Mother’s Milk, Literature Sleuths, and Science Fairies;
I had that sinking feeling yesterday as I read a killer review. In the text the authors described an exciting dynamic; high food intake, high cortisol concentrations in mother's milk, and high activity in kittens covary while low food intake, low cortisol concentrations in mother's milk, and low activity in kittens covary. Neat. Tidy. Compelling. And there was a gorgeous figure to reinforce this awesomeness! Now, don't get too excited here, because, spoiler alert, none of this turns out to be an accurate representation of the papers they are citing.
‘none of this turns out to be an accurate representation of the papers they are citing’
Today, how a writer intuitively ‘feels’ about an issue takes precedent over the facts or numbers informing an issue.
If people beleived all this poppycock about food comming from CSPI of PCRM(a PETA surigate)peoople would stop eating entirly since most of their studies are unreliable and the food police and wackos like Morgan Spurlock,Marion Nestly,Micheal Jacobson and Ralph Nader have questible motives
She’s lucky to be working in a field where this kind of thing is merely the misrepresentation of actual science done by proper scientists.
Could be worse, she could be reading up on gun control. Or climate. Or smoking, or statins, or…
Funny, I got part way into that article, and was almost at the point of quitting in frustration with the cutesiness of it all. But I stuck it out, and it got much better toward the end.
Science 101. When I was a resident physician I remember trying to prove to one of the longer-in-the-tooth staff anesthesiologists that a particular technique could reduce the incidence of phantom limb pain in amputations. I cited a couple of papers hoping to bowl him over with my superior sources of evidence. He just looked at me, slightly po’d and said, “You haven’t read the papers in their entirety, have you? We’ll talk in an hour.” An hour later I was back, suitably humbled. The papers didn’t even live up to the hype in their own abstracts let alone what had been claimed for them in a review.
The long and the short of it is that there is a lot we don’t know and mother nature gives up her secrets grudgingly if at all particularly in complex systems. The really good scientists start answering a lot of questions with, “We don’t really know, but . . .”
there are those,”that do not know that they do not know”. The human herd is heavily populated with such ignorance, and you don’t have to go any farther than rite here in SDA to observe such!
Like you never ask yourself “Why am I always such a dick?”, huh?
“the human herd” is something you hear a lot of from people who think they are so much better/faster/smarter/richer than the rest of us Common Folk. They think they are SO much better they should decide things for us. Like how best to spend our money. Such people do appear on the “conservative” side too. They are the ones who want to use the power of government to enforce morality on the human herd.
However, the truth is the “human herd” does no exist. There is no human herd. There are individuals who act in what -they- perceive to be their own best interests. When people act in ways that run counter to what the better/faster/smarter/richer set deem optimal, this is ascribed to stupidity and low class attitudes. Were they all Superior Men they OBVIOUSLY would believe as the Elite believe, and do as the Elite do.
That this -always- proves to be catastrophically wrong never seems to slow the Elite crowd at all.
Such as scientists who make up stuff because they’re on a deadline and there’s money involved. They’re Elite, they’re better/faster/smarter, if they cheat on the details a bit it’ll be ok because their fudging only makes The Truth obvious enough for the inferior minds of The Herd to grasp.
This is one of the reasons science is described as a “discipline” rather than a “fun way to spend your evenings”. You have to sift through all the BS generated by people who think they’re smarter than you.
Now: science = litetature
Dave I know you’re making a joke, but if you’ve looked at pretty much anything done in Anthropology in the last 30 years that equation is in fact true. Post modernism dictates that as reality. They don’t -say- it that way, they use lots and lots of really big made-up words… that all boil down to what you said.
These people can no longer be lampooned. They are fully down the rabbit hole, out through the looking glass and having tea with the March Hare. Or to quote a more modern work, they took the Blue pill.
Phantom:
I agree. Since Welles’ War of the Worlds demonstrated the gullability of the general public, it has been endlessly exploited.
But it has exploded, only because of government grants. Take away the monetary incentive, and you only have Welles’ incentive: laughter…which doesn’t last as long as government extortion.
And if the $ was coming from the private sector, there’d be a lot more due diligence before any cheque got signed.
‘Men Are Idiots,’ Says Study In Prestigious Medical Journal
A study published in the Dec. 11 issue of the BMJ — the medical journal’s lighthearted “Christmas issue,” which uses science to tackle important and under-addressed questions — says yes.
According to the available evidence, men are much more likely to be idiots (or at leas engage in idiotic behavior).
Researchers realized that even though we know men die, end up in emergency rooms, and engage in “risk-seeking” behavior much more frequently than women, scientists had never tackled “idiotic risk-taking behaviour” specifically.
They defined “idiotic” risk as senseless, “where the apparent payoff is negligible or non-existent, and the outcome is often extremely negative and often final.”
So they took a look at the data on Darwin Award winners over the past 20 years, from 1995 to 2014.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/men-idiots-says-study-prestigious-171500692.html
http://sandwalk.blogspot.ca/2007/10/darwin-awards.html
John Galt Since most of the so-called Darwin Awards stories are made up your link nicely illustrates why a sceptical nature is de rigueur in today’s world.
This comment from the link is worth noting:
The various “Annual Darwin Awards” e-mails (such as the one which is the topic of this article) do not originate with DarwinAwards.com; they are put together by unknown persons. Many, but not all, of the valid Darwin Awards are marked “Confirmed by Darwin” to indicate that Wendy Northcutt has checked them out and they actually happened. Unfortunately, confirmation often consists of just tracking down a newspaper account that repeats the story. We all know that newspaper reporters can often be taken in by made-up stories.
None of this changes the fact that a lot of men are supreme idiots when they’re sober, and become lethally creative when intoxicated.
It’s impossible to make the world idiot proof; human nature will always provide a better idiot.
OK John Galt
I just remember being so awfully disappointed when I found out the ‘JATO rocket strapped to a Chevy and blown to bits on the side of a mountain’ story was false.