The Terrifying Truth Of Fake Medical Studies | Stuart Ritchie Ep. 436

What’s more likely: that a titillating-sounding study linking pornography and ESP proves that human beings possess an innate ability to predict the future, or that another, less flashy study trying to replicate these results and failing suggests the truth may still be “out there?” Those of us who want to trust science hope the latter is the study that makes it into the peer-reviewed journals taken seriously by the academic world. But those of us who have been paying attention to how hype affects news cycles suspect that the former is the study that actually gets submitted, published, passed around, and talked about. Sure, a retraction can always be issued for the bad science after the fact, but not everyone’s going to get the memo. And this, as Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth author Stuart Ritchie explains, is a big problem.

On this episode, Stuart joins us to dissect the reasons behind the way well-intentioned but relatively minor discoveries are distorted into modern miracles by the time they hit the press. It’s not so much that scientists have a desire to obscure the truth, but they do have to be visible enough to get the funding that makes their work possible. So it’s not science itself that happens to be the problem — or the people trying to further our understanding of that science — but the broken system around how science is financed and its findings monetized. Thankfully, Stuart has some ideas about how we might reform this system into something that serves us better. Listen, learn, and enjoy — for SCIENCE!

✍️ Full show notes and worksheets for this episode: https://jordanharbinger.com/436

What We Discuss with Stuart Ritchie:

🧪 Why good, meaningful science too often gets pushed aside by the hype around bad science that makes for sensational headlines.
🧪 How and why incentives in research are often skewed and lead to bad science — and even outright fraud.
🧪 What happens when good scientists are hoodwinked by bad science and vouch for it as gospel because its pedigree seems legit.
🧪 How can you spot bad science before you adapt your lifestyle to correspond to its dodgy, worthless, or perhaps even dangerous advice?
🧪 What is the Open Science movement, and how might it help us reform these problems in research going forward?
🧪 And much more…

📖 Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth available here: https://geni.us/nrJSCr5

📖 Intelligence: All That Matters available here: https://geni.us/TOhPbq

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