What Can We Do About Junk Science?

[Gregb]

What Can We Do About Junk Science?

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/what-can-we-do-about-junk-science-16674140

 

I think this is a super important article to read because junk science circulates easily these days and social media is out of control

 

 

 

As skewed or phony studies about vaccines, GMOs, radiation, and other hot-button topics show up in journals that masquerade as legitimate science publications, junk science becomes harder to distinguish from real research.

 

[sman]

One thing we can do is utilize the social media.  Discussion forums like ours can, and do, actively debunk the junk as it surfaces.  The difference between junk-science and science is not subjective, and can be pointed out by common folk.

[Gregb]

One thing we can do is utilize the social media.  Discussion forums like ours can, and do, actively debunk the junk as it surfaces.  The difference between junk-science and science is not subjective, and can be pointed out by common folk.

I agree and we'll do what we can. But from looking at my facebook wall, people just read a headline and share it. They don't actively investigate the claims.

[sman]

I know what you mean.  I think facebook is very important today, but it is a testament that hypography is very important too. :wink:

[DFINITLYDISTRUBD]

Would help if we had an educational system that was worth a ****.....but stupidity is the new black...very fashionable indeed...so good luck with that one.

Who needs to learn when there are machines that give you instant access to information (who cares if it's accurate or not) and social media to feed you your opinions, sparing you from any need whatsoever to think for yourself (ugly habit really).

 

I leave you with this happy thought, the willfully ignorant are the folks that are shaping this world and determining the policies by which it is governed. 

Edited April 28, 2014 by DFINITLYDISTRUBD

[Gregb]

Carl Sagan happens to touch on this too!

 

[Buffy]

I blame P.T. Barnum. But I mainly blame the people who help him get to all the Suckers. The so-called Press.

 

This is somewhat more pronounced in the US, but thanks to Rupert Murdoch, it's been spread everywhere in some form, although--to invoke Godwin's Law--Joseph Goebbels really perfected it.

 

The real problem is the rise of unabashed lying to insist on the truth of your worldview, AKA "propaganda." We've all had this: the King paid the crier to announce what was happening--in a way favorable to the King--and we've evolved through the Ministry of Propaganda to Press Secretaries. The roots of journalism relied on the growth of democracy to allow contrary views to be spread absent a fear of getting one's head chopped off, although we've gone through waves of loss and gain of the "freedom of the Press." There's always been a tendency for the Press to have more or less independence from political power, sometimes willingly reaching low points such as William R. Hearst's involvement in promoting the Yellow Scare and the Red Menace, but even through those ups and downs, the fundamental belief promoted by Joseph Pulitzer of "an able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it," has been the rule in journalism.

 

In the last 15 years or so though as some major players has become more and more "reality-free" and those players have used their power to cow the press by broadly accusing any attempt to expose those lies as evidence of partisanship, the Press has changed their view of Journalism to have little to do with finding Pulitzer's "right" but rather simply reporting what each side says and leaving it to the readers to determine the truth on their own, just so they can no longer be accused of being "the librul press."

 

So what does all this have to do with Junk Science? Well, unfortunately, science is critical to politics. Key government policies on just about every topic rely heavily on scientific research and knowledge. And in dealing with scientific information in policy formation, we have this increasingly credulous press which has allowed equivalence to be claimed between both well-tested and valid science and crack pots who make wild claims that have no support on any scientific basis. Moreover, the interested parties have found that if they pay enough money, some of those crackpots can actually come from seemingly legitimate sources including major Universities and multi-national corporations. Who is a lowly journalist--who probably has an Bachelor's English and not a Doctorate in Chemistry--to argue when a "Doctor" with a million dollar study says "Cigarettes are not harmful?"

 

Rather than sift through the information on both sides and find that except for the people with very large investments in what turns out to be an extreme minority view, it's much easier to do a "he said, she said" article and walk away.

 

Who wants to work that hard? Especially when they keep squeezing your salary because ad revenue is going down?

 

The fact that there is no push-back by an active and aggressive press is in my view one of the biggest reasons that those interested parties have gone hog wild with crazy claims backed by bogus data that is so voluminous as to scare away any major news source from bothering to wade through and find the truth.

 

The end result is actually that most folks read this stuff and simply decide that everyone is lying and there is no "truth" or "right." That's a very dangerous thing for a society.

 

So in my view, one of the most important things that those of us who actually know a thing or two about science can do is push everyone we know to better understand science especially pushing those who are in a position to get these stories exposed to stop thinking that all viewpoints are equally valid and should all be given equal consideration, even if a little bit of research might prove one side is making silly and possibly deleterious claims.

 

 

When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him, :phones:

Buffy

[LaurieAG]

I bookmarked the following Washington Post article "As drug industry’s influence over research grows, so does the potential for bias" in November 2012.

 

Not much has changed since.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-drug-industrys-influence-over-research-grows-so-does-the-potential-for-bias/2012/11/24/bb64d596-1264-11e2-be82-c3411b7680a9_story.html?wpisrc=al_excl

[Eclogite]

The consensus view from the posts above is that "things are getting worse". My own suspicion is that the majority of people are as gullible, biased and unthinking today as their great-grand parents were, and on back 100,000 years. Does anyone have solid meta-studies that would support the pessimistic view. (Or are both views pessemistic?)

[Buffy]

The consensus view from the posts above is that "things are getting worse". My own suspicion is that the majority of people are as gullible, biased and unthinking today as their great-grand parents were, and on back 100,000 years. Does anyone have solid meta-studies that would support the pessimistic view. (Or are both views pessemistic?)

 

I agree with you: my point above was actually that "gullibility" allows for sway in both positive and negative directions, so the forecast of where we're going is only good for the short term (like the weather).

 

Most interesting statistic in my mind that backs up this point is that people who watch Fox News apparently know less about what's going on than people who do not watch the news at all.

 

 

He who is not aware of his ignorance will only be misled by his knowledge, :phones:

Buffy

[DFINITLYDISTRUBD]

Hrrmmm...Wonder how folks that rely on DW, BBC, and CCTV News (my big three for news) would score in comparison. 
 

 

 

Eclogite

The consensus view from the posts above is that "things are getting worse". My own suspicion is that the majority of people are as gullible, biased and unthinking today as their great-grand parents were, and on back 100,000 years.

If one were to go based on educational rankings, America is remaining stuck with 2013 results being relatively unchanged from 2006 results.

But I'd say we are in a severe decline when it comes to critical thinking...which makes selling pseudo science and pure bullsquats as valid increasingly easier. 

 

 

 

The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking (a non-profit organisation based in Canada)^[2]defines critical thinking as the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skilfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.^[3]

An excerpt from a motorcycle engine building blog, which makes perfect sense to me...and definitely fits into the long list of reasons why American schools are so far behind the rest of the world when it comes to fulfilling their sole purpose for existing. 
 

[ "Ironically, We Often Learn To Take Mental Short-Cuts In School !!

In school, most of the information we read is in textbooks, which are automatically assumed to be 100% correct. This effectively trains us from an early age to read for one just thing ... the memorization of facts. Once out of school, as long as information seems prestigious, it never occurs to most people that it should be questioned or analyzed. 

Thinking is much more than just memorizing and repeating facts, but unfortunately, most formal educational systems measure and reward their students only according to their ability to memorize and repeat information. That's good, but it's not actually thinking.

This substitute for thinking usually becomes a lifelong habit -- a habit which invites perceptual problems !! Taking mental short-cuts severely limits our ability for rational thought." ]

 

All apologies for the rough nature of this post.

Edited May 4, 2014 by DFINITLYDISTRUBD

[Gregb]

The consensus view from the posts above is that "things are getting worse". My own suspicion is that the majority of people are as gullible, biased and unthinking today as their great-grand parents were, and on back 100,000 years. Does anyone have solid meta-studies that would support the pessimistic view. (Or are both views pessemistic?)

True, but our great grand parents didn't have the internet where misinformation spreads like a wildfire. That is the danger. Not our level of gullibility, but the method of information transportation.

[CraigD]

The consensus view from the posts above is that "things are getting worse". My own suspicion is that the majority of people are as gullible, biased and unthinking today as their great-grand parents were, and on back 100,000 years.

I share your skepticism that, on a 50+ year scale, people are getting more or less gullible, etc., though I’d not try to extend this skeptical position to apply to prehistoric and pre-language people, as that’s too speculative for my comfort.

 

The OP’s Popular Mechanics article is focused on a much shorter timescale and more recent event, the shift from the traditional business financial model for scientific journals, where subscribers pay most of the money that permit a journal to be published, to “open-access” models, where authors do (the “publication fee-based model”), or other parties do.

 

Dee-based open access journals appears to me to be that they are often “predatory”, preying on inexperienced but qualified and well-intentioned junior faculty and students by getting money from them without peer-reviewing their papers or bringing them to the attention of readers in their fields, or worse, damaging their reputations by branding their work “junk science”. University librarian Jeffrey Beall (who’s quoted in the PM article, and who I heard speaking on the same subject today on National Public Radio) is doing good work to protect against this by maintaining this list of “Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers”. As Beall explained in the NPR show I heard, predatory journals are dangerous beyond just cheating naive authors, because some of what they publish is intentional junk science intended to sway legitimate science and public policy – what might be better termed propaganda.

 

More troubling to me are publications – not just scientific journals, but media intended for the general public – subsidized by groups with deeply (and often clandestinely) anti-scientific intentions. A well know group of this kind is the Discovery Institute, famous for its “wedge strategy” to “reverse the stifling materialist world view and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions”.

 

Then there are publications supported by organizaitons with less obvious anti-scientific agendas, such as the radio show Coast to Coast AM, and a slew of supernatural-themed TV production companies. Though the motives of most of these seem the old, simple pursuit of fame and fortune, similar to PT Barnum’s, but without his open contempt for their audience, the many people whos anti-science ideas they help promote have are often (to quote Yeats) “full of passionate intensity” of a passionately anti-scientific kind that, frankly, scares me.

 

Notice I’ve moved from the subject of “junk science”, which scares me little, to pseudoscience, which mostly pisses me off, to anti-science, which scares me.

 

True, but our great grand parents didn't have the internet where misinformation spreads like a wildfire. That is the danger. Not our level of gullibility, but the method of information transportation.

As an optimist on the subject of the free flow of information, I’m biased, but I think that the net effect of the internet when it comes to true and false information favors the true. Accepting the credo “truth is beauty / beauty truth”, in a fair contest, misinformation loses.

 

Though I think this is the case in net, it bothers me that, on an individual basis, many people, many personal friends of mine, are won over by pseudoscientific arguments and anti-scientific agendas. After much thought and practice, I think the main factors that inclines people to reject science – and thus, implicitly, embrace anti-science – are intensely unpleasant experiences with it, in school and at home, and a general mistrust of authority, which includes government and teachers (which, in the mind of many or most students, are practically synonymous).

 

I think a lot of creative folk, educators and entertainers both, are doing good work in making science pleasant and rewarding - fun, even. The TV series The Big Bang Theory is an example.

 

Mistrust of authority is, I think, a harder problem, because many sources of authority, government in particular, aren’t, to a rational person, trustworthy. Perhaps the best strategy for this factor is break people’s association of government with school and science.

[DFINITLYDISTRUBD]

 

 

Gregb

Questioning

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Posted Today, 09:55 AM

Eclogite, on 03 May 2014 - 5:15 PM, said:

The consensus view from the posts above is that "things are getting worse". My own suspicion is that the majority of people are as gullible, biased and unthinking today as their great-grand parents were, and on back 100,000 years. Does anyone have solid meta-studies that would support the pessimistic view. (Or are both views pessemistic?)

True, but our great grand parents didn't have the internet where misinformation spreads like a wildfire. That is the danger. Not our level of gullibility, but the method of information transportation.

 

But the more gullible folks are the faster and easier misinformation and disinformation are spread.  On the other side of the coin folks less inclined to accept things as accurate or inaccurate hinder their spread.

Edited May 5, 2014 by DFINITLYDISTRUBD

[ErlyRisa]

The end result is actually that most folks read this stuff and simply decide that everyone is lying and there is no "truth" or "right." That's a very dangerous thing for a society.

 

Yep!!!

 

and someone mentioned Facebook...

 

I used it for 6months... and slowly realised,

 

A. I have no freinds.

B. The people I used to know are actually alot dumber then I was giving them credit for - even people I knew that have Science degrees and are engineers, nurses, teachers: In real life I saw them as worthy intelligent people, Facebook just highlighted thier opinion based ignorance on any topic, this brought about distain for me: Facebook ruined my life, and showed me just how pathetic humans are: Now in real life, I literally have nothing to say to them other than, how' the baby (which if I were still on facebook, I wouldn't have to ask because thier is a multitude of pics to sift through anyway)

 

 

Social media didn't save the world:

It just turned the pensioners into voyeurs (watching the family, via constant updates)

Teenagers into sexting prostitutes (Although SMS already started that)

...and the new generation about too "choose" a social media outlet,

 into phreaks! -> that hardly even speak english (LOL OMG ,etc -->and Twitter just made that worst)

 

anyone want to stop wasting time?

-->I'm planning to build a spaceship to leave the mediocre earth behind, and visit my friends on the otherside of the Galaxy. -->I'll send Facebook updates as I travel past Uranus.

 

oh...PS - 1984 (George Orwell) - It's now in effect, thank Mr Zuckerberg, (At Least in the Forum days, you didn't own my full profile of my life...which now makes me wonder what the heck is a commodity, I tell you what, the answer is NOT intelligence, it seems to be; Popularity driven by, teeny tiny snippet chat + photos of opportune moments)

 

I personally noted to all 30 of my "friends" too NOT upload a single pic or tag my name in anything that they do... do they listen... no...are they my friends...no.

 

 

On a side note:

 

Wikipedia didn't help:

I personally find it great, but for kids of today, they can just do their homework by "googling" it.

::What's the point.

 

I think we need to make specified schools: ZERO INTERNET ACCESS ... and back too books (or at the least tailored educational software)

 

To start up another topic:

 

is Creationism still rampant in the US?

Edited May 5, 2014 by ErlyRisa