Bad Science

After reading several different articles and "stories" from assorted websites, I did realize the drastic differences between the sources. From the actual periodicals, or peer reviewed articles, you get the impression that you have absolutely NO idea what they are talking about; at least from a layman perspective. The big, scientific words and references, the difficulty of the subject itself, even the titles seem pretentious. The information may be accurate and true, but only someone else in the field would probably understand most of what the paper actually said.

I attempted to read some article about the brain. It was not easy to read and maybe I wasn't looking at it right, but there wasn't even much to read. The article was about the brain synapses and measuring evoked or spontaneous reactions. I probably would have grasped about one-third of the text and almost none of the actual context, and I was only able to view a large paragraph. I would have been bored out of my mind and never have been able to read the entire article. It would have put me to sleep.

I also read a secondary source article about human behavior. It was informative, covered the material in a more layman text that actually made it interesting. I enjoyed reading it, with all its scientific examples and everything. It definitely was easier and would make keeping up with science a lot easier. This article was about people not taking a reward if it is given outside of "fair play". It used a humans basic need to for water to gauge whether a person would quench that thirst no matter what if offered water. The tests showed that people wanted to quench their thirst but not at a high "moral" price. I think my favorite part of this particular article was the disclaimer at the end. It was humorous, actually.

The bad science I read was on several different types of over the counter highly advertised weight loss products offered in grocery stores, drug stores or at online websites. All the articles say they had clinical studies, they also had personal testimonies from people who had taken the drugs. However, these are items that a person can Google and find actual boards where real people post the results, or lack of, they had using the product and how any "guarantee" of the product had worked out for them. Basically, they all got sold on the "snake oil" products and they all got burned on them.