Comment by refibrillator
2 years ago
This seems to happen a lot here lately, particularly on earth and space science related topics. After you read the comments on a paper in your field, it becomes depressingly obvious that a lot of the most upvoted commentary is armchair skeptics doing back of the napkin math that sounds good but falls apart upon closer inspection. Gell-mann amnesia effect, etc.
Something else is happening in sone cases. You have research that tells you something, the press picks it up/exaggerates it to the point that it's no longer connected to the real thing + now we are all talking whatifs and have opinions without reading the initial claims.
In cases like this it's more than fair to call bullshit.