No Truth Sandwiches today. Just science and facts. Genuine science about fake science. When you see something that sounds like it can’t be true, or must be true regardless, always remember that if you aren’t confused, you aren’t paying enough attention.
- When I first heard of cold fusion, I thought it couldn’t be true, but I considered what would have to happen for it to be true. Then I waited for real physicists like James Peebles to weigh in. (Fleischman and Pons are renowned chemists who went in beyond their depth.)
- When I first heard of dark energy, I didn’t believe it. But the evidence in numbers of distant supernovas is solid and incontrovertible.
- Voodoo economics? Yup, a bust.
- Milton Friedman promoting a Universal Basic Income? Good idea, but the Devil is in the details. Do we set it high enough to get most everyone out of poverty, or low enough to keep most all the poor mired in poverty while canceling all other forms of aid? Whose numbers do we trust?
Now it is fake abortion “science” and fake race “science” and fake virus “science” and fake climate “science” and much more. You may remember, or have heard about, some of the “junk science” wars over lead, DDT, fallout, acid rain, chemical spills, Agent Orange, ozone, tobacco, and the rest, too many to list here.
But I will do my best with today’s issues.
I will pass over lead drinking water pipes, where we are making real progress in replacing them. We still have leaded aviation fuel for smaller, propeller-driven planes. But nobody actually denies that lead is poisonous any more, and electric airplanes are coming.
Sufficient unto the day is the nonsense thereof.
Me, with H/T to Jesus.
Now, I can’t lay out all of these stories in detail. I hope you will be OK with me giving you the names of the lies, and one or two links each. Google would be happy to give you lots more links, and Wikipedia can give you long lists of references to the real science.
How Cloaked Science Works
These are metastasizing cancers on our minds. They require advanced chemotherapy that can gradually kill them off without making us too sick at having to go into their wretched hives of scum and villainy on social media. I inoculated myself long ago as a determined student of religion and philosophy and politics, and am reasonably immune on a day-to-day basis, but I still need an occasional booster.
Cloaked (and Dagger-ed) Science
Scientific veneers can be used to hide dangerous disinformation.
Once you learn this evocative term, you see examples of cloaked science everywhere. For example, some right-wing media outlets have been citing a database run by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) – to bolster false news reports. One of the ways it’s unscientific is that anyone can post a negative vaccine reaction to VAERS, including the physician who demonstrated its pitfalls by reporting that a vaccine had transformed him into the Incredible Hulk. But VAERS sure looks and sounds science-y—and it even has a .gov domain to support its seeming legitimacy—so it has become a popular source for people spreading disinformation and developing conspiracy theories.
As another example of cloaked science, the rare doctors who embrace an anti-vaccine attitude have (unfortunately) garnered an outsized audience. One news article explained: “The doctors often stand in lab coats and use simplified medical jargon, lending an air of authority.” Obviously, dressing in lab coats helps with the ruse: Cloaked science, indeed.
A one-column, unlabeled graph that provided no information made their study seem even more scientific.
[In another study] participants read one of four explanations – a good explanation with or without [irrelevant] neuroscience information or a bad explanation with or without neuroscience information. Participants then rated how satisfying they found the explanation to be on a seven-point scale. Good explanations were rated as similarly satisfying regardless of the inclusion of neuroscience; however, bad explanations were rated as significantly more satisfying if they included neuroscience than if they did not.
Similar findings have been reported based on the use of brain images. In all of these cases, the cloak of science hid the dagger of unsound scientific information.
See our previous article on prebunking as a way to inoculate yourself against biased sources such as those seen in cloaked science! Then, ignore any gimmicks.
Cancer
Covid-19
Abortion
Global Warming
Race
Feel free to add your own instances and evidence. Please repost to social media, and where relevant elsewhere on DK.
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