John Oliver had a really nice piece on this about a year ago. The problem is three-fold:
- Scientists use really small sample sizes to make studies
- They do some p-hacking: try a bunch of different things over the smallish sample and find something that correlates
- Scientists have way more financial incentive to perform new studies than replication studies trying to confirm the results of another.
Thanks for this!
The hilarious thing is John Oliver does the exact same thing by carefully controlling the narrative on his show. =)
He started out very fair and objective, and turned into a regressive left mouthpiece. It was one of my favorite shows season 1 until he created his own echo chamber, just like he talks about here!
You can push almost any narrative without lying, simply by intellectually dishonest omission.
This is absolutely true. He did a piece on Daily Fantasy Sports and most of what he said was accurate, but he missed the forest for the trees, and afterwards it calls into question basically every piece he does.
I like to use steelmaning - something I first heard of from @neilstrauss and Charles Darwin-- to strengthen arguments instead of omission. Unlike a strawman where you take the flimsy version of a criticism, you take the strongest possible version of a counterargument and defeat that. The main issue for John Oliver doing that is time -- he only has ~10 minutes for his feature story. That's not really an excuse for blatant omissions and lots of strawmans, but it's hard to fully cover complex issues in a short time.
I still think overall he does a great job of pointing out injustice, but it's always worth digging deeper and looking into it from the other side.
I've never heard this term before, but it's my normal debate tactic. It saves a lot of time and effectively lets you argue both sides of the argument in "good faith", rending the debate process hopefully shorter. If my position isn't clearly superior to the "steelman'ed" one, then I know I may need to switch sides.
John Oliver is cringe worthy even on this one but the general gist is more or less on track. If only he was consistent.
He refutes himself in shows after this one citing social and psychological studies in order to refute Trump and his politics. Even in this video I can find 4-5 instances where he is intellectually dishonest with other parts of the clip.