Why I hate the index finger (1980)

Is there much of this type of thing hiding on PubMed?

Not a source I had previously associated with top-tier humor.

I believe every year The Canadian Medical Association Journal publishes a mostly-humorous edition around Christmas. And there's a long history of satire in NEJM, BMJ, The Lancet, etc

I particularly enjoy this one (PDF):

http://cda.psych.uiuc.edu/multivariate_fall_2013/salmon_fmri...

Thanks. I think I found another good one, though more technical than OP.

> The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute

https://www.bmj.com/content/331/7531/1498

that... isn't... satire. It's written in a funny way because it was a "silly"[0] experiment, but it showed a real issue with fMRI.

> What we can conclude is that random noise in the EPI timeseries may yield spurious results if multiple testing is not controlled for. In a functional image volume of 60,000-130,000 voxels the probability of a false discovery is almost certain.

[0] silly as in "there's no way this fMRI will show the frozen salmon as alive, right?"

I think we run into the definition of satire and parody, here.

Satire is "the truth, in the most extreme way", so I think it definitely qualifies to very, very seriously examine a dead salmon with an fMRI to see if it has brain activity.

It's not a parody - they actually did the study, and the results were as described, not an imitation journal article ala The Onion.

That may be one definition of satire but it strikes me as controversial or incomplete and when I search online for it, I only find this comment.

I think you're coining a definition to fit your purpose. If you want to argue that the article fits some definition of satire you need to actually provide a reference to a definition that is accepted by more people than just you. You can't just put quotation marks around your personal definition; that's not how it works.

I find your definition of satire to be unsatisfactory and reject it, pending further documentation.

Satire needs a target to actually be satire. Something can be silly, lighthearted, or humorous without being satire. On the flip side, satire itself doesn't actually need to be funny to be effective satire.

So for your example, what is the dead salmon study satirizing? Is there some other study that did something similar that they're making fun of? Is there a broader scientific movement that they're criticizing?

I concede that there may be a target that I'm not aware of. But I find it more likely that someone just said "what if we put a dead fish in an fMRI", and their colleagues found it funny enough to actually do. Many scientists have a sense of humor, and will absolutely do something just because they think it would be funny.

> So for your example, what is the dead salmon study satirizing? Is there some other study that did something similar that they're making fun of? Is there a broader scientific movement that they're criticizing?

Yes. fMRI studies are used to "prove" this and that about cortex activation under certain kinds of tasks, and they're demonstrating that even a dead salmon shows significant activity under fMRI if you analyze it "in the standard way". Thus, it's absurd to draw conclusions in a psychological or psychiatric context without screening for false positives.

The arch-satirist Jonathan Swift is always my archetype. A modest proposal was about the famine in Ireland, but more than that, it was about a certain kind of English attitude that external technocracy could solve problems in the face of exploitation and callous disregard.

Ok, quoth Oxford:

> the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.

In this case, they're using an analysis which is commonly used to "show activity" in various psychological and psychiatric contexts to "show activity" in a dead salmon. This directly exaggerates ("truth, but in the most extreme way" is about exaggeration, in my definition) and shows the futility of trying to draw significant results without screening for random chance among thousands of comparisons.

A comparison I'd make is to arch-satirist Jonathan Swift's "modest proposal" - it described a real problem (i.e. famine in Ireland) and skewered by exaggeration the English tendency to prescribe solutions that affected none of the core issues as though they knew best and could overcome English exploitation, greed, and callous disregard by the right public policy.

This one is quite good: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC300808/

Also https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108%2802%29...