Fake science? Just sayin'...

[TimFox]

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/6-tips-to-help-you-detect-fake-science-news?utm_source=pocket-newtab

[MikeK]

Lots can be said on the subject:

https://www.amazon.com/Skeptics-Guide-Universe-Really-Increasingly/dp/1538760533

[aetherist]

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/6-tips-to-help-you-detect-fake-science-news?utm_source=pocket-newtab

The Conversation is owned by the Einsteinian Mafia. As is Wiki, & well almost everything.
Members here can google for themselves & find plenty of articles re pal review.

Why did Toot the Tiny Tugboat smoke?
Pier pressure.

[aetherist]

Lots can be said on the subject:

https://www.amazon.com/Skeptics-Guide-Universe-Really-Increasingly/dp/1538760533

This is probly Einsteinian Mafia propaganda too.
There is plenty of good stuff free on google re proper skepticism.

[Buriedcode]

I'm going to just ignore the aether guy (unless he has some results from experiements that can't be explained by current models?).

I've noticed quite a few articles of late promising to help one navigate the bullshit, fake news, pesudoscience etc..  but the premise is that we should all be *right* in what we believe (why?), and that everything has a definate answer.  Sadly, the world just isn't like that.  Science is a simple methodology for creating models that explain nature, it is constantly evolving, improving and changing, and nature isn't "pure" and can be quite messy, and the scientific method is used because we are all flawed, biased, and limited in our senses.

In order to fully assess any kind of headline, study, or finding in modern science, one must have a background in that field.  And since we can't all be experts at everything, we usually defer to actual experts - or at least those who have credentials that show they have studied the subject at length.  But then it just becomes about which "expert" you trust - since you can always find one alledged pexect expert that doesn't agree.  And then you can argue about what constitutes evidence... you're just kicking the can down the road to find a "truth" which probably won't change you life much anyway.

Ultimately I think the world would be a better place if people could just accept that they can easily believe something that isn't correct, and are willing to admit they were wrong. We are all learning all the time, we are all ignorant. I'm not suggesting one should be proud of it, but it isn't necessarily a bad thing either. 

I just wish this almost obsessive idea of being "completely right" about everything would die.

Edit: typo

[timenutgoblin]

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/6-tips-to-help-you-detect-fake-science-news?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Quote from the article:

Tip 3: Correlation is not causation
Just because you can see a relationship between two things doesn’t necessarily mean that one causes the other.

Even if surveys find that people who live longer drink more red wine, it doesn’t mean a daily glug will extend your life span. It could just be that red-wine drinkers are wealthier and have better health care, for instance. Look out for this error in nutrition news.

People who live longer have more time to drink red wine compared to other people who don't live longer. People who don't live longer have less time to drink red wine.

[EEVblog]

I'm going to just ignore the aether guy (unless he has some results from experiements that can't be explained by current models?).

Every other science related forum has banned him.

[TimFox]

Also from the article:
"Tip 5: Science doesn’t need ‘sides’"

[magic]

The good news is that unless you are working with some high speed or RF stuff, the matter of whether ether is real or not has totally no influence on your life

For all I care, the Earth might as well be flat, too.

[Benta]

Quote from the article:

Tip 3: Correlation is not causation

This is one of the most crucial points, and one which 99% of journalists and polticians don't understand.
I invented a headline once to demonstrate the point:

"Blooming Apple Trees Cause Flooding in the Alps."

Ridiculous, no? But sellable to a journalist or politician.

[TimFox]

A similar axiom amongst my archaeological buddies:
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

[raptor1956]

It not just the quackery evident in many of the non-peer reviewed papers or even science itself that's under attack -- it's all areas of expertise that are being inundated with half truths and outright lies.  How many of you have seen thumbnails for videos about an amazing new piece of military hardware, often aircraft, that are clearly just photoshop designs with zero real world reality.  This particular subset of bullshit has increased substantially in just the last couple years and is now at a point where these fake news site outnumber real sites 10:1.  The average Joe, lacking any real understanding of the engineering involved but wowed by the photoshop image can be lead to believe it's true even though it is not.  That this is so widespread and covering virtually every topic points to a number of possible causes:

1.  Stupid people can now 'publish' nonsense on the internet -- there have always been stupid people but now they have multiple platforms to spread the stupid.  Dunning Frickin Kruger.

2.  Various special interests seek to undermine one idea or another because there is profit in doing so, such interests create think tanks to spread there lies and then those think tanks, or others related to them, hire astroturfers to troll comment sections to attack genuine discussions and copy/paste from their carefully prepared selection of misinformation.  And oh yeah, outright, bald-faced lying is their stock and trade.

3.  Nation state trolls, mostly from Russia but other players are in the game to, promote nonsense as fact and attack fact as lies to undermine a nation by getting millions to doubt all authority.  While the principal authority they wish to undermine is political, the process of undermining ALL authority allows them to attack the political authority but escape detection by coming at it from the side -- all sides.

4.  For fun ... there are many trolls that do what they do because it entertains them.  Many of them are at the sociopathic end of the personality spectrum.

5.  ADDITION TO PREVIOUS LIST:  Scammers and others that make money pushing nonsense.  There are many forms of this, but the common element is that they can earn a large amount of money pushing lies.


When there are hundreds of explanations for something the scientific one is just one of many and for the "do your own research" crowd, the scientific explanation just can't be trusted and they point to made up fake content to offer their proof of that. 


Brian

[Wallace Gasiewicz]

I assume that the 'science' referred to includes the myriad of studies involving statistical analysis.
Most people including well trained professionals have very little training in stats.
It is very hard to determine if any study is valid without knowledge of stats.
I have personally seen "studies" that were accepted as correct that were entirely misleading in their accepted conclusion.
One study cost a company millions in further "studies" and was entirely misleading.
Remember, at the heart of it all, statistical analysis is the analysis of "Chance"

Engineering studies are based in some laws and standards that are not available in other realms.
For example:
When evaluating a resistance meter, there are very good "standards" to use. This is not so cut and dried in health care or other pursuits.

[nctnico]

I assume that the 'science' referred to includes the myriad of studies involving statistical analysis.
Most people including well trained professionals have very little training in stats.

Agreed. To add an extra data point: during an internship I worked at a university hospital. The man overseeing my work had statistics as a hobby. He checked all the statistical analysis done by the researchers (with a much higher educational level) and he found errors frequently.

[raptor1956]

I assume that the 'science' referred to includes the myriad of studies involving statistical analysis.
Most people including well trained professionals have very little training in stats.
It is very hard to determine if any study is valid without knowledge of stats.
I have personally seen "studies" that were accepted as correct that were entirely misleading in their accepted conclusion.
One study cost a company millions in further "studies" and was entirely misleading.
Remember, at the heart of it all, statistical analysis is the analysis of "Chance"

Engineering studies are based in some laws and standards that are not available in other realms.
For example:
When evaluating a resistance meter, there are very good "standards" to use. This is not so cut and dried in health care or other pursuits.

When I said 'science' I was referring to the plethora of channels that purport to prove one scientific theory or another is a lie or fake.  Flat Earth is a common one but so to is the Young Earth Creationist types that claim evolution is a lie and that the Earth is about 6000 years old.  The more recent and dangerous attack on science is the Covid-19 virus and the various vaccines.  Then there's the long list of boggy men like: 'The Deep State', and Pizzagate, and, well the list goes on and on and on. 

Some of these wild ideas are the product of political assaults on 'the other guy' that has now escalated to claiming one side is a collection of pedofiles that harvest 'adrineachrome' from children -- the whole idea behind this is a rip off of the late 90's family movie "Monsters Inc".  The millions of people are working themselves into a lather over complete bullshit is a consequence of being inundated with this stuff and no longer being able to tell right from wrong.  A society that descends to that level is not long for democracy.


Brian

[Circlotron]

1.  Stupid people can now 'publish' nonsense on the internet -- there have always been stupid people but now they have multiple platforms to spread the stupid.

Once upon a time if someone wanted to publish an idea they wrote a book and then looked for someone to publish it. If the publisher didn't think it would sell because it was obviously nonsense then it was end of story. Literally. Now, with the internet, that barrier has been removed.

[Circlotron]

so to is the Young Earth Creationist types that claim <snip> the Earth is about 6000 years old.

Last time I looked, uranium had a half life of about 1.5 billion years. The fact that you can find lead in the ground would seem to indicate that uranium had been there for several half lives at least.

[Zero999]

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/6-tips-to-help-you-detect-fake-science-news?utm_source=pocket-newtab

That article is good, which is ironic because it was originally published in The Conversation who have previously published articles with questionable scientific rigour.

[PlainName]

so to is the Young Earth Creationist types that claim <snip> the Earth is about 6000 years old.

Last time I looked, uranium had a half life of about 1.5 billion years. The fact that you can find lead in the ground would seem to indicate that uranium had been there for several half lives at least.

I don't know the details of the Creationist theory, but I reckon that they must assume things popped into existence fully formed (since there hasn't been time for nature the other theory to do its stuff). Thus there may well be a half-life, but that doesn't preclude everything starting off halfway through, so to speak.

[Gregg]

This post reminds me of the Shit Mountain Theory

It says, essentially, that an idiot can produce more shit than you can shovel.

This theory has been expressed in a similar and certainly more concise way, by the Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini, under the name of "Bullshit asymmetric principle", and whose statement is more or less this: The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is at least an order of magnitude higher than that needed to produce it.

https://www.eugy.it/en/coffer/50-shit-mountain-theory.html

[aetherist]

Three myths about scientific peer review
https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/three-m ... er-review/

Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/

How to Reject any Scientific Manuscript
https://vixra.org/pdf/0907.0020v1.pdf

Eric Weinstein's Harvard Story - The System Breaks Down in Novel Situations
379,329 views  Apr 18, 2020  Full episode with Eric Weinstein (Apr 2020):

[Zero999]

Fake science has a greater risk of emerging where there are vested interests. These can be political, or financial. Any field which has the ability to influence society, governments or the potential to make lots of money is vulnerable.  I question science when it comes to expensive pharmaceuticals, diseases such as certain cancers and COVID-19 and to some extent, climate change. I'm not a conspiracy theorist and I accept anthropogenic climate change is real, but the fact there are people who have had their careers ruined for disagreeing with the accepted theory, rings alarm bells. I'd rather hear people talk rubbish and have it countered with facts and evidence, rather than them being censored in the form of them losing their job, denied a platform at universities, or not having any future papers accepted by journals. In order to have objective and rigorous science, there needs to be free and open debate, which means people should be allowed to question widely accepted theories, even in areas which upset people, without fear of reprisal.

There's a huge amount of fake science in certain areas of academia, especially the humanities subjects, mainly social sciences which have entire junk fields such as: critical race theory and gender studies.

[Dr. Frank]

I like this classic one, Prof. Feynman on Scientific Methods:https://youtu.be/EYPapE-3FRw.

As an experimental physicist, I'd extend the methods to a triad:
1 Observation of phenomenon, measuring relevant parameters and collecting data to a most complete degree
2 developing theoretical description, guessing / formulating a law, or do simulation / modelling, to combine / correlate the collected data
3 experimental testing of theory, confirmation or falsification by measuring the predicted theoretical extrapolations, with different parameters/data sets from 1

Alternative / contradicting theories or different experimental methods have to be greeted, or should be welcomed in any case, as only their falsification will validate the other theory or experiment.

 Frank

[langwadt]

Quote from the article:

Tip 3: Correlation is not causation

This is one of the most crucial points, and one which 99% of journalists and polticians don't understand.
I invented a headline once to demonstrate the point:

"Blooming Apple Trees Cause Flooding in the Alps."

Ridiculous, no? But sellable to a journalist or politician.

https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

[Benta]

@langwadt: absolutely brilliant!
My abdomen aches from laughing. How on earth did you find that?