Comment by _aavaa_
4 days ago
> Finally, if you want to simply know which Science™ you can trust, I’d recommend finding and following individuals who repeatedly demonstrate competence in statistical methods and scientific interpretation.
So like, the scientists themselves?
> If in doubt, read the study critically yourself.
I cannot believe the author manages to say this with a straight face. “Hey you average person (with maybe a college degree), go read the original academic paper yourself. Doesn’t matter that you don’t have the background, struggle with basic math (much less statistics), can’t evaluate the claims, and don’t know which questions to ask.”
The age of the polymath is long dead, we’re living in The Great Endarkenment. You trust your pilot to do their job, you trust your civil engineers with the bridge you driver over, and the mechanical engineers with the controlled explosions happening in your car, but when it comes to cutting edge scientific articles, here is where you, average Joe, will be able to know better that the experts in the field who specialized in this and do it every day.
> You trust your pilot to do their job
In this case, the "pilot" (the combined media and researcher science communication system) is deliberately steering the plane into the side of a mountain. A coin flip would do a better job. They've burned their credibility to the ground, and you're trying to repair it by invoking other professions that haven't done so.
Okay, I’ll bite. Who exactly is “they”? How have they burned their credibility to the ground? And how does reading scientific papers yourself address this issue if in your telling it was created by people who are no better than a coin flip?
Well, this study and the BBC's reporting on it (ignoring the misleading title) isn't quite as bad as worse-than-coin-flip, but the study from my other comment [1] is worse-than-coin flip - not only did they fail to adjust for birth weight, they even cut out data they didn't like [2]. So "they" varies by field, institute, and researcher.
[1] https://dailycaller.com/2025/03/31/exclusive-researchers-axe... (every claim the article makes is backed up by attached FOIA'd documents, so you don't have to take the Daily Caller at their word if you don't trust them)
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