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squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

There’s a website (can’t be bothered to google it right now), where they reconstruct modern-day animals from their bones as if they were dinosaurs. It’s ridiculous.

That’s why I think that most of paleontology is just speculative nonsense. You get these nice pictures of dinosaurs in their natural habitat, then you read the paper and it turns out, all they have of that dinosaur is an imprint of half a knuckle bone.

Astronomy is similar. You get pretty images of exoplanets with clouds, continents and oceans, and then you read the paper and all they had was periodic flickering of a star when the planet orbits in between the star and us.

At that rate, they could just also invent a space faring dinosaur civilization from the same fragments of information and it would be just as grounded in reality.

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blackbrook@mander.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don’t think you can prove that people can’t do something well, by doing it yourself poorly.

“Look how humorously badly I keep missing the target! See? Sharpshooters could never hit something like this at this distance!”

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- squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Roughly 30% of published, peer-reviewed scientific studies are estimated to be not reproducible. Because nobody takes peer reviews seriously and everyone is just rewarded for publishing, no matter how much of it is garbage.
  
  Remember the “chocolate helps you lose weight” study that went through every stupid newspaper? It was obvious garbage, employing p-hacking, using a fake researcher’s name, using a made-up university institute. And yet it went through peer review without issue, was published in a journal and was picked up by every newspaper under the sun.
  
  Then the author stepped forward and said he only created this fake study to show how easy it is to publish a garbage paper. The thing he didn’t expect was that nobody cared. Nobody printed anything about him retracting his own obviously fake study. No consequences at all were taken to his finding.
  
  Because everyone is incentivized to publish every piece of toilet paper they can find, and nobody cares about the quality.
  
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LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yeah, this is why people don’t trust science. They look at the surface level of the PRESS RELEASE and then assume scientists are just making shit up.

There’s a ton of work done behind the pictures and there’s lots of revisions and changes as new evidence comes in. AND there is disclaimers on ever single “artist rendition”

Science is fucking hard, and the pretty pictures of the press release are just the fun parts that they use to advertise their hard work.

Then people take a brief look at the picture, call bullshit, then go smear them online.

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- squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Tbh, these artist renditions are almost completely made up. They are made up, because the press won’t print a “We found a piece of bone shrapnel and we guess it might belong to a dinosaur”, but they totally will print a nice image of a dinosaur from Jurassic Park, no matter if it’s truthful or just purely made up.
  
  Science is hard and getting proper science published in regular non-scientific press is even harder, unless you make crap up.
  
  That’s why the fake “chocolate helps you loose weight” study made it into every newspaper front page in existence, while the reveal by the author that the study was faked was completely not covered at all. (He did that to expose how easy it is to get fake science published. He just didn’t expect how little anyone in media cared whether the science published is actually science.)
  
  Real science is hard. Fake science is easy. Debunks and negative peer reviews are just not published. Hence, there’s a huge amount of garbage science floating around and hardly anyone disputes it. Because of blind, unquestioning, religious faith in science.
  
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KoboldCoterie@pawb.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

At that rate, they could just also invent a space faring dinosaur civilization from the same fragments of information and it would be just as grounded in reality.

I want to live on that planet. It can’t possibly be doing worse than we are.

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Shiggles@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You might like the various works of David Hone, a very talented and well spoken paleontologist who talks in depth about how they know what they do know, and gives several examples of poor paleontology and what they’re doing wrong.

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VerPoilu@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There is a book discussing that.

This website has a few examples: obscuredinosaurfacts.com/blog/…/all-todays.html?h…

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