As suggested at this thread to general “yeah sounds cool”. Let’s see if this goes anywhere.
Original inspiration:
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to make it a post, there’s no quota here
So the non-peer reviewed pre-print making an eyebrow raising claim, without a breakdown of which states they claimed did or didn’t require child safety seats at which ages is totally sensible, but for the multiple studies showing child safety seats prevent deaths and serious injuries, “the controls are insufficient, in ways the main study examined does not need to worry about”. Uh-huh. My puny NPC brain can’t comprehend such rationality.
Oh ye gods and little fishes it gets better. So Zvi quotes the paper authors’ repeated citations to the two papers that claim car seats don’t save lives or prevent injuries. After enough repetition I noticed that one of them was “Levitt 2008”. And yes, the paper is Steven Levitt. The Freakonomics guy, whose entire brand is “misread statistics so I can publish a non-intuitive result and go on Meet The Press and write a NYT bestseller”.