P Less Than .05
Ronald Fisher suggested 0.05 as a convenient working limit in 1925. A century later it governs drug approvals, journal publications, and the entire architecture of scientific knowledge.
Pale Fires at the Edge of Everything
JWST keeps finding massive, fully formed galaxies in an era when the universe was too young to have built them. The Lambda-CDM standard model is under pressure — and the data is only getting sharper.
Before the Brain Had a Default
The default mode network wasn’t discovered until 2001 — and only because Marcus Raichle’s team stopped discarding the resting-state data everyone else had been treating as noise.
Medium Cool
McLuhan’s hot/cool media taxonomy — built to explain 1960s television — turns out to be one of the sharpest tools available for understanding what TikTok, podcasts, and social platforms are doing to cognition right now.
Fisher’s Arbitrary Line
The 95% confidence threshold that gatekeeps all of published science was proposed by a single statistician in 1925, who later said it was being misused. Here’s why that happened and why it won’t change.
Cargo Cult Science
Richard Feynman named the failure mode in 1974. The replication crisis proved him right. The problem isn’t bad scientists — it’s incentive systems that make rigorous science economically irrational.
