Intersting things we are told that are wrong.

[Drak3]

Just now, amdorintel said:

oh i know that, indeed the nutrients in grapes are delicious

 

anything not in moderation can be and is bad for you.

that is why they sell them baby bottles for $3.99 at the liquor store

Yeah alcohol is pretty uniformly bad for you. Red wine included.

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Yeah alcohol is pretty uniformly bad for you. Red wine included.

There is a limited exception: alcohol retards giving birth.  It is used to delay birth in certain emergency circumstances.  They usually use a different chemical but it’s basically a super alcohol that is also used to prevent fatal DTs in alcoholics.

[mr moose]

28 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Yeah alcohol is pretty uniformly bad for you. Red wine included.

Can't say I can think of an instance where alcohol is healthy for the body, I can say that a little bit every now and then helps me sleep and socialize. It essentially disinhibits us.

 

Which for some people has long term benefits in other areas. 

[amdorintel]

studies have proven a little bit of red wine is healthy

over consumption of anything is bad for you including over eating apples.

 

[Drak3]

25 minutes ago, amdorintel said:

studies have proven a little bit of red wine is healthy

over consumption of anything is bad for you including over eating apples.

 

Incorrect.

Studies have proven that the nutrients in red wine are healthy. Red wine itself, is not, as it contains alcohol, which is a poison that contains no health benefits.

 

Eating grapes or drinking a high quality grape juice would have the same benefits as red wine, but without alcohol outweighing those benefits.

[amdorintel]

without grapes alone, and only having red wine

[mr moose]

14 minutes ago, amdorintel said:

without grapes alone, and only having red wine

 

38 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Incorrect.

Studies have proven that the nutrients in red wine are healthy. Red wine itself, is not, as it contains alcohol, which is a poison that contains no health benefits.

 

Eating grapes or drinking a high quality grape juice would have the same benefits as red wine, but without alcohol outweighing those benefits.

 

We agree red wine is healthy in moderation, now all we are debating is why and does the alcohol content play any role.

 

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-disease/in-depth/red-wine/art-20048281

 

I see a lot of "may"'s in that article. suffice to say I would call it black and white either way just yet.

 

 

[Bombastinator]

The problem with health “studies” in general is privatized science.   Most science papers put out since the 1980’s are some of the most shoestring stuff possible, and it’s often funded by a business interest.  The grape growers association or the vintners association, or maybe both together will fund a “study” the purpose of which is to promote their business.  This is why whether eggs are good or bad for you seems to switch every three years.  
 

Things to look for:  
-Who funded the study?  
-where was the study done?

(Italy often means who is secret, which generally means it’s going to be iffy and look extra close)

-who did the study?
This is one good place to look for dredge science.   Do they actually even work in the field being studied?

-what and how many claims do they make based on what they’ve actually done?

 The problem with a lot of studies is they try and derive stuff from mouse or Petri dish stuff.  “We saw this behavior which is linked to [/b] this completely different thing and therefore may indicate  this other thing.”  They then ask for further research to be done because they know darn well that the “link” and the “indication” are both tenuous at best.

 

science didn’t used to be done this way, shouldn’t have to be done this way, and doesn’t work well this way.
 
UPDATE:  in other news don’t screw up html tags here.   They become invisible and stop working right

[mr moose]

34 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

The problem with health “studies” in general is privatized science.   Most science papers put out since the 1980’s are some of the most shoestring stuff possible, and it’s often funded by a business interest.  The grape growers association or the vintners association, or maybe both together will fund a “study” the purpose of which is to promote their business.  This is why whether eggs are good or bad for you seems to switch every three years.  
 

Things to look for:  
-Who funded the study?  
-where was the study done?

(Italy often means who is secret, which generally means it’s going to be iffy and look extra close)

-who did the study?
This is one good place to look for dredge science.   Do they actually even work in the field being studied?

-what and how many claims do they make based on what they’ve actually done?

 The problem with a lot of studies is they try and derive stuff from mouse or Petri dish stuff.  “We saw this behavior which is linked to [/b] this completely different thing and therefore may indicate  this other thing.”  They then ask for further research to be done because they know darn well that the “link” and the “indication” are both tenuous at best.

 

science didn’t used to be done this way, shouldn’t have to be done this way, and doesn’t work well this way.
 
UPDATE:  in other news don’t screw up html tags here.   They become invisible and stop working right

 

That's why we have the peer review process,  the idea is that a study is judged on it's merits and the claims made are considered based on the evidence and the robustness of that evidence.   When this is done properly it doesn't matter who funded the study, because money doesn't change the robustness of an experiment or the legitimacy of the results.   Are there mistakes and/or corruption, yes, but far less a thing in the more respected journals.

 

This is why we give more credit to articles published in nature et al,  and less credit to the self claimed "science" journals who will publish anything you pay them to.

 

It is also important not to get hung up on one or two studies but to be aware there are many studies and what they mean.  

 

 

Also another interesting condition about science and publication is that transparency is becoming a much bigger thing.  It is so easy to attain any study these days and in many cases we can look over history and see when certain groups were influenced by industry.  This does not bode well for scientists today and credibility (being the new currency) can be shot too easily.    How many people refuse to listen to dietitians because in the 60's some US health organization was promoting margarine over butter at thee behest of the corn industry?   Today's dietitians (at least here in Australia) work hard to get where they are and they don't want their reputations shattered because a fellow dietitian was after a quick buck. 

 

 

This is why My above link was to the mayo clinic, they go out of their way to ensure they aren't claiming black and white something that could be disputed, and keep all their information sourced from evidence based practice.  Does this make them right? not all the time, but it does mean they are not trying to be wrong and any omitted information is not done so for nefarious reasons.

 

 

 

 

 

[Bombastinator]

15 minutes ago, mr moose said:

 

That's why we have the peer review process,  the idea is that a study is judged on it's merits and the claims made are considered based on the evidence and the robustness of that evidence.   When this is done properly it doesn't matter who funded the study, because money doesn't change the robustness of an experiment or the legitimacy of the results.   Are there mistakes and/or corruption, yes, but far less a thing in the more respected journals.

This is why we give more credit to articles published in nature et al,  and less credit to the self claimed "science" journals who will publish anything you pay them to.

 

It is also important not to get hung up on one or two studies but to be aware there are many studies and what they mean.  

 

 

Also another interesting condition about science and publication is that transparency is becoming a much bigger thing.  It is so easy to attain any study these days and in many cases we can look over history and see when certain groups were influenced by industry.  This does not bode well for scientists today and credibility (being the new currency) can be shot too easily.    How many people refuse to listen to dietitians because in the 60's some US health organization was promoting margarine over butter at thee behest of the corn industry?   Today's dietitians (at least here in Australia) work hard to get where they are and they don't want their reputations shattered because a fellow dietitian was after a quick buck. 

 

 

This is why My above link was to the mayo clinic, they go out of their way to ensure they aren't claiming black and white something that could be disputed, and keep all their information sourced from evidence based practice.  Does this make them right? not all the time, but it does mean they are not trying to be wrong and any omitted information is not done so for nefarious reasons.

 

 

 

 

 

re: peer review.

 Peer review is a good system and in some places it actually still exists.  It’s been under serious threat for a long time though.  The way peer review originally worked is people would actually repeat experiments.  This has been reduced to the odd opinion of 5 or six scientists as to whether something scans right or not.
It’s hackable though. 

prestigious journals:

The real strength of a prestigious journal is not, at least from the direction I wind up approaching, its superior peer review.  It is that they cost fantastically large amounts of money to subscribe to, and they get enough applications for publication that they can actually pick only stuff that actually looks like it was done right. 

re: transparency

 The whole dredge science scandal with that guy (I’m forgetting his name though I remember he had reddish hair) did a lot to push the transparency movement which is helping.  It’s new though.

re: the new currency

that was pretty much the old old currency too.  There was a big lull.  Perhaps it is coming back.  I hope it is.  There are groups in the US claiming all science is fake based on stuff that happened because of a lack of it. I see it as incredibly dangerous to everyone.  The world runs on science.

 

re: my statement

I was speaking generally and more or less going over the process that is used to examine articles produced by the anti ecig corporations to attack ecigarettes.  I didn’t even read the study you posted.  A knee jerk reaction there and something of a thread jack because I wasn’t really talking about what you specifically said.
Overreaction on my part.  I apologize.

 

 I’ve been fighting shoddy studies almost weekly for years now.  It seems to have worked in a bit too deeply.

 

The stuff I see doesn’t generally come from prestigious journals.  That data can’t usually even be gotten because it’s too expensive.  I’ve run into $1500 paywalls.

Information about the existence of a study usually appears as a science writer article in some publication that makes a lot of claims about a study. Generally wildly exaggerated. Sometimes there is a link.  Those are the cheap studies.  Sometimes there is a name that can be searched and an abstract or partial abstract can be found left somewhere else.  The payoff for whatever marketing company is not the study.  It’s the science writer article about the study.  Investigating the study is usually done mostly to question the science article, and the journalist in question doesn’t want to spend $1500 either so most of my experience with this is back alley stuff.   That’s why the reference to italy.

 Lots and lots of ecig studies out of Italy.  That came as a result of ecig users noticing that previous stuff was being funded by tobacco interests.  Italy (possibly only one city in it) has an interesting law which effectively makes study funding invisible.  Suddenly most anti cigarette studies stopped elsewhere and they all started coming out of Italy.  One place in particular.  I’m forgetting the name.  A lot of them were effectively redos of studies previously shown to be funded by tobacco interests earlier.

 

How peer reviewed studies can be faked:

1: study cooking.

this is why I’ve grown so angry about private science.  Tobacco companies do their own research but they don’t publish.  What they do is do 80% of a study and cancel it.  They find out what the data of the research is and more or less what it would say if it were finished and then kill it.  There was actually a movie about this with Russel Crowe in it called “the insider” Then, knowing the data, they can specifically design a different study that will look good and produce the data that they want to produce.  It’s a real study, if a pre cooked one.  These things can not uncommonly pass peer review because they’re real.  The process is correct.  It’s just that it’s not actually research, it’s just marketing.  The research had already been done, and the study designed to produce intended results.  I wind up looking generally at low end stuff because thats what science writers use to make articles from.

2: the opinion factor

part of the problem is these articles have been put out for a long long time. 10-15 years.  People read the stuff, and one of the things that makes an article scan right is whether the results seem reasonable.  There has been a long term push to make results seem reasonable.  The journals they are getting into are getting better.  These days I only even get a look at maybe half the studies referenced.  The rest are paywall impassable.

The last one I ran into was out of Germany in a well respected journal and a researcher was claiming that e-cigarettes were worse than cigarettes because he did a test where under excercise e-cigarette users heart rates did not speed up under excercise.  At all. None of them.  Smokers had less heart rate speed up than non smokers, but zero for e-cigarette users.  Not lungs, heart. Zero change. Every subject. Where are all the e-cigarette users spontaneously falling unconscious after climbing a flight of stairs?  Where are the flocks of COPD patients (who not infrequently actually recover after switching) being admitted into emergency rooms near death?  It scans though because it’s now reasonable for e-cigarettes to be horribly bad for you.

[mr moose]

27 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

re: peer review.

 Peer review is a good system and in some places it actually still exists.  It’s been under serious threat for a long time though.  The way peer review originally worked is people would actually repeat experiments.  This has been reduced to the odd opinion of 5 or six scientists as to whether something scans right or not.
It’s hackable though. 

prestigious journals:

The real strength of a prestigious journal is not, at least from the direction I wind up approaching, its superior peer review.  It is that they cost fantastically large amounts of money to subscribe to, and they get enough applications for publication that they can actually pick only stuff that actually looks like it was done right. 

re: transparency

 The whole dredge science scandal with that guy (I’m forgetting his name though I remember he had reddish hair) did a lot to push the transparency movement which is helping.  It’s new though.

re: the new currency

that was pretty much the old old currency too.  There was a big lull.  Perhaps it is coming back.  I hope it is.  There are groups in the US claiming all science is fake based on stuff that happened because of a lack of it. I see it as incredibly dangerous to everyone.  The world runs on science.

 

re: my statement

I was speaking generally and more or less going over the process that is used to examine articles produced by the anti ecig corporations to attack ecigarettes.  I didn’t even read the study you posted.  A knee jerk reaction there and something of a thread jack because I wasn’t really talking about what you specifically said.
Overreaction on my part.  I apologize.

 

 I’ve been fighting shoddy studies almost weekly for years now.  It seems to have worked in a bit too deeply.

 

The stuff I see doesn’t generally come from prestigious journals.  That data can’t usually even be gotten because it’s too expensive.  I’ve run into $1500 paywalls.

Information about the existence of a study usually appears as a science writer article in some publication that makes a lot of claims about a study. Generally wildly exaggerated. Sometimes there is a link.  Those are the cheap studies.  Sometimes there is a name that can be searched and an abstract or partial abstract can be found left somewhere else.  The payoff for whatever marketing company is not the study.  It’s the science writer article about the study.  Investigating the study is usually done mostly to question the science article, and the journalist in question doesn’t want to spend $1500 either so most of my experience with this is back alley stuff.   That’s why the reference to italy.

 Lots and lots of ecig studies out of Italy.  That came as a result of ecig users noticing that previous stuff was being funded by tobacco interests.  Italy (possibly only one city in it) has an interesting law which effectively makes study funding invisible.  Suddenly most anti cigarette studies stopped elsewhere and they all started coming out of Italy.  One place in particular.  I’m forgetting the name.  A lot of them were effectively redos of studies previously shown to be funded by tobacco interests earlier.

 

How peer reviewed studies can be faked:

1: study cooking.

this is why I’ve grown so angry about private science.  Tobacco companies do their own research but they don’t publish.  What they do is do 80% of a study and cancel it.  They find out what the data of the research is and more or less what it would say if it were finished and then kill it.  There was actually a movie about this with Russel Crowe in it called “the insider” Then, knowing the data, they can specifically design a different study that will look good and produce the data that they want to produce.  It’s a real study, if a pre cooked one.  These things can not uncommonly pass peer review because they’re real.  The process is correct.  It’s just that it’s not actually research, it’s just marketing.  The research had already been done, and the study designed to produce intended results.  I wind up looking generally at low end stuff because thats what science writers use to make articles from.

2: the opinion factor

part of the problem is these articles have been put out for a long long time. 10-15 years.  People read the stuff, and one of the things that makes an article scan right is whether the results seem reasonable.  There has been a long term push to make results seem reasonable.  The journals they are getting into are getting better.  These days I only even get a look at maybe half the studies referenced.  The rest are paywall impassable.

The last one I ran into was out of Germany in a well respected journal and a researcher was claiming that e-cigarettes were worse than cigarettes because he did a test where under excercise e-cigarette users heart rates did not speed up under excercise.  At all. None of them.  Smokers had less heart rate speed up than non smokers, but zero for e-cigarette users.  Not lungs, heart. Zero change. Every subject. Where are all the e-cigarette users spontaneously falling unconscious after climbing a flight of stairs?  Where are the flocks of COPD patients (who not infrequently actually recover after switching) being admitted into emergency rooms near death?  It scans though because it’s now reasonable for e-cigarettes to be horribly bad for you.

 

I would be very reluctant to dismiss an article you can't read. The fact they are behind paywalls is not a cause for questioning their integrity. In fact the cost of accessing the more prestigious articles is how they can avoid introducing bias.  they do not need advertising or funding from any other source.  They can reject low quality articles and are under no pressure to publish anything.   I cannot afford a sub to all the decent journals just to satisfy a personal hobby, it's annoying sure but it doesn't mean the studies are wrong.  There are plenty of prominent researcher who have access and don;t seem to have a problem with what they read.

 

The logic of science website has many great articles explaining most of this.

 

 

[Bombastinator]

24 minutes ago, mr moose said:

 

I would be very reluctant to dismiss an article you can't read. The fact they are behind paywalls is not a cause for questioning their integrity. In fact the cost of accessing the more prestigious articles is how they can avoid introducing bias.  they do not need advertising or funding from any other source.  They can reject low quality articles and are under no pressure to publish anything.   I cannot afford a sub to all the decent journals just to satisfy a personal hobby, it's annoying sure but it doesn't mean the studies are wrong.  There are plenty of prominent researcher who have access and don;t seem to have a problem with what they read.

 

The logic of science website has many great articles explaining most of this.

 

 

Paywalls: yes exactly.  I can’t.  A paywall means   I have to take what the science writer says is in the article at face value.  I thought that’s what I was saying.  The whole purpose of attempting to look at such an article is to see what they said.  Often what they say in the research doesn’t make sense either though.  This last one I mentioned does that but was in a good journal I can’t access.  The writer copied the result out which is why I was able to see it.

 

i will look at this website you mention though.

[mr moose]

3 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Paywalls: yes exactly.  I can’t.  A paywall means   I have to take what the science writer says is in the article at face value.  I thought that’s what I was saying.  The whole purpose of attempting to look at such an article is to see what they said.  Often what they say in the research doesn’t make sense either though.  This last one I mentioned does that but was in a good journal I can’t access.  The writer copied the result out which is why I was able to see it.

 

i will look at this website you mention though.

 

I found that website helps me articulate what I am trying to say (sometimes he has whole articles that I just point to), I have been advocating for science for the better part of a decade in public groups.   However articulation is not my strong suit.   And that is the worst part with something as multifaceted as understanding science and the scientific community.  It is really hard to explain the flaws in science without giving plebs a green light to ignore the whole damn thing. 

[mr moose]

Which reminds me of another misrepresented "fact".

 

The human eye is basically the equivalent of a 1M pixel camera with an average shutter speed of 80Hz, blurry edges and a black spot just off centre. 

 

I am sure it's no where nere as bad as this tries to make out,  but this is how it is described by biologists.:

 

 

The rest of the image we think we see is put together by the visual cortex. It essentially sums up the crap vision we have and creates reality for us.

 

 

Link includes vsauce's video:

https://nofilmschool.com/2014/03/do-human-eyes-see-like-cameras-resolution-frame-rate-of-vision

[kokakolia]

Darth Vader never says "Luke, I am your Father", he actually says "No, I am your father". 

 

 

[Guest]

11 hours ago, OlympicAssEater said:

One of my classmates told me that if I microwave my foods I will get cancer because microwaving foods is no good, and here I am no cancer from microwaving foods.

it causes discharges @ the brain cells.Every person is different and your friend was kinda right.Its not healthy.

[DoctorNick]

5 minutes ago, MockinLeafs said:

it causes discharges @ the brain cells.Every person is different and your friend was kinda right.Its not healthy.

Maybe if you use a tin foil hat it will discharge to the surrounding area

[Sauron]

Dinosaurs didn't have feathers

 

X and Y chromosomes only come in XY or XX

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, kokakolia said:

Darth Vader never says "Luke, I am your Father", he actually says "No, I am your father".

I never understood that one - didn't people see the movie?

[Soppro]

10 hours ago, mr moose said:

This is true to a degree. but you still have to catch the virus which doesn't care how cold you are or aren't.

there is a small section on the cold in this article:

https://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica fact file/science/cold-weather-health.php

I've heard that lifestyle changes in cold weather can also contribute to the speed at which viruses spread, i.e. spending more time indoors means viruses can spread much faster.

3 hours ago, mr moose said:

The rest of the image we think we see is put together by the visual cortex. It essentially sums up the crap vision we have and creates reality for us.

Mmhm, our brains do an immense amount of visual processing to make the thing that we actually 'see', colour vision involves guesswork (esp. around edges of our vision). A significant portion of our brain activity is devoted to just visual processing.

 

My addition to this is that our bodies don't actually sense absolute temperature, but temperature differences which is why if your hands are cold enough, they will sense cold water as being warm! Pretty cool 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, DoctorNick said:

Maybe if you use a tin foil hat it will discharge to the surrounding area

i will,after i buy you a book named "humor for dummies" so you can remove the bitterness from your silly jokes.

[Andreas Lilja]

I'm amazed at the continued existence of most alternative medicines, especially those which are supposedly legit like osteopathy or chiropractic. 

[spartaman64]

i heard that by the time you graduate 70% of what you learned is outdated or something. so im guessing this applies to documentaries also and if the documentary is like 4 or 6 years old a lot of it is oudated

[JZStudios]

17 hours ago, handymanshandle said:

I remember when parents would claim that swallowing gum would get stuck in your stomach.

Needless to say, after a lot of gum swallowed, that has never happened.

...that you know of.

 

I remember being a wee baby child in elementary school and asking why February only has 28 days and every other month is 30-31. I was told something along the lines of it used to be another month with fewer days, but there was a king or something that wanted his birth month to be longer so he took it from February.

I'm pretty sure I asked a lot of questions and got a lot of bullshit answers.

[spartaman64]

5 hours ago, kokakolia said:

Darth Vader never says "Luke, I am your Father", he actually says "No, I am your father". 

 

 

 

3 hours ago, Sauron said:

I never understood that one - didn't people see the movie?

also kirk in star trek never said beam me up scotty he said beam me up mr scott