Science says.
Periodically, bizarre theories (first of all on the logical level, but often also on the level of orders of magnitude and statistical methods) pass before my eyes, or are sold off, which are portrayed as "scientific" because they originate from a person which are recognized as such.
Here we need to understand one thing: if we take a male scientist and listen to him, we can hear many things.
- his lepton congress, where he presents a peer-reviewed publication.
- when he forbids his daughter to go out dressed like a Tibetan slut.
- when at the market he buys more aubergines and less fennel.
Now, all three are said by a scientist. The trouble is that the fact that a nuclear physicist buys more eggplant and less fennel does NOT state any physical principle that privileges each other.
You can't go and say "science says eggplant is better than fennel". Yet a well-known university professor, perhaps Nobelz Prize winner, prefers one to the other.
Same thing for "don't dress like a Tibetan slut". I'm not sure how pigs dress in Tibet, but I can confidently speculate that it's not suitable for people. But even if it wasn't wise to dress like a Tibet pig (if there are any), and even if it made sense, it would NOT be a scientific claim.
If, on the other hand, the scientist goes to present his publication, I don't know, at a symposium, he produces:
- the data
- the method he used
- undergoes peer review.
Only in this case did the scientist speak. In the other two the father, or the vegetable consumer, spoke. End.
So when you tell me that Montagner found HIV and Covid to be the same virus, I don't give a damn who Montagner is: I want to see the academic publication where he wrote this, and the peer reviews. Otherwise, he said that I know Montagner "customer of the bar", but not Montagner the scientist .
And what Montagner says at the bar is not "science". It's not like if one passes by and Montagner says "nice boobs" then it's scientific that her breasts are healthy.
Montagner has NEVER published ANYTHING about the similarity between HIV and Covid. Then, maybe at the bar he said this and that, but the scientist speaks by publishing, not giving interviews.
Having said that, however, even the method of seeking publication is not perfect, and produces other misunderstandings.
The first point is that equality between men is a philosophical principle but has no real results. Even in the academic and scientific world, there are half-saws and there are good ones. The result is that, since the good ones are few and the half saws are many, many half saws try to have notoriety not so much for the goodness of their statements, but for their absurdity.
These people may have some rather laughable academic role, of which they make a repulsive display, and among their academic publications you find (few) things that are quite boring, but on the whole truthful.
For these people it remains only to publish OUTSIDE the scientific domain. But to publish OUTSIDE the scientific sphere, it is necessary to bow to the rules of book and often political marketing.
If a biologist publishes a book on honey proteins on the commercial circuit, probably no one buys it. If a biologist does the same thing saying that a spoonful of honey in hot milk is enough to cure Covid, he will sell a lot:
- the theory causes a sensation
- the theory seems revolutionary
- theory has weight in domestic politics
And then the book goes mainstream. But beware: we are not talking about an academic publication, so the biologist's ranking (in the academic world) remains unchanged, while his media notoriety grows.
For example, an adjunct professor of chemistry argues that the Chernobyl radioactive cloud was not dangerous. If it is inserted into a political debate on nuclear power plants, such a thesis causes a sensation, it seems revolutionary, it has a weight in domestic politics.
But the fact is that I don't find any of his scientific publications on this statement, while I find tons of them on the damage of radiation, at every dosage and condition.
The clique of losers, when they fail to break through in the academic world, tends to give themselves to worldly notoriety, also because it is not difficult: my friend Marshal of the Carabinieri and I go to Amsterdam and using his investigative acumen we discover that a betray Anne Frank was the fishmonger who sold her the Matjes. Of course, we don't expect better from someone who sells Matjes, but then historians will ask for proof, method and academic publication. And there isn't. (any reference to a story involving Jewish notaries is intended. Being a notary is even worse than selling Matjes).
Another phenomenon is triggered on this: the “Nobel Prize for Economics”. It is essentially a scam hatched by a group of Swedish banks, who decided to set up their own prize and name it after the Nobel. At one point the royal foundation got angry and decided to take him under their wing, also because they began to see fearful bullshit rewarded, but this "prize" is now there, and practically every charlatan will quote you. opinion of Nobel Prize in Economics of the case.
In all honesty, the Nobel Prize for Economics is still the thorn in the side of the foundation, which did not want it and never wanted it, because it does not have rigorous foundations (i.e. in the absence of a true axiomatic system and precisely) the economy struggles to get out of the world of cartomancy and horoscopes.
Personally, I would file “Stiglitz said that” on the same shelf in the library where you keep Peter Kolosimo's books. With the difference that Peter Kolosimo was a genius of covers and titles.
The difference between "hard" sciences, those based on an explicit formalism and a strong axiomatic system, and the "soft" ones, which in recent years have begun to use some symbols of the hard sciences to give themselves dignity '.
It happens that in the "hard" sciences when a conclusion is reached, the conclusion is usually true within 5-sigma. And when it's not 5, at least you know how many sigmas there are, so you know how plausible it is that this is.
This reliability of the "hard" sciences has given enormous popularity to them, because being reliable they are the preferred ones in the world of industry, which needs reliability and regularity.
The "less hard" sciences got a little "behind" in terms of credibility, so they started using (or pretending to use) the hard science methods.
It is not the first time this has happened: in the world of magic, symbols that come from great religious traditions are used, such as the shield of David and the Menorah, the sign of the cross or the pentacle, rather than words of Greek origin or Latin. Not for nothing, Rowling was a genius in creating her magical language: expelliarm us , that is, it removes all weapons of the male gender , it is brilliant because it allows you all the weapons of the female gender.
| Case | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| Name | weapon | armae |
| Genitive | armae | armārum |
| Dative | armae | armīs |
| Accusative | armam | armās |
| Ablative | weapon | armīs |
| Vocative | weapon | armae |
Likewise, many "less hard" sciences use terminologies and methods borrowed from the hard sciences, in order to give themselves more credibility. The most common mathematical methods are statistical ones, which are normally used in an extravagant way.
I could cite the statistics on the "Gender GAP", that is a statistic on a multifactorial phenomenon, which is however used by crediting the difference in pay only to gender, thus ignoring the p-value, and the theory of estimates is abused to the point that I am cited a statistic on the harm of eating meat where a prevalence of 0.02% is calculated (because the number of cancer cases is in these terms) using THREE HUNDRED people as a negative sample.
Anyone who has done a decent high school knows how to calculate a sample of an estimate, and can calculate how many people it would take to make that estimate.
These abuses are very common, and are easily caught if you have a relatively robust statistical background. It does not take a genius to understand that such a prevalence does not calculate it using a sample of 300 people.
To this is added a misleading language taken from the humanities: we often hear people say “in these conditions the cases of spina bifida double”. Interesting, but the cases of spina bifida are measured in the order of hundredths of a percentage point. And again, to measure a prevalence of this kind, a sample is not enough, you need a statistic on the entire population (or almost).
There is also a "fault" of the scientific community, therefore, if there is so much fake science , but in general the problem is that many do not have the basic logical tools to reject these extravagances to the sender.
If someone comes to me with an extravagant investigation into the fact that eating meat is bad, already with two bases of statistics I can dispute the size of the sample. Data from the entire population is used to measure prevalences of that size (as in the case of the prevalence of spina bifida around coal-fired power plants, which I mentioned). But without having this basic knowledge, one can simply challenge the concept of "meat". What is "meat"?
in China, it also indicates bat, armadillo, mole and other delights. But even if we go to the West, in the USA meat indicates chlorine and steroid hormones, in quantities not allowed in Europe. You should have analyzed the carcinogens of meat to define the sample, and then do a study on the effects of these carcinogens. But that they hurt even without meat, and that carcinogens cause cancer is not news that ends up in the newspapers.
There are also statistics that come WITHOUT a control group: when cows are said to produce methane by decomposing grass, they forget the fact that grass also decomposes outside the cow (since they are usually annuals), bacteria that decompose it are practically the same, and it would be necessary to compare the methane produced by the grass inside the cow with that produced by the grass outside the cow.
In addition to the logical exam, a fair knowledge of science fiction helps a lot. Because a lot of hoaxes, scientific or not, come from right there. For example, the "speciesism" that vegans talk about comes from a science fiction book, translated in Italy as QI 1000 (Brain Wave), originally https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoziente_1000 . If you wonder what this has to do with it, in the synopsis they forget to tell you that cats had become Nician nihilistic philosophers, and that obviously the utility animals locked in the farms become communists and rebel. (to Orwell's delight, I suppose).
Just as the story of graphene that can control your mind comes out of an episode of X-files, where using a Psion III they could control graphene and one of the protagonists almost lost both arms. The story that governments use COVID as an excuse to create a dictatorship comes from V for Vendetta, the reptilians are from the V series, Visitors. And so on: clearly, if you recognize scientific conjecture as science fiction, it is easier for you to reject it.
There are also some simple mathematical methods for uncovering the false science. For example, orders of magnitude are always wrong. If you come from a scientific education, you know very well that at the end of an exercise the first thing you have to look at to understand if you have done well is to check the orders of magnitude. For example, if you get quantities of the order or hundreds of Tesla, you know that you have something wrong or you are trying to simulate something really powerful. Tesla is a gigantic unit of measure.
Even when we talk about logarithmic functions, for example, or exponential functions, we must be very careful. If someone comes and tells you that with 5G you can overheat your blood, which ceases about 5 liters, and you know that you see -100 DBm of radiation on your mobile phone, you know that we are billions and billions of times below. required energy. These things can be seen by eye, because the orders of magnitude are VERY wrong.
In general, then, when you read in the newspaper that "someone has made a new discovery and in ten years we will be cured of every disease", you should:
- see if there are already science fiction books that talk about it
- see if there are already films or other fiction about it.
- see if the theory is logical.
- see if the entities are well defined.
- if everything looks okay, take a look at the publication, and look for the abstract and conclusions.
- if the orders of magnitude square and the entities are defined, then try to understand the paper.
In the first 5 steps, you usually skimmed 99% of the shit. I would say that in the first 4 you have skimmed 90%.
Because cialtroneria is okay, but only at GWAR concerts.