that story is beautiful. this reader forum is more stringent, and public, and brutal, on arcane and novel theories than most peer reviews.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

May it always be so. We got a good thing going, you should be proud, thx for the continued work.

Thanks for the link, although with your title you may not get a whole lot of response.

A very worthy read, and likely a great discussion on here. Would love to see opinions from those who have published.

Thanks,

Maurice

i like chocolate

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Rain*

Awesome, awesome link. Thanks for sharing. I work in the biotech industry (molecular/cell bio, drug discovery) and will definitely be having a conversation with my coworkers about this article tomorrow.

I think the article brings up a real, legitimate problem at the border between science and mainstream journalism---that is, mainstream media seems to have become the go-to source for the general public to get the latest news from the science world. The only problem with this is that many of the journalists at mainstream news outlets have little to no background in science, and even if they did, they still have to write the article in layman's terms and in an attractive way that gets pageviews. It seems that for most mainstream news journalists, it isn't so much about reporting science as it is about reporting sensationalism. It's frustrating.

As the article in the OP highlights, this problem is becoming even more compounded by these sham open-access journals that publish anything as long as the author is willing to pay an upfront fee. Combined with the mainstream media's appetite for anything even remotely newsworthy, I can totally see why so many people from the general public get tricked into starting a new bogus "miracle" diet every month. It's a joke.

Excellent article.. ST has a few unusual personas, but by and large, it has a great collective intellect and ability to discern the pertinent facts in a whole range of topics. Not necessarily achieve a consensus agreement, but almost always have a healthy discussion and exchange of viewpoints. To all participants, popcorn eaters, moderators and staff, I applaud you.

Because of that article, I'm going to start eating 1.5 ounces of dark chocolate daily just to lose weight.


Then again, I normally eat about 3-6 ounces of chocolate daily. That tidbit might improve my chances of success in the new regime.

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Take a short break from ST and read my blog:
http://tri-banter.blogspot.com/

Eating chocolate entitles me to take the whole lane, preferably slightly left of center.

I love this! I teach high school Chem and I am going to use this with my students to have a great discussion about scientific research and why source for content matters so much! You would not believe the questions they bring to class sometimes!

Thanks!

Ummmm... OK... I'll be that guy.

Couldn't the same thing be said about Global Warming... oops, sorry, it's no longer called Global Warming it's called Climate Change. And how many people bought into that "data"?

This is too good to be true. Their next study should include measurements for body hydrodynamics and aerodynamics so they could say something along the lines of "eat a chocolate bar every day and become a faster triathlete in three weeks (no training required)".

For those of us in academe this kind of stuff is hugely frustrating because of the perception it creates in the general public. As I hope is clear in the article, this sort of study would almost certainly not get published in a legitimate peer-reviewed journal, even lower-tiered journals. Peer review is imperfect and certainly vulnerable to fraud, as we saw with the recent Science debacle, but it catches crap like this. As far as fraud goes, the great thing about science is that notable results attract attempts at replication and refutation, which is exactly how the Science article got found out.

The problem is the way results, even results from legitimate studies, get reported in the media. First there are the sham pay-to-publish journals highlighted in this article. Serious scholars don't publish in them. In fact publishing in one of these journals is a great way to get denied tenure at a research university in the US or otherwise destroy your reputation if you already have tenure. I suppose it's possible scholars at primarily teaching schools that just require SOME publication for tenure might throw something in one of these, but otherwise they are a bad idea.

Of course, typical journalists don't know the difference between a real journal and a pay-to-publish. Furthermore, the tendency is for journalists to focus on the NEWS, on the big hook, and completely ignore the caveats and, especially, the substantive importance. For example, suppose I did a study showing that participation in triathlon on average increases a person's chances of getting ass cancer by 100%. And it's statistically significant! You know this story is getting picked up everywhere and the next day Bertha from Accounting will wheeze at you about how you're getting ass cancer. 100% increase. That's bad, right? But what if the chances of non-triathletes getting ass cancer is 1 in 100,000,000 and triathletes is 1 in 50,000,000. Yeah it's a 100% increase, from nothing to nothing. (And yeah I pulled these numbers out of my ass, which itself increases the chances of ass cancer by 100%.) Academics are often as much to blame because some of us like to get our names in the papers and we learn how to frame studies to pique the interest of journalists.

The reason why this concerns me is that undercuts the legitimacy of science in the eyes of the general public. Heck it's bad enough even when the media does a good job of covering science because lots of times results are preliminary and uncertain and later turn out to be wrong. It's part of the process. But when you pile on genuine bullshit, then it all starts to smells like bullshit.

yea, reminds me of a study I saw saying "eating bacon doubles the risk of heart disease". I have no idea how 'good' the study was, but when I delved deeper into the study I recall reading the results were actually something like the risk went from 1 in 10,000 to 2 in 10,000 (I just made those up). Point is, I still eat bacon!

From what I have seen a lot of people on ST are both a little older (no insult intended) and I would suspect that people in the technical sciences are over-represented here compared to the general population. I work in technical science and immediately doubt almost everything that is told to me unless I had already verified it. I am especially doubtful of 'rules of thumb', 'we have always done it this way therefore it is right', and 'old wives tales'. Sometimes I am proven wrong. For example a coworker told me pickle juice helps with cramps, I immediately thought it was total BS, I looked it up and indeed it does - more so than salt like we all think/thought. I get that a lot here, it is refreshing.

Ok...I'll bite...I actually think in many cases within the global warming/climate change/environmental impact debates, it's the other way around. That is, special interest groups find a 'scientist' who will support their interests and they then put those scientists on the payroll - directly or indirectly - to espouse their views.

Indeed, quite how global warming became such a political issue (in general supported by Democrats and disbelieved by Republicans) is quite bizarre when you think about it. Most of that is likely down to Al Gore, and shows how the divisiveness of politics can pre-shape people's opinions about any topic (religion, foreign policy, guns...), or vice-versa: how some of those specific topics can shape political beliefs, which then shape views on other topics.

The extremely rapid melting of the polar icecaps is not bogus. The large increases in concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution is not bogus. The destruction of rainforests is not a myth. The earth has never gone through a period where, over such a short period of time (i.e. the last 300 years), the atmosphere and the environment have changed so drastically. And regardless of what anyone choses to believe, do we really think it's ok to just keep pumping millions of tonnes of CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere unchecked? I suspect generations to come will shake their collective heads in dismay at our myopism.

To get back on topic, the point is that everyone can find data on this topic to support their view. But two things:
- What does the majority of the truly independent scientific community say?
- And saying that the earth has gone through 'warming' periods in the past may well be true, but the earth has never been subjected to the extreme changes we are imposing on it now. So shouldn't we at least be a little mindful that this could be more than just another natural warming cycle?

And by the way, I'm no liberal, democrat, Al Gore-lover! Just an independent thinker.

Pickle juice helps with crabs, not cramps. Think you misheard. Throwing a pinch of salt over your shoulder is the trick for cramps.

Settle down Kay, this is a sports forum :-).

True, this whole thread prob belongs in the LR

While I understand what you are saying, we as a triathlon community and less so as a slowtwitch community do still like to jump on the latest thing before it has necessarily reached consensus stage. We're always looking to get that next bump in performance.

It's probably only been in the last few years that I have come to understand how important review articles are. So not just one study that found X, but what do the majority of studies find? And granted there are issues with publication bias and lack of repeated studies that affect these reviews but it's still better than cherry picking those that support one's particular viewpoint.

Unfortunately the journal that publishes most of the reviews relevant to us "Sports Medicine" is not available freely.

Didn't know you did tri Walter W ;-)

We live in a world where people like Ben Greenfield make $ selling BS to (some) people.

Not shocking to find out that a lot of how "science" is reported, is wildly inaccurate at best, or completely bogus at worst.

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float , hammer , and jog

There are some snippets in this thread that point to the disconnect between science and mainstream.

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

I had a similar experience! A coworker told me that if something looks aero, then it is aero. I immediately thought that was total BS. I tried it out and indeed it is true. If I buy something that looks like it could possibly make me more aero, I just bike faster (some times I need to actually install/wear it for the effect to take place... go figure...).

Often it isn't the actual science that is bogus, it is the conclusions that are bogus, more like over-hyped. People are often not exactly sure what was studied, specifically, so their conclusions can be less than informed. However, people reading about the science will understand the conclusions rather than the actual study. We are a painfully under-educated society (in the US at least) in science and logic. I often give a logic quiz to people to demonstrate how people can easily draw erroneous conclusions from valid scientific evidence.

It rained, therefore the road is wet. --> if it rains there is no way the road won't get wet
The road is wet, therefore it must have rained. --> except for all you know a fire hydrant went off, someone spilled a jug, whatever.

A reasonable person can look at a wet road, correlate the clouds in the sky, the smell, etc - and conclude that it did, in fact, rain. In science, you are not allowed to do that. The evidence you are presented (a wet road) does not allow you to conclude that it rained. The observation that the road was wet is valid; the conclusion is erroneous. The general public is not able to separate experience (most people know when it has rained, even if they didn't actually see it rain) from science which is much more rigid in drawing conclusions.