The Implicit Association Test, “fails the most basic reliability and validity criteria & second hand smoke is not dangerous

See Science Needs Criticism, Not Cheerleading by J. Peder Zane of The WSJ. Interview with John Staddon, professor of psychology, neuroscience and biology at Duke University.

"Mr. Staddon has challenged the work of leading social scientists, including Duke sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, whose books include “Racism Without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.” “If colorblindness, the MLK ideal, is itself racist,” Mr. Staddon has written, “we are in an Alice-in-Wonderland world, and racial strife without end.”

Mr. Staddon is especially troubled by the concept of “implicit bias,” which holds that unconsciously held beliefs about social groups perpetuate racism, so that “basically, we are racist no matter what we do or even think.” He notes that the main mechanism for measuring it, the Implicit Association Test, “fails the most basic reliability and validity criteria. Yet it is still widely administered to hapless employees in numerous institutions across the country.”

He is equally skeptical of “institutional” or “systemic” racism, an idea that originated in 1967 with Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panther movement and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton “and then passed through the publication factories of academe into the mainstream.” The term, Mr. Staddon notes, is hardly ever defined. The best effort he has seen is from the influential British government Macpherson Report of 1999, prompted by the murder of a black teenager. It defines systemic racism as “the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin.” Because is the key word. But now systemic racism is most frequently used as a synonym for any kind of racial disparity, never mind its cause.

“Of course racism exists in America, as it does almost everywhere else,” Mr. Staddon says, “but the idea that differences in the outcomes between racial and ethnic groups can be explained by a factor that is basically unmeasurable is the opposite of science, which seeks, or should seek, to identify actual causes.”"

"Still, he says, “my personal tipping point” regarding the uses and misuse of science occurred some two decades later, “when I found out that despite massive publicity to the contrary, smoking has no public cost.” His 2014 book, “Unlucky Strike: Private Health and the Science, Law and Politics of Smoking,” argued that smoking saves society money on balance because the old need more resources than the young and smokers die more quickly and cheaply than nonsmokers. Smoking “puts individual smokers at risk. It does not put the public purse at risk. It is a private health problem, not a public one.”

He also reviewed the scientific literature about secondhand smoke and found little evidence of serious harm—even though the risks of passive smoke have been used to justify banning smoking from most public spaces. “After I published an article that touched on this problem,” he says, “I was contacted by a co-author of a massive passive-smoking study, with clear negative findings, that I had cited who attested to the fact that it had been deliberately neglected, and also by a psychologist colleague who sent the manuscript of a concurring book on the subject which he had abandoned for lack of a publisher. Smoking policy is more driven by the politics than by the science and critics of the received view are not welcome.”"