jewels, he would be rich. Buffett is rich; therefore, he owns the Crown Jewels." The rationale for the award seems to be, "Some criticism of federally-funded research projects has been uninformed and ill-advised. People continue to criticize federally funded projects; therefore, their views are uninformed and ill-advised."

It's astonishing that some of the projects awarded passed any kind of peer-review for merit. The first two awards went to the National Science Foundation. The first NSF grant, for $84,000, was intended to discover why people fall in love. The second, for $500,000 (part of which was from two other federal agencies), was to determine which stimuli cause rats, monkeys, and humans to bite and clench their jaws.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at July 7, 2012 2:58 AM
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