Farts Cure Cancer! AKA The Scientific Distortion Thread

[Sir Thursday]

As I was browsing the internet this morning, I came across this rather unexpected claim - Scientists Say Smelling Farts Prevents Cancer. It makes for an amusing headline, but when I had a look for the research on which it was based I found it came from this paper. So it turns out that although there is the faintest whiff ( :cool4:) of a connection between the two, the headline is almost completely divorced from the reality of the science that underpins it.

Any other examples of particularly egregious mis-interpretations of scientific studies?

ST

[Sci-2]

BICEP2's dust issue.

Probably anything to do with the Multiverse.

A variety of fields are underpowered, don't replicate findings, and so on.

Nutrition Science is apparently garbage?

Singularity.

The idea that have an expanded space program will help us dream, mystically create STEM jobs.

[Fez]

You hard scientists think you've got it so bad; out here in the social sciences we take results from one-off studies with a single sigma as gospel.

[Sci-2]

Singularity.

The idea that have an expanded space program will help us dream, mystically create STEM jobs.

More on this science-religion:

Which Way To Heaven?

Listen to those of today’s cornucopian true believers who don’t simply put their faith in the endless prolongation of business as usual, and it’s rarely difficult to hear the ringing voice of the Christian evangelist coming through the verbiage about limitless energy sources, new worlds for mankind, and the rest of it. How many times, dear reader, have you heard the great leap upward into space described as humanity’s mission, its destiny, even its sole excuse for existing in the first place? How many times have you read enthusiastic claims about space-based manufacturing, orbital colonies and the like that assume as a matter of course that benefits will outweigh costs and difficulties will inevitably be overcome, because, well, going into space is humanity’s mission, its destiny, etc.? Let’s just say that if you write a blog that asks hard questions about the mythology of progress, you can count on fielding outraged comments along these lines several times a week from now until star date fill-in-the-blank.

Now it so happens that there’s a very good reason to doubt these claims, and in particular to challenge the notion that orbital colonies, settlements on Mars, and the rest of it will inevitably prosper if we just find the quadrillions of dollars necessary to pay for them and the infrastructure necessary to build them in the first place. In an article published in Nature in 1997, a team of economists headed by Robert Costanza set out to calculate how much value is contributed to the global economy by the Earth’s natural systems; their midrange estimates works out to an annual contribution roughly three times the size of the world’s gross domestic product. Put another way, of every dollar’s worth of goods and services consumed by human beings each year, around 75 cents are provided free of charge by nature, and only 25 cents have to be paid for by human economic activity.