Category
11 articles
One small survey goes in, forty identical headlines come out. We follow a single study's journey through the American news machine and map exactly where the skepticism should have kicked in — and didn't.
Every year, some brewery walks away with a medal and a marketing budget built on the phrase 'Best Beer in America.' Here's what those competitions actually measure — and why the honest answer is 'a handful of thirsty judges on one afternoon.'
Open-label placebo trials keep producing a result that shouldn't exist: patients get better from pills they know are empty. Here's why that finding is messier than the headlines suggest — and what it exposes about the sacred architecture of the randomized controlled trial.
Sugar pills keep winning, and it's not because they're magical. It's because the bar they're measured against — the humble placebo response — has been quietly climbing for decades. Here's what that means for every 'breakthrough drug' headline you'll read this year.
That 4.9-star taco truck with a dozen reviews and the 3.8-star diner with three thousand are telling you less than you think. Here's how sample size, Bayesian smoothing, and a little review gaming decide where you eat lunch.
Every summer, a record-breaking heatwave or a freak blizzard gets trotted out as proof of whatever someone already believed about climate. Here's why one storm settles nothing — and how scientists stack thousands of weather stations and a century of data to find a signal that refuses to hide.
Your worst acne flare-up was always going to get better on its own — but the supplement you started that week gets the credit. Welcome to regression to the mean, the invisible force behind millions of glowing testimonials.
Your DNA test says you're mostly Irish. The confidence interval says it could say almost anything. Here's why ethnicity estimates are the flashiest, least reliable numbers in consumer science.
'No significant difference found' sounds like a verdict. Often, it's just an alibi. Here's why an underpowered clinical trial can burn through billions and still tell us absolutely nothing.
Every November, millions of Americans watch a candidate's 'lead' evaporate and conclude the polls were broken. They weren't. Here's what margin of error actually means, why 'up by two' can mean nothing at all, and how to read a poll like a data scientist instead of a doomscroller.
Ask a college grad how many people you need for a 'real' study and you'll hear the same number: 30. Here's how a piece of 20th-century textbook shorthand became one of the most stubborn misconceptions in American classrooms — and what actually determines whether a sample is big enough.