From Science Blogs:

Several years ago, Harriet Hall coined a term that is most apt: Tooth fairy science. The term refers to clinical trials and basic science performed on fantasy. More specifically, it refers todoing research on a phenomenon before it has been scientifically established that the phenomenon exists. Harriet put it this way:

You could measure how much money the Tooth Fairy leaves under the pillow, whether she leaves more cash for the first or last tooth, whether the payoff is greater if you leave the tooth in a plastic baggie versus wrapped in Kleenex. You can get all kinds of good data that is reproducible and statistically significant. Yes, you have learned something. But you haven’t learned what you think you’ve learned, because you haven’t bothered to establish whether the Tooth Fairy really exists.

There’s a lot of tooth fairy science out there right now. It’s been increasing in quantity ever since the rise of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), now known as “integrative medicine” over the last two decades. “Energy healing,” acupuncture, homeopathy, craniosacral therapy, reflexology, even faith healing, there’s no pseudoscience too ridiculous to be excluded from pointless clinical trials. What all these clinical trials share in common is that they are tooth fairy science. They study a phenomenon without its ever having been established that the phenomenon actually exists. Worse, because of the vagaries of he clinical trial process, bias, and even just the random noise in clinical trial results that produce seemingly positive trials by random chance alone, advocates of these pseudoscientific treatments can always point to evidence that their treatment “works.” The overall body of existing research on a treatment like homeopathy is negative, but homeopaths can always cherry pick individual studies and sound convincing doing it.

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Talmiz Ahmad in The Wire:

The new year has commenced with the execution of Saudi Arabia’s firebrand Shia cleric, Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, the attack on the Saudi embassy in Tehran, and the Saudi decision to break diplomatic ties with Iran by asking its ambassador to leave Riyadh in 48 hours.

These events mark the culmination of the steady deterioration in relations between these two Islamic giants over the last five years, poisoned by the infection of sectarianism that has divided West Asia since the Islamic revolution but which has gained resonance since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In Saudi Arabia, the Shia are said to constitute about 13% of the national population, which makes them a substantial three million or more in the Kingdom. They are concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern Province, where they number 2.6 million in a population of about four million.

The ruling ideology in Saudi Arabia is “Salafism”, a belief-system that demands that all Muslim faith and practice be founded on Islam’s two basic texts, the Koran and the Hadith, the “traditions” of the Prophet. This literalist and restrictive approach sees as kufr (disbelief) all beliefs and practices that are not drawn from these basic texts. Animosity for the Shia and the conviction that they are not Muslim lies at the heart of Salafist doctrine.

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Dynamic Positioning

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Tara Parker-Pope in The New York Times:

A strategy called “design thinking” has helped numerous entrepreneurs and engineers develop successful new products and businesses. But can design thinking help you create healthful habits? Bernard Roth, a prominent Stanford engineering professor, says that design thinking can help everyone form the kind of lifelong habits that solve problems, achieve goals and help make our lives better. “We are all capable of reinvention,” says Dr. Roth, a founder of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford and author of the book, “The Achievement Habit.” I’ve applied design thinking to my own life the past few months, and it seems to be working. I’ve lost 25 pounds, reconnected with close friends and refocused my energy on specific goals and habits. Design thinking has helped me identify the obstacles that were stopping me from achieving my goals, and it’s helped me reframe my problems to make them easier to solve. In the words of Dr. Roth, design thinking helped me “get unstuck.” To get started, design thinkers focus on five steps, but the first two are the most important. Step 1 is to “empathize” — learn what the real issues are that need to be solved. Next, “define the problem” — a surprisingly tough task. The third step is to “ideate” — brainstorm, make lists, write down ideas and generate possible solutions. Step 4 is to build a prototype or create a plan. The final step is to test the idea and seek feedback from others.

Design thinking is normally applied by people who are trying to create a new product or solve a social problem or meet a consumer need.

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Waseem Ahmed. In the Name of Faith. 2015.

Pigment colors on archival wasli paper.

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Adrian Chen in the New York Times Book Review:

For all the talk of Donald Trump’s unpresidential behavior, the Republican enfant terrible does share one notable trait with that paragon of presidentiality, George Washington: a fondness for conspiracy theories. Washington once wrote in a letter that he believed an Illuminati conspiracy was at work in America, while Trump is the figurehead of the birther movement, which claims Barack Obama is not a natural-born American citizen. The psychologist and science journalist Rob Brotherton’s new book, “Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy ­Theories,” helps explain why someone with such seemingly outlandish views can gain widespread public support. It turns out we are all conspiracy theorists.

Brotherton attacks the stereotype, which he says was popularized by the historian Richard Hofstadter in his influential essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” of conspiracy theorists as a small band of tinfoil-adorned loonies — the paranoid fringe. Brotherton’s main argument is that we all possess a conspiracy mind-set to some extent, because it is hard-wired into our brains. “Suspicious Minds” details the various psychological “quirks and shortcuts” that make us susceptible to conspiracy theories.

For example, psychologists have discovered that we possess an “intentionality bias,” which tricks us into assuming every incidental event that happens in the world is the result of someone’s intention.

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From the Wall Street Journal:

First, worry less about the banking system. Financial institutions today are less fragile than they were a few years ago. This isn’t because they got better at understanding risk (they didn’t) but because, since 2009, banks have been shedding their exposures to extreme events. Hedge funds, which are much more adept at risk-taking, now function as reinsurers of sorts. Because hedge-fund owners have skin in the game, they are less prone to hiding risks than are bankers.

This isn’t to say that the financial system has healed: Monetary policy made itself ineffective with low interest rates, which were seen as a cure rather than a transitory painkiller. Zero interest rates turn monetary policy into a massive weapon that has no ammunition. There’s no evidence that “zero” interest rates are better than, say, 2% or 3%, as the Federal Reserve may be realizing.

I worry about asset values that have swelled in response to easy money. Low interest rates invite speculation in assets such as junk bonds, real estate and emerging market securities. The effect of tightening in 1994 was disproportionately felt with Italian, Mexican and Thai securities. The rule is: Investments with micro-Ponzi attributes (i.e., a need to borrow to repay) will be hit.

Though “another Lehman Brothers” isn’t likely to happen with banks, it is very likely to happen with commodity firms and countries that depend directly or indirectly on commodity prices.

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Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

In one of his last interviews, the historian Tony Judt lamented his “catastrophic” Anglo-American generation, whose cossetted members included George W Bush and Tony Blair. Having grown up after the defining wars and hatreds of the west’s 20th century, “in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political”, these historically weightless elites believed that “no matter what choice they made, there would be no disastrous consequences”.

A member of the Bush administration brashly affirmed its arrogance of power in 2004 after what then seemed a successful invasion of Iraq: “When we act,” he boasted, “we create our own reality.” A “pretty crappy generation”, Judt concluded, “when you come to think of it.

One cannot but think of the reality it made as mayhem in Asia and Africa reaches European and North American cities. But those of us from countries where many Anglo-American institutions were once admirable models have their own melancholy reasons to reflect on their swift decay.

As another annus horribilis lurched to a close, the evidence of moral and intellectual sloth seemed unavoidable. In the Christmas issue of the Spectator,Rod Liddle described Calais as “a jungle of largely Muslim asylum seekers aching to get into Britain – presumably to be hugged” by “the liberals”.

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Milford Bateman in The Conversation:

[T]he microcredit movement quickly elevated the supposed poverty reducing power of self-help and individual entrepreneurship to almost miracle status. To escape poverty, the poor no longer needed state intervention and other forms of “collective capability” such as trade unions, public ownership and strong regulations.

Only one last hurdle had to be overcome before the global triumph of microcredit. A core aspect of the new neoliberal agenda was its emphasis on the need for all institutions in society to be financially self-sufficient and profit oriented. Subsidies and public investment were bad words.

The heavily subsidised Grameen Bank-style microcredit industry clearly could not survive under the new neoliberal “self-sufficiency” paradigm. Led by USAID and the World Bank, the microcredit model was therefore extensively commercialised, privatised and liberalised.

It was essentially developed into a for-profit private business model. Microcredit was turned into a business, but one imbued with a crucial social goal – poverty reduction. With this important change secured, the microcredit industry began a very rapid expansion.

By the mid-2000s the model was being described as the most effective anti-poverty and “bottom-up” development intervention of all time. With support from both the left and the right of the political spectrum, the UN agreed to nominate 2005 as the UN Year of Microcredit.

And then it all began to go horribly wrong.

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Rafia Zakaria in The New Republic:

Being Muslim and female was an identity that rhymed effortlessly with repression and oppression in the view of most liberal academics and students. I had heard it all so often and in so many other classes: the interdiction of the hapless women who were imprisoned by Islam, as an offhand way to highlight the relative fortune of the more successful Western feminist, the one that had moved from questions of basic equality to concerns with sexual pleasure. No texts by Muslim feminists were assigned reading for the course: not Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam and not Amina Wadud’s Qu’ran and Woman. The course’s sole concession to diversity a single slim text—Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza—by the Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldua.

That curriculum was chosen nearly a decade ago, but the exclusion of Muslim feminists has continued. In an interview published in the New York Times last week, feminist icon Gloria Steinem, whose latest memoir was published last month, namedtwenty-eight women and three men in her list of “best contemporary feminist writers.” She fails to mention a single Muslim feminist. In other instances, I’ve found my own writing on women and militancy attacked; not met with analysis and engagement, but with condescending suggestions that, because I am female and Muslim, I am somehow “excited” by the idea of a female Muslim warrior. While the tone and tenor of these may vary, the message is the same: The Muslim feminist is either left out of the conversation or included only as an example of a deviant type, demanding liberals’ suspicion and vigilance.

I realized this even then. Contesting the premises of my professor and classmates would label me the prude, the insufficiently liberated. Speaking would court encirclement by pitying, knowing glances reserved for one understood to be plagued by yet un-confronted repressions. If I spoke, I would give them what they wanted: a Muslim woman to save, to school in the possibilities of sexual liberation. It would be impossible, in the rush and fervor of that savior encounter, to explain that my oppositions were not at all to sex or sexual pleasure, but to its construction as unproblematic, un-colonized by patriarchy, the entire measure of liberation.

More here.