Leon Jung Jin Kim
Anastasia P. Arvanitidis
Research methods
February 3rd 2012
Commentary of “Junk Science”
Junk Science was a series of reports about the abuse or misuse of false or credible scientific evidence or pseudoscience for many different reasons. It could be useful to hide evidence or for product promotion and sales. A strong example would be that court evidence does not usually follow the rules that would be applied in the field of research. Often evidence is trusted from the lawyer that is more convincing, thus empirical results don’t have enough weight.
The interviewer/researcher would often talk to those that are misusing information or that had before. For instance, a scientist had misreported information he had gathered and gave a false interpretation leading to an untrue conclusion. It does not make the scientist a culprit for misreading, he is doing his job. By the time the new information gets distributed, the old butchered one has already been spread out to various communities and people won’t know what to believe. If we take spinach for example, though really healthy, does not provide the enormous amount of iron as it was told. It was simply a scientific misinterpretation (a mathematical one in this case).
Misuse of science cannot be prevented, due to human error and human nature. It is in its way a new religion that people follow and don’t question. Scientist only believes theory from experiments they can recreate through the scientific method and the general population is not too familiar with that concept. One thing can both prevent and instigate cancer in certain news. As long as it works, I’ll like science, but I’ll question it.
