I fooled millions into thinking chocolate helps weight loss (2015)

p-hacking and journalists publishing junk science or downright lies is a very well known problem. People have been pointing it out for years. Publicly shaming them via a story that will sell well is just using the systamic flaw to patch itself. It won't change the net number of sham stories these journalists publish and if anything slightly increases the quality by marginally diluting the harmful stuff being pushed by snake oil salesmen with something comparatively harmless.

We need to go past the analogy and make a deeper assessment of the factors that matter. For example, what does the bad actor stand to gain? How much harm can they cause? How often is this happening?

For example, if the fake construction worker scheme was used to rob people and it was happening regularly, it might be worth doing something about it.

And "doing something about it" doesn't necessarily mean throwing away trust. There are a bunch of other interventions when you look at the problem holistically, e.g. can we reduce the benefit, reduce the prevalence, reduce the net harm?

Then the poser explains this is something people are doing all the time for personal gain, and the city is enabling them, and this is a problem.

That seems like a public service to me!

What the study exposed is that science journalists, whose literal job is to understand this stuff and explain it to the general public, suck at their jobs. You absolutely can blame them for just publishing whatever anybody says without verifying it.

Any system (in this case the system of how information originating in science makes it into the general public brains) needs to be tested from time to time to see if it works.

This prank was a test, the system failed (to stop this from reaching headlines).

One of the main points in science is that credentials shouldn't matter (lots of great research is done by people without a Dr title and lots of shit by those with a Dr title), the research was published so they could actually go and look at it easily. And given the timescales and stakes involved they should have:

Not following a construction worker direction can be pretty bad while doing so the most you lose is a bit of time.

This was also the actual job of science journalists and it takes roughly three minutes to look up a paper and check the basics like sample and effect size. They definitely have the time.

Also, there is a metric fuckton of junk science. Heard of the replication crisis? Your analogy would need 1/3 of men posing as construction workers to not be construction workers!

The fake construction worker has to go, but that's only half the problem.

That's why we have a balance with indemnity/damages, which also can be punitive, which simply state: "Of course you can fool people. However, better don't otherwise you will regret it, buddy."

I side with you. Trust does not mean you cannot be fooled in the first place. That's why it is called trust.

What they showed was how easily terrible science gets published to the masses as if it were reliable.

This is very much the case in the UK with quite a number of papers like the Daily Mail and the Sun, and it's the case in Germany with Bild in particular. They have a status which no American would give, say, the New York Post.

And then if you point out a problem with a research undertaking or study when it is brought up, you can get some set of true-science-believers looking at you like it can't possibly be. It's unreal sometimes.

It's really no wonder people spread their subjective experiences as if they are science. Institutional "science" is great as a set of models and perspectives, but when you dip into the product you can start to wonder if you are effectively doing the equivalent of product research by watching the home shopping network.

"Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a “statistically significant” result."

"A woman’s weight can fluctuate as much as 5 pounds over the course of her menstrual cycle"

As a regular person how would I know what the correct sample size for this type of study should be? Remember, that number isn't some fixed value but a range that increases confidence (if I'm using that wrong sorry) and it's all subjective.

I would also have to think about the uncontrolled factors, like mensuration, as having an effect since he didn't mention it in the original study.

This is far too complicated for the majority of people.

I started drinking coffee because I had heard that it was the primary source of antioxidants in the U.S., and I decided to start adding unsweetened cocoa powder to every cup.

I get all the health benefits of chocolate this way, but none of the fat or the sugar.

The taste is not bad.

So in a slight twist on your example, it'd be like if Tucker Carlson had actually been spending the past few decades putting together a documentary about how Fox News and the Republican party sold out democracy in exchange for political power and money.

You certainly might not be a fan, but it would absolutely change how you look at him.

I see this as a form of white-hat hacking. Telling off white-hat hackers leads to less white-hat hackers, which leads to less vulnerabilities discovered by white-hats, which leaves you open and vulnerable to grey- and black- hat hackers (e.g.: a student of dietary studies hoping to receive acclaim for their research, even if the outcome of that research being published is overall harmful).

This is one white-hat publishing one paper. I assure you there are far more grey- and black-hats out there producing a greater many more papers.

The people of the groups that we have delegated authority to (the governments, megacorps, and supporting companies/associations/schools of the world) are doing a rather mediocre job of managing all this stuff, so I don't mind an individual stepping up and trying to bring attention to something like this that has such negative effects on so many people.

This vulnerability is being exploited by worse actors. Exposing the vulnerability publicly may bring about change to make the system less vulnerable.

I can only guess that it’s a sort of survivors-bias, where “it hasn’t happened to me, so I must be doing what is right”

Fine, he hasn’t given a solution beyond find better experts, but you’re basically just blaming the messenger; the trust has already been broken, you just don’t know it yet. And the trust-breakers are those experts and verification systems, that don’t actually do any verification. Your advisors aren’t doing their jobs.

And you’re cursing him for showing it to you? Or because the sham should continue uninterrupted? We don’t have a system of trust but verify; we just pretend to.

Oh, lookie, there it is already!

Dark chocolate could still be a great weight loss product, and this "study" has tarnished that line of research.

Like, sample size 15. You can check that before you publish. You do have some responsibility to if you are a reporter, no?

I dunno compare it with someone releasing "left-pad-2", with the code actually printing that you should really audit you deps.

So yes, I agree, and might have hoped the plug was pulled a little faster, and the author really rides the newspapers into writing redactions, as it's really testing in prod. But like please, gatekeepers, publishers, trust the fad diet stuff a little less.

These scumbags do it once, social media does it at scale.

Trust has to be earned. If you trust anything by default, you are just being a fool.

First of all, you'd need to know what to learn, which is pretty hard.

In this case that would be what? At least basic and some advanced understanding of human anatomy, metabolic processes, neurotransmitters maybe, some pharmacology, nutrition, that's too much for most people.

It would be easier to just learn how to tell honest people from scammers/liars/propagandists and then trust some of them.

In a world where the replication crisis is a thing and a third of psychology studies replicate?

In a world where the vast majority of "science" stories published in news sites are grossly misleading or wrong?

It's important to destroy that trust.

Though I do have one problem with this article. It implies the main problem in the reality->public pipeline is the scientists themselves, when it's actually journalists, university PR teams and the general public in that order. (Though blaming the last is in poor taste as they're time poor comparing to the others and have no training in how PR teams and journalists mislead)

   - Verbal Kint

What did this do to your body aside from the weight loss? Did you have anything anything else to supplement? How did you poop (there's almost fiber in junk food)? How did you manage your blood sugar? Did the caffeine in the chocolate have an effect?

And just how much chocolate are we talking here?

“CICO” so yes you can lose weight (fat and/or muscle) on any food as long as you leverage the first law of thermodynamics and don’t eat too much. But I find chocolate kinda addictive and crave inducing. So I would make it a rare treat and on an already full stomach.

I consume it regularly, Latino-american style. This is, brewing it in water, adding a touch of milk.

I have done this for about 15 years. Before that, it had sugar. I have drank chocolate all my life.

Delicious.

Bitter chocolate has a lot of fat in it as well.

There is no way to prevent anyone from starting a fake science journal. There is no worldwide registry of which academic journals are legitimate. They are just different groups of people who do their own thing. “Academia” is not a sufficiently coherent group of people to set standards in this way.

Maybe there should be a worldwide registry for which journals are real, but it wouldn’t be any easier to set up than a registry of which newspaper websites are real.

Journalists operate in a world where people try to trick them. That’s just how it is.

I found either of those as well acetaminophen significantly more effective than the opiates my doctor kept pushing on me for post surgical pain relief.