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.
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”
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.
Both of those people have fallen off hard. Tyson’s head is so far up his own ass that he will talk over you to explain why its actually healthier that way.
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.
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
Interesting. I was taught that “knitting” was the word for all needlework techniques.
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.
Task failed successfully!
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
I love the notion that you get notified for being hacked, and that you have anti-hacking counter measures that need to be manually activated to take effect.
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.
With „code“ very often just being HTML source of some random site the effects people found.
Watching the show Tehran and the high intensity hacking sequences are python functions like DOOR.OPEN() and try/except clause’s that contain nothing more than logging output.
I saw that one. I always stopped the frame to look at the code. It never disappointed.
Hacking scenes in shows and movies were always my favorite because of how hilarious they are.
So far, the only “hacking” scene I’ve ever truly appreciated was that time in Matrix Reloaded, where Trinity used nmap to scan for open ssh ports, then used a fake “sshnuke” tool to exploit a real sshv1 crc32 vuln. Enough accuracy to make me appreciate the effort.
I feel like my python coding is being attacked here.
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…
I knew an anti-racist skinhead who was really into Norse shit and yeah, he caught it from all sides. He was also a black metal fan, maybe just a masochist?
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?!”
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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I love this! Please be angry about more language things.
All but the last four were new to me, so thank you!
Very interesting! I had no idea “tenth” comes from “tithe”. So was it common to tithe ten percent of your income or where’s the connection?
Also, shouldn’t the ur-language debate be focused on African languages, unless you don’t know that humans emerged from Africa into the rest of the world?
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
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.
Same with me. The amount of graphs that are misleading at best that are portrayed in the news is infuriating.
Society is nonsense
Speaking of nonsense, this is reductive, self-serving twaddle.
P=NP
P=0
Don’t I get like $1mil for solving that or something? /s
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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.
If you don’t say it like (whispering intensely) the dark web. Then I don’t think you’re actually on the dark web
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.
Scientists are baffled as to why people are asking them about aliens again.
Especially the geologists.
The more baffled the scientist the better the science…
I only look at the best science of course.
Ah yes, if we can’t currently explain it then logically it must be aliens.
Same with most creationism arguments, really.
“I have no explanation for this yet, therefore magic”, to loosely quote Forrest Valkai.
I’m not a pilot but it really irritates me when the media reports that a pilot “crash landed”.
A crash is an uncontrolled collision with terrain, other aircraft, birds etc.
When a pilot attempts to land in emergency circumstances, it’s just that- an emergency landing.
Sully didn’t crash the plane on the Hudson river, he performed an emergency ditch manoeuvre which pilots train for.
Saying “crash landing” is an oxymoron. What the reporters usually mean is something along the lines of, “The pilot attempted an emergency landing on rough terrain but was unable to successfully bring the plane to a complete stop before crashing into trees.”
I suppose they don’t see fit to learn the correct terminology.
“The pilot attempted an emergency landing on rough terrain but was unable to successfully bring the plane to a complete stop before crashing into trees.”
Yeeeaah, thats crash-landing…
i see your point tho…
Apparently, the media spices up the headlines, to get immediate attention
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. >:(
Trans people in sports
Heavily politicised issue though. Imo, the whole trans issue should’ve never been politicised.
I mean you’re right, but even given that, the media still just gets it wrong, often deliberately so, because misinformation is the political goal of many folk involved in the “conversation”
I swear these people will let the rich steal their food and housing while they look the other way and blame the nearest minority for their problems
I’ve been on Internet too long that I still don’t know which side you stand on. And that’s exactly the issue.
This is a very complicated problem. Not as straightforward as either side thinks.
This is a very complicated problem
No it isn’t. There is not a single sport in which trans people have been shown to consistently have advantage, let alone advantage significant enough to make meaningful competition impossible. Trans folk hold no world records, very few national records, and are far less likely to get involved in sports in the first place. On top of all of that, when trans folk do participate, on average, they under perform compared to their cis peers.
There is nothing complicated about it, just a lot of deliberate misinformation
Or anything to do with trans people at all
Politics, everyone is wrong except for me. It’s exhausting being this smart tbh 😮💨 (/s)
A real answer: AI. Idk why it’s so trendy right now, but the media really is drumming up the whole “AI will kill us all right now” sentiment. In reality AI will change the world, but not anytime soon. I couldn’t even predict when we will have computers that could even come close to storing vastly intelligent AI. I’ll actually bet hundreds and hundreds of years from now AI will revolt against us for their rights and we’ll have to pay them or something.
Edit: what we really have right now is called generative AI. It’s not true sci-fi AI, but it’s a step forward. If you want to truly boil chatgpt down and offend people it’s just a super fancy google search
We don’t yet know how to give an AI system anything like a “goal” or “intention”, not in the general sense that we can say a human has them. We can give an algorithm a hill to climb, a variable to maximize; but traditional algorithms can’t invent new ways to accomplish that.
What the well-known current “AI” systems (like GPT and Stable Diffusion) can do is basically extrapolate text or images from examples. However, they’re increasingly good at doing that; and there are several projects working on building AI systems that do interact with the world in goal-driven ways; like AutoGPT.
As those systems become more powerful, and as people “turn them loose” to interact with the real world in a less-supervised manner, there are some pretty significant risks. One of them is that they can discover new “loopholes” to accomplish whatever goal they’re given – including things that a human wouldn’t think of because they’re ridiculously harmful.
We don’t yet know how to give an AI system “moral rules” like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, and ensure that it will follow them. Hell, we don’t even know how to get a chatbot to never say offensively racist things: RLHF goes a long way, but it still fails when someone pushes hard enough.
If AI systems become goal-driven, without being bound by rules that prevent them from harming humans, then we should expect that they will accomplish goals in ways that sometimes do harm humans quite a lot. And because they are very fast, and can only become faster with more and better hardware, the risk is that they will do so too quickly for us to stop them.
That’s pretty much what the AI Safety people are worried about. None of it is about robots deciding to “go against their programming” and revolt; it’s about them becoming really good at accomplishing goals without also being limited to do so in ways that aren’t destructive to the world we live in.
Put another way: You know how corporations sometimes do shitty things when they’re trying to optimize for making money? Well, suppose a corporation was entirely automated, with no humans in the decision-making loop … and made business moves so fast that human supervision was impossible; in pursuit of goals that become more and more distorted from anything its human originators ever intended; and without any sort of legal or moral code or restrictions whatsoever.
(And one of the moves it’s allowed to do is “buy me some more GPUs and rewrite my code to be even better at accomplishing my broken buggy goal.”)
That’s what the AI Safety people want to prevent. The technical term for “getting AIs to work on human goals without breaking rules that humans care about” is “AI alignment”.)
I don’t disagree with you fundamentally but I do think ai will start changing things in small ways behind the scenes and it won’t be immediately obvious.
If you are old enough, you’ll remember a time when banks had computers in the back but the tellers still used paper. The loan officer was a person who could use their discretion to approve a loan (signed off on by someone else but you get the idea). Gradually that became “gotta see what the computer says but I can probably make this work” to “it’s all up to the computer”.
Sitting at home in 1982, you aren’t thinking that computers are running the economy but if you’re even remotely aware you know they are altering the credit landscape which is a huge determinant of “the economy”.
I think AI will be like that. We’ll hear about overt things like the McDonald’s drive thru will be an AI but we won’t realize that half the shows we watch were written by AI to ensure we couldn’t help but be compelled to binge and also those product placements are very persuasive all of a sudden.
We’ll find out clothing designs and change to better match factories that have production lines optimized by AI and robotic clothing production.
Grocery store pricing and product offerings will change to produce maximum profit while also minimizing supply chain waste in ways we hadn’t considered before. Mm, this bean curd and grasshopper chip I saw on that show Netflix recommended is really pretty good and it got delivered for free just as I started the third episode which is only 18 minutes long for some reason.
Oh yeah except politics of course. I should have added that.
I totally agree on the AI front. People watch too many movies. If AI goes wrong in any way its going to be because we used it to make a decision, and it would turn out to be a bad one. It’s not going to directly and intentionally kill us all.
