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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

>>>First Things is published by The Institute on Religion and Public Life, an interreligious, nonpartisan research and education institute whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.

I'm not quite sure what to think about the bias we might be seeing in this post from this site. This is quite a long essay and there's not a single link on a site that seems like it would be likely to be quite biased. I'm not saying anything is wrong with this, but I guess just consider the source? It could very well be fine.

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Hi, I'm the author. Just wanted to pop in and say:

(1) I originally had the thing stuffed full of citations and links, but since they wanted to print it in the paper magazine, we stripped all those out. If you want a reference for any particular claim, I'm happy to provide.

(2) First Things didn't pressure me to make any content or editorial modifications to the article. The sole exception was one or two more technical points that they asked me to cut for length and flow concerns (and because many readers don't have a quantitative background).

Any bias in there is purely mine.

It might be helpful to compile a list of those citations online (your own website, perhaps?). This is the sort of essay that might get shared around a whole bunch....it would be a shame for its impact to be lessened because of the inevitable judgment people will have for the hosting publication.

It may be a perfect example of the "secular bias" the publication references, but I too groaned inwardly when I went to check out the "about" section after completing my read. Not because I changed my mind on the content of the article, but because I was imagining sharing it and having to deal with an argument about publication bias (in the media) for an essay about (among other things) publication bia (in the sciences)

That's a great point, I'll try to put something together.

I was interested in finding the paper from which you got this quote: "some non-reproducible preclinical papers had spawned an entire field".

Seems to be from: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a...

That's a fair point - I was also surprised that the essay appeared in firstthings. However, the essay is really good, and the author is spot on about a lot of his critiques.

Biased against what? Science? How long until we get rid of the 'religion is against science' narrative?

A fair question but one that requires significant qualification on what the virtues and competencies of each are. If you consider religion in its entirety there are elements that certainly do compete and contradict scientific endeavour. I enjoyed the book Religion for Athiests by Alain de Botton on qualifying those virtues of religion from the perspective of one who isn't.

This is a well-known issue in scientific circles. The seminal paper of Ioannidis: http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...

I saw the nane of the institute in the certificate so knew the context of the article. Still, i found it to be one of the best accounts of current scientific practice i 've read in years.

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