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Core Scientific Literacy How science produces knowledge and how to read a scientific claim as a non-specialist: falsifiability, trials and confounding, p-values and effect sizes, screening tests and risk, reading a paper fast, Fermi estimates, and a handful of the big mechanisms that explain the world.
44 cards · space to flip · 1–4 to grade · d to go deeper
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Reading list The works this deck draws on, in the order worth reading them. Cards point to a specific chapter or paper where one fits.
01 Book Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World · Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West The best single starting point: selection bias, causation, misleading numbers and charts, and how to refute a claim without being an expert. Grew out of a university course and reads like one taught well. 02 Book Bad Science · Ben Goldacre The clearest account of how a health claim goes wrong, from placebo and regression to the mean to how trials are designed and how the press mangles them. Short chapters, each built around a real case. 03 Book Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth · Stuart Ritchie The replication crisis explained by a working scientist, with the mechanisms (p-hacking, publication bias, underpowered studies) and the fixes. Read after Goldacre. 04 Book Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You · Gerd Gigerenzer Natural frequencies, screening tests, and relative versus absolute risk, worked through with doctors, lawyers, and patients. Published as Reckoning with Risk in the UK. 05 Book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark · Carl Sagan The case for the scientific attitude as a way of living. The chapter on the baloney detection kit is a checklist you can use on any claim. 06 Essay Cargo Cult Science · Richard Feynman, 1974 A commencement address of a few pages on scientific integrity: the duty to report everything that could make your result wrong. The shortest thing on this list and the most quoted. 07 Book How to Make the World Add Up · Tim Harford Ten rules for reading statistics in the news, from noticing your emotional reaction to asking what is being counted. Published as The Data Detective in the US. 08 Book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions · Thomas Kuhn Where the words paradigm and normal science come from. Dense in places, but the picture of how a field actually changes its mind is the corrective to a naive reading of Popper. 