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Don't expect real science from the Daily Mail...

bilby

bilby

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...Or any other popular news outlet. Or indeed most "scientific" journals.

http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800

We needed to get our study published pronto, but since it was such bad science, we needed to skip peer review altogether. Conveniently, there are lists of fake journal publishers.
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...
The key is to exploit journalists’ incredible laziness. If you lay out the information just right, you can shape the story that emerges in the media almost like you were writing those stories yourself. In fact, that’s literally what you’re doing, since many reporters just copied and pasted our text.
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No wonder so many people believe so much total garbage.
 
There are many ways that the results of studies can be crap, and the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is only one of many.

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The more useful rule is to never accept a claim that rests on a single study, so the downer is that it is typical for studies that conclude something unusual to make it in the pop science news. They don't report anything normal and expected.

It leads me to wonder: there seems to be not a single science news source for lay audiences that you can really trust. I think there are enough people in the world who value the reporting of sound science, so why not?
 
bilby said:
...Or any other popular news outlet. Or indeed most "scientific" journals.

http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800


...
The key is to exploit journalists’ incredible laziness. If you lay out the information just right, you can shape the story that emerges in the media almost like you were writing those stories yourself. In fact, that’s literally what you’re doing, since many reporters just copied and pasted our text.
Click to expand...

No wonder so many people believe so much total garbage.
Click to expand...

Well, yeah. Anti-science movements take advantage of this all the time.

The tobacco companies pioneered the tactic: create fakey labs and use them to publish stuff in fakey journals. Journalists report on it like it's real science, and the public simply doesn't have the means to distinguish between real science and malarkey with lots of big words and scary equations.

Creationists do it, anthropogenic climate change deniers do it, and I wouldn't be surprised if anti-GMO nuts and anti-vaccine nuts use some similar tactic.
 
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