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Well, it is shooting fish in a barrel, but what are the fish doing in a barrel, anyway? Vox, my favorite fake news site, paid Google to appear on the new tab in Chrome (I assume) with a dandy bit of idiocy, "7 bad science and health ideas that should die with 2019 [sic]." Which tells me why "science got the shaft." It starts off with the one-liners that are supposed to make me sub-critical, like the authors:
(1) A freeze on HIV science involving fetal cell tissue
(2) Defunding planned parenthood
(3) Interference with a Breast Feeding Resolution
(4) Elimination of a Science Adviser's Office at the EPA
(5) Rollbacks of Environmental Protections
(6) Women putting Goop in their vaginas
(7) Dr Oz becoming white house health adviser
Most of which have nothing to do with science, they're just things that make you feel smart if you disagree with them. And why is Vox so interested in what you put in your vagina?
This is a warning. Julia Belluz, Brian Resnick, and Umair Irfan don't know the difference between politics and science.
But it gets better. They get to the meat of the article.
They start with global warming, which has been renamed climate change to make it sound scarier. They blame increases in "vector-borne diseases" on the reversal of the Earth's magnetic poles, or whatever "climate change" is, when really the increases are changes obviously changes in the reporting standards, something fake news outlets don't actually check because facts are better if you or one of your friends from San Jose State make them up.
And they have the temerity to blame hurricanes on the CO2 levels in Afghanistan, or whatever "climate change" is. Remember 2005 when the quacks were predicting that the number of large hurricanes would increase, and then no significant ones hit for a decade? This is the same kind of idiocy that says that cool summers don't prove global warming wrong, but hot winters prove it right (the kind of intellectual hypocrisy that comes again and again.
And forest fires: Grand Wizzard of the KKK casting his Mega Ice Age spell to drive all the African Americans out of Siberia, or whatever "climate change" is, did that, too.
Then they go after e-cigarettes because, "we have no idea what the long-term health impact of using [them] will be." This is the same disingenuous, know-nothing dogma that the "precautionary principle" was.
I didn't even know Juul existed, but people sucking on their sonic screwdrivers never made me want to start smoking. I don't see why people sucking on their thumb drives would, either. But these idiots do.
For some reason the authors think we should all think that Neanderthals wrote awesome jazz tunes, or something, because their third myth is "Neanderthals were more savage than us." I don't see from anything they write any way to assess that. What does a human and a neanderthal doing it against a cave wall overlooking the Mediterranean on a summer's night have to do with savagery? Other than some women like it that way? I wonder if they put Goop in their vaginas? Really there are only two points of evidence: the possibility of Neanderthal language (which implies earlier humans must have; it's plausible) and the skull cracking frequency, which is pretty weak.
[I should say that the Neanderthal language paper they link is the only one that seems at all scientific.]
So, we have irrelevant and weak arguments that Neanderthals started Greenpeace and the League of Women Voters, but I'm still not sure. Worse, I don't see why it matters. Why is this a "myth" (rather than an interpretation) that has to "die?" No real reason.
Then there's something about self-control. Some psychologists, I assume, debunked some earlier psychologists, I assume, with a study that was just as bad as the original.
What does psychology have to do with science, anyway?
There's something about immigration and disease. This is just politics. They're as bad as Donald Trump. Probably worse, since they pretend to know what their talking about. It's interesting, though, that they say "travelers and visitors do spark public outbreaks" despite "being screened," while vociferously denying that illegal aliens do, presumably because they pre-screened themselves with a Vox checklist before sneaking into the country.
Twitter of course comes into play. Apparently when Twits "hear out the other side, they become more polarized." Given the nature of communication on Twitter, I doubt what people read there is really "hearing out the other side," because:
(1) At 140 characters or less, at best you get a headline, not an argument.
(2) The every Twit is a vile Judy Garland in blackface, and so "exposure to the other side of the argument" is more likely a direct insult to you.
And finally, they don't like the Stanford Prison Experiment. Neither do I, and there are good and reputable reasons to dislike it. However, all these jokers care about is an "expose" that another idiot interviewed some of the participants and they recalled things that make it seem a little more like an act. But, that's really problematic. People don't remember things very well, and even though the half-life for a traumatic event (51 months) is longer than a college lecture (2 weeks),* it's been so long since the experiment that people's memories are useless. You simply can't trust a fifty year old memory, especially when changing that memory is self-serving. Which, of course, is what happened in the experiment.
Did I mention at the outset that I hate science reporting? It's sensationalist, innumerate, and ignornat, as you'd expect of something that was written by people who failed their GREs and so had to go to journalism school.
* These are measured in different ways. The first is to interview people about something immediately after the event and then interview them some time later and see how many accounts have major discrepancies (e.g., participants, feelings, and actions differ in the two accounts) and the second is by objective testing over during a semester.
(1) A freeze on HIV science involving fetal cell tissue
(2) Defunding planned parenthood
(3) Interference with a Breast Feeding Resolution
(4) Elimination of a Science Adviser's Office at the EPA
(5) Rollbacks of Environmental Protections
(6) Women putting Goop in their vaginas
(7) Dr Oz becoming white house health adviser
Most of which have nothing to do with science, they're just things that make you feel smart if you disagree with them. And why is Vox so interested in what you put in your vagina?
This is a warning. Julia Belluz, Brian Resnick, and Umair Irfan don't know the difference between politics and science.
But it gets better. They get to the meat of the article.
They start with global warming, which has been renamed climate change to make it sound scarier. They blame increases in "vector-borne diseases" on the reversal of the Earth's magnetic poles, or whatever "climate change" is, when really the increases are changes obviously changes in the reporting standards, something fake news outlets don't actually check because facts are better if you or one of your friends from San Jose State make them up.
And they have the temerity to blame hurricanes on the CO2 levels in Afghanistan, or whatever "climate change" is. Remember 2005 when the quacks were predicting that the number of large hurricanes would increase, and then no significant ones hit for a decade? This is the same kind of idiocy that says that cool summers don't prove global warming wrong, but hot winters prove it right (the kind of intellectual hypocrisy that comes again and again.
And forest fires: Grand Wizzard of the KKK casting his Mega Ice Age spell to drive all the African Americans out of Siberia, or whatever "climate change" is, did that, too.
Then they go after e-cigarettes because, "we have no idea what the long-term health impact of using [them] will be." This is the same disingenuous, know-nothing dogma that the "precautionary principle" was.
I didn't even know Juul existed, but people sucking on their sonic screwdrivers never made me want to start smoking. I don't see why people sucking on their thumb drives would, either. But these idiots do.
For some reason the authors think we should all think that Neanderthals wrote awesome jazz tunes, or something, because their third myth is "Neanderthals were more savage than us." I don't see from anything they write any way to assess that. What does a human and a neanderthal doing it against a cave wall overlooking the Mediterranean on a summer's night have to do with savagery? Other than some women like it that way? I wonder if they put Goop in their vaginas? Really there are only two points of evidence: the possibility of Neanderthal language (which implies earlier humans must have; it's plausible) and the skull cracking frequency, which is pretty weak.
[I should say that the Neanderthal language paper they link is the only one that seems at all scientific.]
So, we have irrelevant and weak arguments that Neanderthals started Greenpeace and the League of Women Voters, but I'm still not sure. Worse, I don't see why it matters. Why is this a "myth" (rather than an interpretation) that has to "die?" No real reason.
Then there's something about self-control. Some psychologists, I assume, debunked some earlier psychologists, I assume, with a study that was just as bad as the original.
What does psychology have to do with science, anyway?
There's something about immigration and disease. This is just politics. They're as bad as Donald Trump. Probably worse, since they pretend to know what their talking about. It's interesting, though, that they say "travelers and visitors do spark public outbreaks" despite "being screened," while vociferously denying that illegal aliens do, presumably because they pre-screened themselves with a Vox checklist before sneaking into the country.
Twitter of course comes into play. Apparently when Twits "hear out the other side, they become more polarized." Given the nature of communication on Twitter, I doubt what people read there is really "hearing out the other side," because:
(1) At 140 characters or less, at best you get a headline, not an argument.
(2) The every Twit is a vile Judy Garland in blackface, and so "exposure to the other side of the argument" is more likely a direct insult to you.
And finally, they don't like the Stanford Prison Experiment. Neither do I, and there are good and reputable reasons to dislike it. However, all these jokers care about is an "expose" that another idiot interviewed some of the participants and they recalled things that make it seem a little more like an act. But, that's really problematic. People don't remember things very well, and even though the half-life for a traumatic event (51 months) is longer than a college lecture (2 weeks),* it's been so long since the experiment that people's memories are useless. You simply can't trust a fifty year old memory, especially when changing that memory is self-serving. Which, of course, is what happened in the experiment.
Did I mention at the outset that I hate science reporting? It's sensationalist, innumerate, and ignornat, as you'd expect of something that was written by people who failed their GREs and so had to go to journalism school.
* These are measured in different ways. The first is to interview people about something immediately after the event and then interview them some time later and see how many accounts have major discrepancies (e.g., participants, feelings, and actions differ in the two accounts) and the second is by objective testing over during a semester.
