mahiwaga

Scientists dismissed “hot streaks” in sports for decades. They were wrong. • Vox • 2013 Jun 3

…In 1985, a hugely influential study by a trio of psychologists argued that the hot hand was a myth. Among the NBA and college players they studied, hitting one shot made no difference in their odds of hitting the next shot. Like coin tosses, players were subject to the laws of probability, with the same baseline percentage chance of hitting every shot. Ever since that study, psychologists have held up fans’ belief in the hot hand as an example of human irrationality: our tendency to see patterns in randomness.

Now, however, it’s starting to look like the hot hand might be real after all.

Just goes to show how people can look at the exact same set of hard data and come to wildly different conclusions. And “correct” and “incorrect” get pretty fuzzy when you’re dealing with probabilistic/statistical arguments. Ultimately it boils down to what your null hypothesis is and what assumptions underlie your null hypothesis.

(crossposted on Facebook)

As background, I’m not one of those anti-science anti-GMO activists who think that GMOs are going to kill us all in some unspecified genetically-engineered bioapocalypse. But neither am I some breathless biotech cheerleader who thinks that GMOs are the only way to prevent a world population crash due to global mass starvation and that anyone who opposes GMOs is de facto anti-science. (For one thing, the simple Malthusian model that predicts unlimited exponential growth until resources run out is unrealistic. Verhulst’s sigmoidal curve from the logistic equation is a more realistic way to model population growth, but that never really enters into arguments on Facebook anyway.)

But regardless of how you feel about GMOs, it’s really not a far stretch to imagine that life will find a way around genetically engineered defenses.

Worm Now Thrives in GMO Corn Designed to Kill It, Study Says • 2014 Mar 18 • Newsweek (via A. Scoble)

One of industrial agriculture’s biggest GMO crops may have just backfired. Scientists have confirmed that corn-destroying rootworms have evolved to be resistant to the Bt corn engineered to kill them.

Of course, this isn’t necessarily a disaster for biotech companies. They can probably cheaply and easily create a new variant of resistant corn with a trivially different defense mechanism, patent it, and charge big bucks, with the oft-heard claim that they need to make a return on their R&D investment (reminiscent of the way some pharmaceutical companies have taken racemic drugs that are now off-patent, purified the active enantiomer, and re-patented the enantiomer) and wait for nature to quickly work around that defense, too. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a great business model!