#BadScience

2025-04-25

Well, it was nice knowing you all...

The odds of some for-profit govt contractor not making a worse hot mess of the climate is pretty much zero.

Link: yahoo.com/news/experiments-dim

#ClimateCrisis #GeoEngineering #BadScience #Environment

(Yahoo) via Fark
 
Witty headlines and experiments to dim the Sun get green light
 
Experiments to dim the Sun get green light

Experiments to dim sunlight to fight global warming will be given the green light by the Government within weeks.
2025-04-08

I'm disgusted by the hyperbole but relieved the story is a lie.

No, dire wolves haven't been brought back from extinction, and I don't believe any species should be, at least for now.

We are careless and irresponsible and restoring extinct species will have negative unintended consequences that outweigh all possible positive consequences.

#link: newscientist.com/article/24754

#DireWolf #GeneEditing #Science #SpeciesRestoration #DNA #BadScience #NewScientist

2025-03-23

#BadScience
Beware researchers in nutrition clinging to their prejudices and not reading all the research.
Years ago tests on rodents showed that if fed a high carb/low fat they were Ok, fed high fat/low carb ditto.
But fed both high carb and high fat, and highly processed food, their cholesterol did rise.
Now we have lots of good research in this area but many only read the research that supports their views.
I read widely and decided low carb was the best option. Plus more fat in my diet but not highly processed fats.
One of my GPs was horrified when I went low carb to get my T2 diabetes into remission, especially as the same blood tests showed my total cholesterol was slightly high and my triglycerides too high.
A few weeks later I was starting my almost 6 years in remission (so far) and my cholesterol was fine.
In the past years my total cholesterol is slightly above the recommended amount but the so-called bad cholesterol is low and my ratios are good.

theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2

2025-03-10

The purpose of efforts to study (the non-existent) links between #vaccines and #autism is to run multiple small studies with poor controls, then terminate early and publicize those that demonstrate the desired outcomes. #badscience

x.com/drneilstone/status/18989

Steve Dallape ☑️ 🌎5teverin0
2025-02-22

"Now that he has been confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to put his frightening ideas about public health into action."

newrepublic.com/post/191671/rf

Dean Burnett (that brains guy)Garwboy@ohai.social
2025-01-20

The only 'Blue Monday' article you'll ever need

theneuroscienceofeverydaylife.

It's #BlueMonday again. And this is all you'll ever need to read to know the 'truth' about it

Which is that it's a ridiculous marketing stunt that got way out of hand and impacted me more than most people

#Psychology #Monday #BadScience #Misinformation

The only 'Blue Monday' article you'll ever need It's Bluc Monday again. Except is isn't. Because the third Monday i January is NOT the 'most depressing day of the year . Neve has been. And i'm weary of sayin that.
Richard Rathenickrauchen@c.im
2025-01-09

RETRACTED: #Hydroxychloroquine and #azithromycin as a treatment of #COVID19

sciencedirect.com/science/arti

Why does the principal author (who still claims the research is valid) look so familiar?

Coincidence of course. 🤷‍♂️

#BadScience #BadMedicine #BadResearch #Science #Misinformation

Didier Raoult, promoted hydroxychloroquine as a way to quickly end the health crisis. ETRACTED! Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19Trump's "doctor" who wrote a false health assessment of the then to be president.
Dean Burnett (that brains guy)Garwboy@ohai.social
2025-01-04

What Smartphones are doing to kids' mental health is NOT terrifying (no matter what a child psychiatrist says)

theneuroscienceofeverydaylife.

My response to the Guardian's latest 'Phones are destroying the children!!' article. As ever, it's... problematic

#Phones #screens #brains #wellbeing #kids #mentalhealth #BadScience #Misinformation

What Smartphones are doing to kids' mental health is NOT terrifying (no matter what a child psychiatrist says)
The Guardian has done another shoddy article about why smartphones are definitely bad. But what's really 'terrifying' is how many apparent experts are so keen to join in with them.
ReallyCanadianFlyreallyflygreg@mstdn.ca
2024-12-22

" “You look at these papers, and it’s still very hard to pin down what the definition [of ultra-processed] really is,” Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard, told me. It’s a concept prone to illogical free association, lumping together Cheetos with ultra-healthy fermented beans."

#food #ultra_processed #badscience #jumpingonbandwagons

The science of “ultra-processed” foods is misleading | Vox vox.com/future-perfect/391795/

2024-12-21

@smeg highlighting additionally:

The study cited in the other articles uses data from the UK Biobank, where the nutritional survey and followup was collected from 2009 to 2012. Where a lot of the current alternatives did not exist.
Most of the plant-based ultra-processed food in the study is snacks and convenience products that happened to be vegan.

#Vegan #Food #PlantBased #Science #BadScience

You’re being lied to about “ultra-processed” foods.

“Vegan fake meats linked to heart disease, early death,” the New York Post declared.

There was just one problem: The narrative was totally fake.

Plant-based meats were virtually absent from the study: Just 0.2 percent of calories across the sample came from meat alternatives. People were eating cookies and cake.

vox.com/future-perfect/391795/

#vegan #processedfood #ultraprocessed #food #foodsafety #sciencejournalism #science #badscience

renebekkersrenebekkers
2024-12-16

Causalingofication - describing an association as if it is causal, without a research design allowing for causal inference.
detectingbadscience.wordpress.
Correlation is not causation. Yet research reports often make causal claims, even when the research design does not allow for them. Researchers regularly describe the results of a regression as if the correlates have “effects” on the outcome.

renebekkersrenebekkers
2024-12-14

Not everything works right away... With great enthusiasm I had developed materials for a Winter School "Detecting Bad Science" detectingbadscience.wordpress.
Despite the encouragements of many of you here, the number of enrolments in the course remained below the minimum break-even point. So I won't be teaching the course in January.
But...[1/2]

2024-12-12

@augieray

I agree this is not benign. But also another example of why research groups need statisticians - a sample of 9!

#BadScience

ƧƿѦςɛ♏ѦਹѤʞspacemagick
2024-11-30

@sinisterporpoise
I am sending you the bill for new bullshit-o-meter.

Watched an episode of Graham Hancock's "Ancient Apocalypse", and can I just say:

#archaeology #bogus #badscience

youtube.com/watch?v=zrWoG8Icky

skuaskua
2024-11-17

We've seen what ⁨⁩ ⁨⁩ produces;
on with ⁩ assisted by ,
the decades of infectious respiratory disease research that poo-hooed , and,
the RWNJ ⁩ on care for transgender kids.

Lots of bad stuff resulting from fetishising ⁨⁩ ⁨⁩ as the only research that can be relied on.

Will we hear from Trumpists that there's no RCTs that support action on ?

Using a mouse model, 10 children and asking their parents to guess whether the children felt pain.

"...the American Psychiatric Association has updated the diagnostic criteria for ASD to include hyper- or hyporeactivity to sensory input, with “apparent indifference to pain and temperature” as a symptom of ASD", the team at pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/394971 write"

Deeply deeply messed up.

#Autism #BadScience

guyjantic has moved!guyjantic@c.im
2024-11-01

Creating exam questions for intro stats, and defaulting, as I sometimes do, to IQ score examples because they're easy to think through (for me). Remembering several years ago a student asking me, with clear anxiety, whether they were "smart enough" for college based on their IQ score. As we talked it became clear they felt guilt and shame about their full-scale IQ score (they apparently got assessed in high school).

IMO the problems with IQ aren't psychometric (the Wechsler tests are extremely good tests, psychometrically speaking); they are cultural. We bundle some heavy stuff with "intelligence," like self-worth, value to others, and I even think I hear hints of morality judgments, sometimes. cognitive abilities don't work that way, but good luck convincing 300 million people. As a teacher one of the little threads of my teaching is helping students question the meaning of intelligence, not just IQ scores (the question of whether/how much those measure intelligence, and how to even define intelligence is a huge can of worms).

Your intelligence has nothing to do with your worth or goodness. It's been deeply disheartening to see the standard right-wing, white-supremacist, misogynist bad actors (incompetently) using IQ research to try to support their racist, misogynist, anti-LGBTQ rants.

As the cold war ended I really thought we were putting this behind us.

#racism #misogyny #iq #intelligence #nazis #whitesupremacy #badscience #badtakes

A computer-generated diagram of a normal (i.e., "bell-curve") distribution with a mean at 110 and a 95% confidence interval indicated by small lines to the left and right of the mean value. The X axis is marked in IQ scores ranging from 85 to 135, with a secondary axis below that indicating t-scores as deviations from the mean mentioned above.

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