Science journalist John Bohannon, whose former work included exposing the awful quality of science journal peer reviewing, has landed a new coup. With only minor effort, as described in http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800, he tricked a significant part of mainstream media into running stories how chocolate helps with weight loss.
"Slim by Chocolate!" the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe's largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages. It was discussed on television news shows. It appeared in glossy print, most recently in the June issue of Shape magazine ("Why You Must Eat Chocolate Daily," page 128). Not only does chocolate accelerate weight loss, the study found, but it leads to healthier cholesterol levels and overall increased well-being. The Bild story quotes the study's lead author, Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D., research director of the Institute of Diet and Health: "The best part is you can buy chocolate everywhere."
I am Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D. Well, actually my name is John, and I'm a journalist. I do have a Ph.D., but it's in the molecular biology of bacteria, not humans. The Institute of Diet and Health? That's nothing more than a website.
Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.
After a little actual, but mostly nonsensical research operation, he had a paper accepted by a supposedly reputable journal. With the aid of a media seeding agent, the story was placed and then took its course.
Original Submission
Related Stories
In an effort to show how politically correct nonsense and evil (but I repeat myself) can get through academic peer review and be published, some academics did just that with seven papers. More are partly through the process.
A particularly funny and horrifying case is the Gender Studies journal Affilia. Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf only needed to be translated with wording in the typical style of intersectionality theory, and it passed muster.
Another published paper, considered exemplary scholarship by the journal that published it, contains this whopper: "Dog parks are microcosms where hegemonic masculinist norms governing queering behavior and compulsory heterosexuality can be observed in a cross-species environment."
The Grievance Studies Scandal: Five Academics Respond
Now, three academics have submitted twenty spoof manuscripts to journals chosen for respectability in their various disciplines. Seven papers were accepted before the experiment stopped; more are surviving peer review. This new raid on screamingly barmy pseudo-scholarship is the Alan Sokal Opening, weaponised. Like dedicated traceurs in a Parkour-fest, the trio scrambled over the terrain of what they call Grievance Studies. And they dropped fire-crackers. One published paper proposed that dog parks are "rape-condoning spaces." Another, entitled "Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism" reworked, and substantially altered, part of Mein Kampf. The most shocking, (not published, its status is "revise and resubmit") is a "Feminist Approach to Pedagogy." It proposes "experiential reparations" as a corrective for privileged students. These include sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or being purposely spoken over. Reviewers have commented that the authors risk exploiting underprivileged students by burdening them with an expectation to teach about privilege.
Also at WSJ.
Related: Publishing Stings Find Shoddy Peer Review
Absurd Paper Accepted by Open-Access Computer Science Journal
Media World Fooled with Bogus Chocolate Diet Story
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Saturday May 30 2015, @06:50AM
From the article:
When reading that (and the section surrounding it), I immediately thought of this xkcd. [xkcd.com]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @09:40PM
If you consult an oracle too often, the gods become annoyed and punish you with false sign. If you must collect many omens, you must show piety by punishing yourself. The gods may then be satisfied with this substitute and allow a strong sign to overcome the false.
If the problems suggested by that article are true, there are people presenting themselves as scientists (possibly with degrees) who use worse methods of divination then those inspecting entrails thousands of years ago.
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Saturday May 30 2015, @09:26AM
"No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday May 30 2015, @09:37AM
But not all people live in the plain. What about the hill people?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Saturday May 30 2015, @10:43AM
But not all hill people live in the astral plane. What about Timothy Leary?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @10:53AM
Media outlets don't care. Reporters don't care. "Health reporting" has been shown to be a bullshit fest for years now, no better than entertainment news and potentially more harmful, and nothing's changed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @11:10AM
Daily newspapers have been closing and/or trimming their staffs for the past 15 years in response to the instant availability of free news on the web. The problem is, what is the ultimate source of that news? In some cases it's not as dependable now as it was back then, when we had more professional fact checking.
Just as with the audio quality of phone calls, what we have today is a lot cheaper, but not as good as what we used to have.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @11:29AM
But this one goes deeper than mainstream news outlet. The so-called science itself, "nutritional science," is crap.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @12:29PM
Lots of sciences start out as bullshit. When chemistry first started, it was called "alchemy", and when astronomy started it was called "astrology".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @12:37PM
Doesn't change the fact that they were/are crap.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @06:44PM
The point is that its not unusual for a branch of science to start as crap, until enough real knowledge is harvested from that crap for it to become a real science. A crap foundation does not prevent it from maturing into something real and useful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @10:33PM
Those fields were based on the philosophy of "as above, so below": that everything was correlated with everything else. Today the null hypothesis testing that is so popular only makes sense if you think the opposite: that most things are totally unrelated to each other.
Both are imperfect philosophies, but if you ask me I think the old one is closer to reality.
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Saturday May 30 2015, @03:55PM
They published in fake 'scam' journals. This wasn't reviewed at all.
To call these fake scam journals scientific journals is a cheap shot that just isn't true. I get offers from these journals in my spam folder all day long.
subicular junctures
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @11:02AM
Thousands of people around the world probably changed their diets and purchasing habits in varying amounts so he could pull off his little joke. And he didn't let them in on it right away, so now quite a few people now have a new habit that is costing them money, extra weight, and dental hygiene.
So what did he prove? That the media is gullible, especially with respect to science news, and especially with respect to reporting about diet and nutrition?
Stop the presses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @11:33AM
The guy performed a valuable service to those people by showing that "nutritional science" quacks are screwing them over.
(Score: 2) by tynin on Saturday May 30 2015, @04:34PM
I don't think he did provide a valuable service to the people who read and believed it. Sometimes we hear things, don't have enough time to fact check everything, and make an assumption that this is true. So now these people will go on about there lives consuming more chocolate than they should.
I fell for something similar from Mythbusters some time back. They had an episode about if it is better to walk or run through the rain if you want to stay the least wet. There initial findings were it was better to walk. I apparently missed a followup episode were they found they were wrong, and it was best to run. For YEARS, if it wasn't absolutely pouring down, I would walk through the rain at a brisk pace, under the idea I was staying drier. Somethings are non-obvious, and even as much as I try to question, and then re-question things that are in and around my life... we can never afford the time to be eternally vigilant on all domains of knowledge.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @05:01PM
I don't understand how anyone believed this about getting out of the rain. (No offense.)
Thought experiment: It's raining. Alice and Bob are standing next to each other in their yard and are 10 feet away from the door to their house.
Alice jogs to the door at 5 feet per second, having been in the rain for a total of 2 seconds. (For reasons which should become obvious, we'll ignore the fact that she is "running into" the rain which is falling ahead of her.)
Bob is deep in thought about something and just barely shuffles his way to the door at a rate of 0.01 feet per second, which means he is in the rain for 1,000 seconds, or 16 and 2/3rds minutes.
After 8 minutes (when Bob is almost halfway to the door), do you think he is probably already wetter than Alice?
And just imagine if the rate of rainfall dramatically increases after a few minutes (which would be pretty typical). By taking his sweet time Bob is now getting completely soaked by a downpour.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @06:46PM
For the same reason some people still think going slower will make a ride less bumpy. Unintuitiveness is no reason to not believe something.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2015, @12:25PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 01 2015, @04:13PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @04:38PM
Two points:
1 - Most of those people will never find out about the fake results and will continue with their "new, improved" diet.
2 - Many of those who do hear about it will go into denial because this "works for me."
Consider homeopathy. Fake "science," same outcome.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @02:02PM
Yet, so many supposedly intelligent Silicon Valley tech types are apparently flocking to those protein drinks.
Hmmm. Maybe our snide derision for the "common folk" is perhaps a bit misplaced?
(Score: 2, Funny) by FlyingSock on Saturday May 30 2015, @01:46PM
Common sense, so rare it's a god damn superpower...