SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the the-power-of-god-compels-you-to-read-it dept.
The conviction that demons exist—and that they exist to harass, derange, and smite human beings—stretches back as far as religion itself. In ancient Mesopotamia, Babylonian priests performed exorcisms by casting wax figurines of demons into a fire. The Hindu Vedas, thought to have been written between 1500 and 500 b.c., refer to supernatural beings—known as asuras, but largely understood today as demons—that challenge the gods and sabotage human affairs. For the ancient Greeks, too, demonlike creatures lurked on the shadowy fringes of the human world.
But far from being confined to a past of Demiurges and evil eyes, belief in demonic possession is widespread in the United States today. Polls conducted in recent decades by Gallup and the data firm YouGov suggest that roughly half of Americans believe demonic possession is real. The percentage who believe in the devil is even higher, and in fact has been growing: Gallup polls show that the number rose from 55 percent in 1990 to 70 percent in 2007.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @04:55AM (11 children)
Yes, academia has become corrupted by scammers and political hacks. It makes sense people stop listening after the millionth "coffee is good/bad for you" press release from people who don't know what a p-value means yet use it for everything.
Eventually, the lack of confidence hits you even if it is a totally different field. It was a failure of the (research) authorities to police their fields.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by exaeta on Thursday December 06 2018, @08:00AM (9 children)
Amen. It's really hard to put trust in academia right now, given how much crap gets published.
If they wanted people to believe them, they need to make all the reports, procedures, etc. publicly accessible for free. Then people could examine the reports to see if they actually support the hypothesis or are a bullshit example of P-hacking.
Personally, I wont believe the random claims I hear from researchers if it defies common sense. About 90% of the time common sense seems to work better than modern "science". What about that study that said fat was bad for you? And that one that said that diet food was great? Now carbs are evil! And organic is the way to go. We're all doomed from preservatives (not!).
I could see someone with biases not accepting the results either. But their 'common sense' might be quite different from mine.
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @12:01PM
Actually its worse. The 'carbs are bad' idea comes from people self experimenting and 'quack' doctors saying consuming carbs over a certain percent (~10%) of your diet increases appetite and thus overeating. The academic nutrition researchers are still calling a 40% carb diet 'low carb' and drawing conclusions about 'low carb diets' from that. So they arent even in the right ballpark.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @05:29PM (3 children)
Yeah!!! Because my common sense is better than yer book larnin'!!! </sarcasm>
Seems to work, you say? Could you put that on a more rigorous footing?
[citation needed]
[citation needed]
Stop watching Dr Oz, dimwit.
Buried in there is a clue for you. Can you spot it?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 07 2018, @02:47AM (2 children)
Citations not necessary, really. Those of us who have been alive, and listening to news propaganda for more than a decade have been hearing this crap all our lives. Eggs are good, eggs are bad, egg whites are good, egg whites are bad, corn syrup is healthy, corn syrup is bad, sugar is good, sugar is poison - bacon, red meat, chicken, fish, on and on it goes. Mostly, we tune it out. But, each announcement convinces some small following.
If you really need citations on all the foods that have been demonized, then canonized in turn, you need to do your own research. It's time for you to play catchup.
And, yes, those "studies" on the various foods have taught us contempt for researchers. We need to go back to the early sixties, and the food pyramid. Teach people that they should eat a varied diet, they should limit their sugars, fats, and calories, but that they SHOULD eat some of each. Teach people to plan their diet to include minerals, vitamins, protein, and all the rest.
If people are eating decently most of the time, they need not feel guilty for pigging out for Thanksgiving when they are surrounded by family and friends.
Common sense. A million generations of ancestors lived on common sense diets, without any "studies" done to determine that one food or another was bad for you. We already knew to avoid some things like pufferfish after all - it was proven to be bad for a lot of people.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday December 07 2018, @03:10AM (1 child)
It's funny in a way, the way the research goes round and round, after billions of dollars and nearly as many food fads, it's more or less back to the advice my grandmother gave me growing up. That is, common sense.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 07 2018, @03:25AM
Just don't forget that Grandma prescribed cod liver oil for everything! :^)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Thursday December 06 2018, @09:16PM
It's not just the researchers, it's the institutions. They see ads promising to change your life right (just give us your life savings and go into a debt you'll never be able to pay off)) next to the ads for products that will eliminate fine wrinkles or perhaps leave you blind or eliminate yellowing of your toenails or wreck your liver. Then they see again and again in the news that some of them are outright scams and others result in well educated baristas.
Then cynical politicians come along and validate the idea that science is not to be trusted hoping to get a few more votes for their side.
That's the average person's view. For those who might actually read research papers and journals, the evidence suggests that the journals that were a cornerstone of scientific discourse really are just in it for the bux. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me that much is one of them published "evidence" for the flat earth if they got paid enough.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Thursday December 06 2018, @11:47PM (2 children)
While what you say is true, the problem is that for all it's flaws academia is STILL a better source of truth than the shit people are latching onto. Religion, alternative medicine, and all the other woo is infinitely worse.
It's like saying that because you got an aqua-marine coloured lolly pop instead of a green lolly pop, you're instead going to switch to eating rat poison.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07 2018, @02:13AM
Alternative medicine isn't necessarily worse. Often placebo is better than consuming a poison that could be harmful.
(Score: 2) by exaeta on Friday December 07 2018, @03:43AM
Sort of. Common sense can get your further, but some people do lack it. Real understanding of whether food X is good or bad for you will result from understanding the chemistry of that food and how it interacts with your body. These correlational studies are often done will sample sizes that are too small and they often make proclamations before the evidence fully supports them.
I think it's best if we stopped looking for 2% relative differences in risks and 0.05 P-value. Scientists need to think more and write braindead reports less. These studies are a symptom of the money being funneled to them. It seems there is little that can be done besides structural reform to encourage a different kind of science.
We also experiment far to little and do studies far too often. It's better to do large numbers of experiments, and once you notice a pattern in one of them, then decide to do a double blind study to confirm or deny it. Instead of just doing a bunch of random studies one after the other, which produces little substantial results. Take a moment to think about how most major discoveries are made, by investigative scientists experimenting, not the double blind placebo controlled study.
Whilst these studies are useful with large enough sample sizes, they aren't useful for small sample sizes. Also 0.05 is wayyyy too big. P should be less than 0.00001 as a rule and repeated at least 3 times by different groups of researchers before we accept a conclusion. (Reproducibility is important.)
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07 2018, @08:21AM
That view is as much created by the sensationalist media that turn all headlines into absolutes.
Asimov's Relativity of Wrong comes to mind, and surprise surprise it was a student of the liberal arts that prodded him to write it. The same liberal arts students that are likely to go on to become hack journalists producing said absolutist headlines...
http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html [hermiene.net]