According to the NHS (http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/vitamins-minerals/Pages/Vitamin...), 1000mg is the typical cut-off for where vitamin C becomes toxic (which is dramatically higher than the 40mg a day most people actually need).
257 karma · joined May 22, 2011
Linking the name "Asimov" with the Halo games seems to be a bizarre speculation/research failure on her part, as far as I can tell.
And now I'm trying to remember what the Game Boy Tower in Pokemon Stadium made the games look like...
It's entirely possible that the results in those studies you provided are solid. I don't know, I don't have the expertise or the access to go through them thoroughly, let alone run a replication. I would just urge everyone here to keep in mind that, as pointed out very well in aestra's comment above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7213317), this kind of research is subject to heavy cultural biases, both through the parents and experiments and through poor science reporting in the media.
And, even if it weren't, this Live Science linkbait blog post, the one rapidly climbing the front page of Hacker News with the sensationalist headline, is still uncited bollocks.
The fact is, the human brain isn't anywhere near the objective, rational computer and recorder it likes to think of itself as. We project our expectations on to everything we see, from the facial expressions of a monkey to random clumps of noise in datasets and it's important to keep that in mind whenever you read articles like this one. The information presented in a typical piece of science news has gone through the mental filters of researchers, university PR departments, editors, and a writer before you even start interpreting the first word. Even if every person at every step understands what they're doing and has the best intentions (and isn't, for example, deliberately twisting facts to fit their linkbait article for a pop science blog), that's a lot of room for a convenient narrative to obscure the basic, potentially important facts.
And even if they do happen to agree with actual good science, the few studies presented here still don't "explain" anything and this Live Science post is decidedly shonky science reporting (and calling it that is frankly generous).
The results with the monkeys are interesting, if both the research and the reporting of it are accurate. However, animal models, while certainly useful indicators, are still just animal models and can't say anything definitive about human biology and psychology.
And as for those studies on young children, it's a mistake to think that just because a child is only a few months old they haven't been exposed to enough cultural influence to skew what they prefer to look at. If just a few of those parents have put a football mobile above their baby boy's cot or decorated their little girl's room with Disney princess wallpaper, that familiarity could easily explain the results.
Do biological differences exist between genders? Absolutely. Are some of those differences driven by ancient evolutionary pressure rather than modern culture? It's a reasonable hypothesis, worth investigating. Have those differences now been explained by a single factor and a few small studies, half of which were on monkeys, and do they just happen to line up with traditional gender stereotypes? You'll have to do a lot better than a Live Science blog that cites nothing but other Live Science blogs to convince me of that.
EDIT: Well, at least the title was changed to better fit the article, even if it still doesn't line up with the actual science.
Anyone with an internet connection can easily find out, for example, how to add together two ints in Java. But if someone took an introductory Java course and couldn't do that at the end of it, then they don't deserve to pass because they've clearly not learned what they were supposed to. If they were actually trying to program something and had to look up basics like that every time they used them, they would be so slow as to be completely useless. Or consider someone with a more time-critical job like a surgeon - they can do specific research beforehand but some level of knowledge (surgical techniques, how to use their tools, anatomy, etc.) is simply going to have to be in their head at the moment they need it or their patient could die.
Also, phones and internet access don't just provide knowledge, they're a way to communicate with everyone else in the room. If you want to see if any particular person has actually learned the material, you obviously can't allow that.
"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Even if there weren't a million bagged-and-boarded copies of Rob Liefeld's Bludd Gunn McShootDeath and the X-Murder Y-Bunch #0.5 sitting in people's basements, it still wouldn't be worth anything because hardly anybody cares about those characters. Even classic runs from the 80s and 90s (Walt Simonson's Thor, Morrison's JLA, Sandman, etc.) haven't had anything like the cultural impact and recognition that major Golden and Silver Age titles did outside of comic circles.
And as for your second point, it's true. God could use evolution as a tool. God could hide fossils as a joke. God could just be having fun by letting us build up our quaint little theory of evolution before suddenly dumping a herd of unicorns in the savannah. God could, if he existed, do pretty much anything for any reason completely incomprehensible to us. And that's precisely where creationism falls down as a scientific theory - any flaw is just covered by "maybe God did it just because" and it can't be disproved.
When the entire experiment is based around constantly monitoring someone, any time where you can't see them is a pretty serious flaw in the experiment design. Even if he was only out of view for a few seconds (and I wouldn't mind a source for that), that's all it would take to drink some gargling/bathing water or quickly have a snack that some devotee left hidden.
Smart people can certainly be wrong and often have been. Sometimes due to their own preexisting beliefs and prejudices, sometimes because they were limited by the knowledge and technology of their time, and sometimes even because they're being deliberately deceived and their particularly expertise isn't suited to catching it (I cited Project Alpha in a comment below and there are many other examples).
The key thing about science, and remember that organised science is a relatively new idea in the span of human history and one that's made tremendous advances possible in a short time, is that it's about a consensus backed up by the evidence, not any single scientist's opinion. Sure, sometimes one scientist or a small team will come up with a radically new opinion in some field. When their evidence is examined and their experiments repeated by their peers, sometimes they're a Gallileo. More often they're a Pons and Fleischmann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Fleischmann.E2.80.9...). But if, and quite rightly only if, they've got good evidence and a theory that fits the facts better than any other, the consensus will shift.
It's not about cynicism, it's about rationality and skepticism. As the old saying goes, keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.
And a large, well-funded project doesn't guarantee reliability. Science involves a certain amount of trust of your peers and scientists studying these claimed phenomena often miss tricks by the participants that someone trained in deception wouldn't (there's a reason so many skeptics and "debunkers" are magicians by training). Look at Project Alpha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha) - a couple of amateur street magicians were able to make a whole department of researchers believe they had psychic powers for years without even being challenged.
When it comes down to it, science is about evidence. That's why scientists were able to overturn ideas like geocentrism - they examined them and they didn't fit with the evidence, so they had to go. Theories that had seemed "impossible" to some (certainly not all) people before them, like the Earth going round the Sun, did fit the evidence when scientifically examined and they became the accepted scientific consensus (to cut a long story short).
Scientists dismissing these studies aren't doing so based just "on their own observations". There's a very solid base of scientific, verifiable evidence that says that people need to eat. I don't think it's overly cynical to say that a couple of flaky studies should do little to change anyone's mind.
In a case like this, it's up to the ones making the extraordinary claim to provide the evidence, not up to anyone else to debunk it.
It reminds me of credulous studies of people who claim they don't need to eat and drink, surviving off sunlight or air or something mystical. Dig into them a little and you invariably find that they were only monitored for a few days or they were left alone to bathe or pray or whatever else provided some gap where they could go and get food.
EDIT: Did a little more research and I came across a possible explanation that does seem to have some decent scientific studies to back it up (more than any of the non-sleeping examples, at least). "Sleep state misperception" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_state_misperception), where a patient doesn't think they've slept much or at all, even though they actually have.
To go with your Arctic tern example, just because one bird can dive deeper doesn't guarantee it's survival. It might still get eaten by a predator or catch a disease or just have a run of bad luck that causes it to starve. However, the birds that can't dive as deeply run the same risks (assuming there's no additional risk to diving deeply) and, over a long time and with a large population of birds, those that can dive deeper will survive to breed more often, until eventually the whole population carries that trait.
Now, that's a very different situation to either someone recording a crime for evidence which should obviously be legal (and I doubt anyone would want to hang on to the images/footage after providing it to the police anyway) or to actors enacting a fictional fantasy scene, which I feel should be legal with reasonable parental controls in place to stop minors accessing it. The law should be capable of differentiating between these situations, it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Since none of those things are true, I'm left to ask again - what the hell does any of this have to do with men getting weird looks in parks?
It's unfortunate that politics can have such an influence on science and psychology and sociology are far from the only fields it happens in. But, again, that doesn't somehow prove feminism wrong or your original point correct.
Did you even read that link you provided about Margaret Mead? Freeman was accusing her mostly of incompetence (taking jokes/lies as fact is the main example) and Freeman's attacks on Mead's work have themselves been heavily criticised.
And even if they hadn't... so what? You're going to condemn the entirety of feminism (and the field of sociology, I suppose) because one person early in its history may have lied?