BPSDB
Yes, yes, naturally I realize that it isn’t actually meant as praise, it is clearly meant to be an insult.
However, Dr Curry really needs to actually read what she praises and what she condemns (like that was news).
What Dr Curry has done is cite “Science Abuse” on the site “Muck and Mystery” and say “the best way I can characterize this is the “anti-Greenfyre.”
The piece “Science Abuse” alleges to critique Chris Mooney’s recent Mother Jones piece “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science“. What M&M actually does is:
- make many frankly ridiculous and idiotic claims (all unsupported).
- make almost no reference to actual facts, and none for the important points.
- cite & misrepresent popular media articles as evidence of problems with the scientific literature, and relies on a source that repeats (is the source of?) those errors
- is rife with logic failures: Straw Man, Red Herring, False Analogy, Circumstantial Ad Hominems, Hasty Generalizations (to name but a few).
- etc
About the only bits that make for semi-coherent reading are cribbed from this piece, which in turn bases it’s entire case on some Cherry Picked examples and a single study which in turn, if you actually read it, is a work that uses modeling (the irony), basing it’s work on three studies from the rather narrow sub-sub-sub-discipline of Genetic Associations.
I guess the blog “M&M” got named for consisting largely of a soft, brown substance coated with a colourful, nutritionless veneer? I leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions from the fact that Dr Curry seems to think the M&M piece is worth reading.
So in summary, if we flip those around (ie M&M is the anti-Greenfyre), then what Dr Curry is really saying is that she is characterizing Greenfyre’s as:
- having coherent, logical arguments
- being evidence and fact based
- claims made are substantiated with credible sources
- is accurate, relevant and rational
I don’t know what to say. Thank you Dr Curry, thank you, but really, there are so many out there who are just as, if not much more deserving. Many, many good people who write coherent, fact based blogs, and who richly deserve the high compliment that being casually dismissed by you truly is. I wear it as an expletive of honour.
In it’s short life this blog has received
The Woodie Gutherie Award for a Thinking Blogger
The Tea Bagger Bury List of Achievement
The PopTart’s Incoherent Slander Campaign of Merit
and now, the much coveted
Ass Backwards Terminally Bewildered Curry Prize
I’m blushing … it really is all too much. I’d like to thank Mom …
Greenfyre's 