Lunch at the Labs

Some web links I found to be of interest:

• The Psychiatric Drug Crisis

  Despite their continued failure to understand how psychiatric drugs work, doctors continue to tell patients that their troubles are the result of chemical imbalances in their brains. As Frank Ayd pointed out, this explanation helps reassure patients even as it encourages them to take their medicine, and it fits in perfectly with our expectation that doctors will seek out and destroy the chemical villains responsible for all of our suffering, both physical and mental. The theory may not work as science, but it is a devastatingly effective myth.

• Richard Posner Explains SEC Refusal to Act in Lehman Brothers Case

  Judge Richard Posner in a 1985 Columbia Law Review article wrote:

  This means that the criminal law is designed primarily for the nonaffluent; the affluent are kept in line, for the most part, by tort law. This may seem to be a left-wing kind of suggestion ("criminal law keeps the lid on the lower classes"), but it is not. It is efficient to use different sanctions depending on an offender's wealth.

• Study proves that politics and math are incompatible
  People were more likely to solve a problem incorrectly when it conflicted with their political beliefs

  But according to Yale law professor Dan Kahan, it's easier than we think for reasonable people to trick themselves into reaching unreasonable conclusions. Kahan and his team found that, when it comes to controversial issues, people's ability to do math is impacted by their political beliefs.

• On being `right' in science
  Chris Holdgraf in PLOS Blogs: Diverse Perspectives on Science and Medicine

  As an academic, I've often heard that "the facts speak for themselves", or that one need only to "look at the data" in order to see the truth. Unfortunately, experience has taught me that neither of these statements is correct. Facts are always colored by the context in which they are presented, and data can be massaged and molded to tell almost any story you want. And so what if you're correct, if nobody will pay attention to you in the first place?

• Life and Death in Assisted Living
  ProPublica and PBS Frontline documentary

  When things go wrong in assisted living, people can pay with their dignity, and sometimes with their lives.

• The Problem with the Neuroscience Backlash
  "Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience," by Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld

  If critics are too pessimistic about what the future holds, they are right about one thing: over the past decade, neuroscience has become overprivileged as a method of examining the mind. Journalists, courts, and sometimes even scientists seem to believe that a brain scan can be more telling than a profile of an individual's behavior. Perhaps as neuroscience progresses, it is possible for objective, physiological assessment of the brain to win out as the ultimate arbiter of truth when it comes to the mind. But that's a long way off, if it ever will be possible at all.

• New meta-analysis checks the correlation between intelligence and faith
  First systematic analysis of its kind even proposes reasons for the negative correlation.

  ... if you look at the studies conducted over the past century, you will find that those with religious beliefs will, on the whole, score lower on tests of intelligence.