Daniel Engber

New sign for my meditation room

A War on Facts About Thanksgiving Dinner We don’t need to do this every year.

Is there any lower form of journalism than the "holiday debunker"?

Here I inaugurate a new series of holiday-debunker debunkers.

First up: DON'T BELIEVE THE MYTH ABOUT THE MYTH ABOUT THE 'TURKEY COMA'

www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/...

This Evidence Fundamentally Shifts the Debate About the HPV Vaccine - Absolutely Maybe We’ve had to wait a long time to get to this point. If cervical cancer develops after HPV infection, it will take…

Surrogate outcomes

Screening versus prevention schools of thought

And much more in this extremely readable @hildabast.bsky.social post absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2025/11/24/t...

(Remember Nordic Cochrane aka Gøtzsche went off the rails a few years ago? This is the outcome)

Last year, the Canadian government ordered a flock of ostriches to be killed after some contracted bird flu. The movement to save the birds became a right-wing cause célèbre—and sparked a standoff with authorities, @engber.bsky.social reports: https://theatln.tc/8UCgg88M

All the Ostriches Must Die How the plight of a few hundred birds in Canada became an all-out fight for freedom

Today is the day you read @engber.bsky.social’s ostrich-murder story.

The Company Quietly Funneling Paywalled Articles to AI Developers “You shouldn’t have put your content on the internet if you didn’t want it to be on the internet,” Common Crawl’s executive director says.

Well that’s one way to think about intellectual property…

Common Crawl’s Rich Skrenta: “You shouldn’t have put your content on the internet if you didn’t want it to be on the internet.”

Must-read Alex Reisner:

www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

A Calculator’s Most Important Button Has Been Removed This is clearly a mistake.

I have just discovered that Apple brought back the C/AC button in the calculator app in iOS 26, an act I take full credit for.

(I know that's not actually a Street Fighter reference.)

FINISH HIM

Octopuses Invade the English Coast, ‘Eating Anything in Their Path’

More news on the slimy, invasive species that everyone loves:

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/w...

New PubPeer comment on "Efficacy of oral folinic acid supplementation in children with autism spectrum disorder: a randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled trial" (Panda et al, 2024). Concerns about significant errors. #folinicacid #leucovorin, #autism

pubpeer.com/publications...

They're using reason as a fig leaf for the lame-o impulses and snap judgments that define their crappy, authentic selves. I, on the other hand, have the strength of character to overcome my gut reactions and thus give voice to the wisdom at my core

People sometimes face a conflict between intuition (system 1) and reasoning (system 2)

In cases like these, which will be seen as the person’s true self?

Wow, upon reflection, I have a strong intuition that system 1 is the true self for other people, but system 2 is the true self for me!

The Great Implicit Bias Bamboozle Where were you when you first learned about implicit bias?

Major new paper by finds implicit measures like the IAT are no better than asking people directly about their biases. After decades of avoiding self-reports, turns out our sophisticated replacement tools work no better than what we abandoned. New post!

College Students Have Already Changed Forever Members of the class of 2026 have had access to AI since they were freshmen. Almost all of them are using it to do their work.

This year's rising seniors have never experienced a year of college without generative AI. It's AI's senior year, too. And AI is ubiquitous: Over 90 percent of college students now use it in some way.

I wrote about how AI already changed college forever. (Gift link)

People normally think that certain things should not be for sale (e.g., organs)

But what happens when people consider the principled arguments economists have given for the view that these things *should* be for sale?

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Inside the Collapse of the F.D.A.

" Watchdogs and institutionalists alike seethed with frustration. Did the health secretary want more regulation or less? What was his overarching philosophy? How could any agency possibly accommodate so many paradoxes? ... "

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/08/m...

Holy cow

💡!

‘I’m Not Quite Sure How to Respond to This Presentation’ The discomfiting spectacle of RFK Jr.’s new vaccine-advisory committee

So far this article by @engber.bsky.social best captures the overall ACIP meeting vibes

The World’s Hardest Bluffing Game Why are some Iraqis so good at figuring out when a person is lying?

Fascinating story on a little-known but unbelievably impressive mental sport :

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

That's not my drawing -- you'd have to reach out to Popular Science for information on who owns it...

The critique of science reform was "stifled"? All other points aside, this is simply not how I remember seeing the past dozen years unfold.

Somehow everyone feels stifled in the social-media age. It's the foundational emotion of the 2020s.

“C” is for Censorship: PBS Cuts ‘Art Spiegelman’ Doc and Other Dubious Acts at Embattled Broadcaster Twelve days before Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse (2024) was set to broadcast on April 15 across PBS stations nationwide as part of its strand American Masters, the filmmakers were told that a 90...

Here's the original story: www.documentary.org/online-featu...

Now PBS Is Censoring a Film About Free Speech A worrying pattern has taken hold in public television.

PBS is really going for it.

(gift link)
www.theatlantic.com/culture/arch...

h/t @antkaufman.bsky.social for breaking this story and reporting out the details

Trump Thinks He Knows What Started the Pandemic The lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origins has became a principle of MAGA governance.

On COVID origins, we're now living in the mirror-image world of 2020: Now the lab-leak theory is assumed to be the truth.

www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

Terrific reporting here on the extent of PBS self-censorship under Trump

Academic Culture and Fraud With the latest fraudulent AI-econ paper, a number of colleagues from MIT, Brown, Princeton, Univ.

New post!
goodscience.substack.com/p/academic-c...

Did you feel it coming in the air?