Submitted 1 month ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/bb8d5ad2-d8c0-40a5-8515-82484d88a756.jpeg
Titles like this make me angry. Sometimes it feels like an insult to my intelligence. Just tell me what it’s about and stop making stuff up.
I make a point of not clicking on such articles, or really anything with click bait titles if I can avoid it.
You have to remember… those headlines aren’t for you. They’re for the average idiot who isn’t even remotely interested in the scientific mumbo jumbo and allbthat highly technical gobbledygook. They want to be spoonfed a statement they can parrot to a co-worker and move on with their day being a terrible consumer of info.
I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend lately, and I wonder if the way these headlines are written is feeding it: creationist articles have been slipping into my science news feed, usually riffing off whatever bullshit alarmist/exaggerated headlines spread through the popsci realm the day before.
If you don’t know what you’re looking at (and most people don’t), you’ll wind up reading creationist propaganda when you think you’re reading a science article.
I’ve added words like may, could, might etc to my lemmy filter to get rid of these articles
Given that quantum theory and general relativity are incompatible, something has to give.
Also, general relativity requires dark matter and energy to explain cosmological data, but particle physics has yet to capture the faintest indication of something supposedly 5x more common than visible matter.
🎉🎈🤡 JOURNALISM🤡🎈 🎉
the single biggest pet peeve that i have is when somebody says something like “X is good for you in Y situations under Z conditions” and then everybody immediately goes “X is good for you, do more X” This happens so often i’m starting to think we shouldn’t allow people to have opinions anymore.
like it’s so easy to just, not say something silly, or stupid.
Or the opposite even! We replaced a mouse’s blood with artificial sweetener and that mouse died of super cancer. Ergo, artificial sweetener will give you super cancer.
yeah. There are so many problems with so many things in so many ways.
It really doesn’t help that people like to grasp onto the “ultimate” truth when it comes to this stuff. Even when there are good arguments for things people will fall head over heels down a mountain just to make a bad argument.
and it just pains me, i’m not mad (ok i might be a little mad, or maybe a lot) but i’m (also) disappointed in them as well, because we can collectively do better as a species, but we just, choose not to.
i mean, for the love of god shitpost as much as you want, i love shitposting, it’s the best, but just, read my posts on eudaimonia if you have to. It’s worth the effort, and it will greatly improve your life. (maybe not my posts, but stop being silly, please.)
I’ve been saying for a while that it really feels like media literacy has gone down significantly. I read some opinions or takeaways on a movie and the responses I see can be so confusing, like how someone could possibly come to their conclusion. It could be a movie about fire engulfing everything and they’d be like, “wow, wind sure does destroy a lot of stuff!”, for some reason.
To some extent I get it, I make pretty distant connections myself pretty often, though I generally acknowledge that it wasn’t the intended read of the work but an interpretation of it. Using the fire example above, wind blows fire around, so the wind is destructive too. Sure, that’s great.
So I don’t mind people having these opinions, even if I would have disagreed with them. What bugs me is just how goddamn certain and adamant people get about it, without being facetious about it. If after viewing you genuinely believe that wind is the root cause of the issues, and not all the examples from the source material showing that it’s fire… I just don’t know what to tell you.
Of course, this isn’t for things like meme, or like I said interpretations of the work. If a bunch of people all independently see it and come to similar conclusions, that’s a byproduct of the work. Also similarly, if one person says a theory and everybody likes it, that’s also a bit different to me, though it can be a little annoying if it’s ran without any other thoughts. Not many things have just a single read to it, so it seems limiting to permanently categorize it. There’s also plenty of cases where the work itself does a very poor job getting its point across, probably like this comment right here (sorry, I have a headache).
All in all, in general I’m fine with the whacky opinions that might not be based in the work or even in reality. It gets frustrating when the person is so adamant that their interpretation is the one definitive read and any alternative is dismissed, because it stifles discussion.
zoe bee recently posted a really good bit on media literacy, worth a watch if you have the time.
Calling back to my original post, saying that people shouldn’t have opinions, it’s a bit of a shitpost and highly satirical, but i think it would be generally productive for society if we started pushing for people to disavow opinions more generally. An opinion is more akin to a bet than anything else, it’s just a statement that you make based on preconceived reasoning. There are things opinions should exist for, shit like “i like the color blue” is a really good example.
But when you start getting to shit like “i think the jews control the world banking system” i think it’s probably good to take a step back and consider the point of an opinion in the first place.
Personally i like wacky opinions, i have a bunch, but they’re inconsequential, it’s shit like “i like linux and think that windows is bad” there’s a point where it’s not just an opinion anymore, and we should stop referring to them as such. Having a different worldview is not an opinion, it’s a worldview, and that worldview is probably based on pseudofact in a lot of places.
I feel like we’ve sort of conflated the idea of an opinion with an “idea” which is wrong.
In fairness sometimes small tiny differences like that do turn out to be significant. But measurement error usually wins out most of the time
Then there’s things like:
“Passing through the magnetic field, exactly half the electrons went UP, and exactly half the electrons went DOWN”, and classical physics went out through the quantum window.
The title on this article is one of my favorite gems:
Cosmic metal?
Is that some kind of refined variation of unobtanium?
Is it an urgent space-gem?
I enjoyed reading that. I’m no chemist or physicist, but that sounds like it could be a cool real world thing. Care to shatter my ignorance?
From what I understand its a Nickel alloy that has good magnetic properties which can replace rare earth alloys for magnets that renewable technology is heavily reliant on. At face value yes this would be pretty big, but in terms of actual real world practicality on replacing rare earth magnets I really couldn’t tell you. Most science articles tend to oversell scientific breakthroughs in my experience, science is slow and incremental, if it’s a real breakthrough the technology tends to catch fire fairly quickly before any articles are written on it
Science journalism is mostly a joke. Worst of all medical journalism.
Every time
Doesn’t the evidence keep piling up for Orch-OR?
No
Is there any experimental evidence?
No. It’s all a bit hand-wavy and nebulous tbh; I think the only leg it’ll have to stand on will be if and when entanglement effects are seen to have a predictive power over complex states that we simply haven’t seen; and IMO at that point it ceases to be an argument about consciousness anyway
Not that I’ve seen
Looks like it to me - scitechdaily.com/groundbreaking-study-affirms-qua…
itsgroundhogdayagain@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
This is all journalism these days
thefartographer@lemm.ee 1 month ago
“This is journalism,” Lemmy Claims to be News Outlet
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
The really reputable outlets will phrase it “'this [Lemmy] is… Journalism”’ claims user of the increasingly popular reddit alternative, in post positing the decline of all other forms of media."