Except politics of course. We all know everyone else is wrong.
Chemistry, and science in a broader sense. When you hear ‘woah a new medicine has been found that could cure cancer’ it’s most likely 'we have developed a new gadolinium based compound that has shown efficiency in penetrating cancer cells and could be used to deliver drugs to these areas, however it has not been tested in humans because it kills rats faster that it cures cancer"
Almost every science headline was written by someone who never understood science. They just translate some foreign language into words that suits them.
PopSci is tricky because on one hand, it’s great that there’s a lot of interest in learning about science and it should be promoted, but on the other, the vast majority of research is so complex that you literally cannot explain it to the layman without making it wrong in some way.
That’s why Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, etc are such treasures. They know science, but also are able to explain shit to laypeople. Scientific breakthroughs need to do press releases that the scientists themselves sign off on. Unfortunately, the misunderstood sensationalism gets clicks which makes money, so there’s absolutely zero incentive for these journalists to get the story straight since they’re profit motivated.
The same Bill Nye that aired the episode “My Sex Junk”? Yeah, please no. That guy isn’t even a real scientist.
Bill Nye was a mechanical engineer, then a comedian, then a TV presenter. Unlike (say) Carl Sagan or Neil DeGrasse Tyson, he was never a research scientist.
Bill Nye has lost my respect recently, but Professor Dave FTW.
You’re not wrong in general, but in the specific case of “X against Y”, it’s simply bad journalism. Every half decent journalist should be able to tell that the original research article might be of relevance for the field, but not the public.
Especially adding anything cancer-related to the headline is just pure evil. They knew exactly, that it will get many people’s hope up and they’ll click.
Medical science or research in general, it’s all spun around to get clicks.
When people think there’s a new “superfood” or “recommendation” from doctors every week, they stop trusting doctors. In reality, the processes and recommendations are very robust and take lots of time and research to change. A study will say that “we might want to look into X” and news will run with “groundbreaking study: x is the sole cause of y”.
I’m not even an expert. Like you said “Almost every science headline was written by someone who never understood science”
Things that kill cancer include:
- Fire
- Polonium
- High-test peroxide
- Most strong acids
- Chlorine
Of course, they also kill everything else.
That’s what radiation + chemotherapy does too. The whole goal is for the treatment to kill the cancer faster than it kills the human.
I had to do an assignment in college about news report headlines vs what was said in the abstract vs what was said in the conclusion. Basically finding out how many news reports just skimmed the abstract. Kinda shocking tbh.
Sadly I can only upvote this once
If I see one more article about knitting where the photos are clearly crochet, or vice versa, I swear to god…
It’s the same with electronics and people holding the hot part of a soldering iron
Corsets. They were not uncomfortable or restrictive, and they did not make women faint. Only the Victorian equivalent of the Kardashians were into dangerously tight lacing – for regular women, they were just a fitted support garment, no worse than spanx. I’ve worn them for 25 years as a late-Victorian reenactor. They’re actually really nice for back pain.
On the other hand, hoop skirts were immensely dangerous, and women were burned to death when their skirts caught an open flame (of which there were many), were dragged to death when their hoops caught in coach wheels as they disembarked, and fell to their deaths when the wind caught their hoops and sent them flying Mary Poppins style from rooves and balconies.
Corsets were fine; hoop skirts were a death trap.
I was thinking of gettingy ex-wife a hoop skirt for her birthday.
IT Security
This is a huge one in movies and TV shows especially, but part of the problem is that IT security, or counter-security, is not a great spectator event. It’s very dry, does not involve a lot of flashing lights or even really anything on screen except in many cases a command prompt or progress bar, and is in most cases not a quick process.
That said, Mr. Robot, while not perfect, did a really good job of being a more realistic portrayal.
Expectation: “Oh my God. They’re hacking the system! Deploy counter measures!!! furious typing”
Reality: “So, we sent out a phishing test email and had a 61% click rate…”
We had the opposite problem. Mandatory training by an external company. They sent an email to everyone urging us to click here and do the training, otherwise our company might not be certified!
Even ignoring the pushy text, the entire mail looked sketchy as fuck, generic company name, low res logo of our company badly photoshopped into a banner.
So everyone ignored this obvious spam and our company lost the certification.
61%!? What subject line are you using!?
I’m not actually in IT in my org but I remember one they sent out was “FWD: Your Medicare Benefits Package is Maturing” followed a few days later by an actual company wide shame email from the CIO about the click rate.
Yeah… boomer companies.
Probably “Your Microsoft account password needs reset” sadly
IT-Sec can be pretty interesting if you know what someone is doing. I agree with you.
I never understood why it was called Mr. Robot but he was a human?
It’s explained later in the story
spoiler
It`s his dad’s computer repair store’ name. Or the one Elliot wants to see it as (in case of classic unreliable narrator moment).
Did you watch the show?
Mr Robot was his dad’s electronic store.
Came here to say this.
Skinhead culture was originally a mix of Rude boys from Jamaica mixing with British working class dock youths. The aesthetic grew around turning your working class clothing into respectable attire. You’d shine the doc martens you wore because they were slip resistant, turn up the ankles of your jeans to show a clean crisp cuff, tight skinny suspenders as this was the 60’s and a Fred perry or Sherman shirt. They would mix with west indie immigrants at dancehalls and listen to Ska, Blue Beat and Rocksteady. There was also a whole scooter/Teddy culture that was a kind of proto subculture. But all that nazi shit came years later as the BNP co-opted what was a tough working class subculture into what most people know today. And don’t get me wrong, the original skinheads were as racist as any blue collar British youth in the 60s/70s. But the origin is in my opinion one of unity.
The far right co-opting the look and image of anything that looks ‘tough’ when they themselves aren’t? Who woulda thunk it!?
As a fan of Viking shit, yeah…
Absolutely. Fucking. Everything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
This is amazing! I had no idea there was an actual term for this. But yeah I frequently encounter flat out misinformation in most news sources and always have the thought: “If I know these parts are BS, how many of the things I’m not familiar with are also BS?!”
Math.
John McCarthy had a saying: He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
And I can confirm, society talks a lot of nonsense.
P=NP
Speaking of nonsense, this is reductive, self-serving twaddle.
Same with me. The amount of graphs that are misleading at best that are portrayed in the news is infuriating.
Electronic product development. Apple releases a iPhone every year, so people think you can start developing a new phone in September and ship 100M of them the following September.
Really became a problem with Kickstarter reporting where some bullshit project would ask for a puny $50k to develop and ship a tiny wrist mounted supercomputer phone and promise to ship in six months, and tech blogs would eat that shit up without an ounce of skepticism.
I even wrote a blog about it
Computers.
Are there no UX designers in all the galaxies you’ve explored with your otherwise impressive space fleet? Because your bridge UI is trash. >:(
Literally anything having to do with Infosec or the Dark Web.
i think letterkenny might have the most realistic representation of “the dark web”
buncha tweakers in their mom’s basement with a nerd friend that helps them look at onion sites so they can feel like edgelords without actually buying anything.
Linguistics.
A stupefying proportion of what mass media and everyday people think they know about linguistics and languages is wrong. Unfortunately, they do not appreciate corrections.
I would love to know more! Feel free to vent.
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You heard about that recent study trying to say that Indo-European speakers came from Anatolia? Classic case of people from another subject of study thinking their own experience and conventions transfer across fields. The dataset is supposedly very good but their theoretical framework and conclusions aren’t.
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Your language isn’t the world’s oldest/first language.
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That includes Sanskrit. It isn’t the Ur-language either. Sorry not sorry.
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Neither is Albanian.
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Nor Arabic.
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Or Tamil.
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Turkish neither.
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Not all languages came from Latin—in fact, most didn’t. It’s a quirk of history that Romance (and Indo-European generally) spread so far and wide
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Indo-European language theory is correct regardless of whether you choose to believe it.
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Russia may be Satan’s dacha, but that doesn’t change the fact that Russian is a real language (and a Slavic one, to boot). Also, when I cite George Shevelov, you don’t get to write him off as a propagandist; he is Ukrainian, not Russian (somebody tried to do that to me last weekend, refusing to even consider the idea because his last name looks Russian).
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Black people (or whatever minority of your choice) don’t speak “bad English” or whatever other language. African-American Vernacular English in particular is a well-studied lect—a language variety—with a ton of scholarship behind it; it isn’t arbitrary (“he eating” and “he be eating” have different meanings/connotations; they don’t just drop words for no reason—there’s logic to it).
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“I could care less” is an idiom. The fact that it is so widely used and understood makes it a part of proper English. That’s the yardstick in linguistics: The crowd tends to win. (Or do the complainants never say things like “I read it a million times” or “it was a billion degrees out and humid”?)
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Words like “supposably”, “liberry”, “expresso”, and “conversate” are analogically extended forms. Sound change and grammar change happen all the time. If you have issues with them, you will have issues with “tenth” (the original form of this word, tithe, survived as a specialized form), “snuck” (sneak is originally a weak verb, not a strong one), or “messenger” and “passenger” (analogy with challenger).
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BONUS ROUND: The Armenian genocide DID HAPPEN. I was quite smugly told by a Turkish nationalist to “read the court case” as I was wrong…in which case THE JUDGES AGREED THAT IT HAPPENED and were only concerned with whether the right to deny history exists. I also got libeled as a racist “Cizvit” (“Jesuit”) for some reason. Same guy tried to pull the “Turkish is the mother of all languages” card, even saying that Native American languages came from Turkish. (Which is facially implausible. North American languages are often front-loading whereas Turkic likes to suffix.)
I love this! Please be angry about more language things.
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Anything to do with space. I’m so sick of hearing about what newly observed thing has scientists baffled and is definitely absolutely unquestioningly hyper advanced intelligent extraterrestrials.
Every time they say that “scientists are baffled”, I think that they’re just talking to the stupid scientists.
The more baffled the scientist the better the science…
I only look at the best science of course.
Scientists are baffled as to why people are asking them about aliens again.
Especially the geologists.
Ah yes, if we can’t currently explain it then logically it must be aliens.
Probably too closely related to politics, but “guns”. “Stand Your Ground” laws. Use-of-force in general.
Too many people mistake corporate policy for law, especially when it comes to responding to armed robbery.
I’m not an expert in airplanes and I’m not even a pilot, but even I know that most airport runways are not made of tarmac. They’re made of asphalt, which is a different substance. Even some newer ones are made of concrete. But every time you’ll watch a news report about planes at an airport they’ll say “on the tarmac.” It’s not even slang among pilots. It’s slang among journalists.
I know I know it’s not super important but it annoys the shit out of me every time I hear it.
I don’t think this was ever meant as a description of the substance, but location. Like, you wouldn’t say someone is waiting on the concrete or “I drove down the asphalt with my car”.
…what? But you wouldn’t say tarmac either for your example. Youd say road.
If it’s about location then they should say runway, taxiway, gate, hangar, etc.
…what? But you wouldn’t say tarmac either for your example. Youd say road.
Yeah, that’s the point. “Tarmac” does not refer to the substance, because pretty much nowhere else would you describe the position of a person or object by the substance it’s standing on. It’s just a generalized term for “where planes go bssshhwww”, whether that’s the taxiway or whatever isn’t relevant in these cases.
I don’t really care that it’s a generalized term for where the planes go. My comment was about how it’s just wrong. Nobody in the aviation industry calls it tarmac. It’s what journalists call it when they can’t be bothered to learn the right terminology.
For the record people in my area do actually call their driveway “the asphalt” and I have heard them call it such even if it literally was not asphalt so ymmv lol
Journalists communicate to laymen, and the most common name of the area you’re referring to is tarmac. Personally I think it would be worse practice to refer to it as the apron, which is apparently the correct word, because it would be confusing to the audience.
Solar. You’ll see monocrystalline cells called multicrystalline or vice versa.
Villains. They don’t admit to being villains in real life.
