Are you consuming a credit card’s worth of misinformation every week? In this episode of Crash Course Scientific Thinking, we’ll learn how to check facts and evaluate sources, so we can figure out wha
I adore that practical lesson about the acronym process! It’s such good scientific rigor for any application, but a systematic process for investigation, learning, and fact-finding is so valuable to jump the shark over bias and emotion. Such review skills are exactly what can help make peer review better, which will be crucial as source material continues to propagate.
Hank we eat between 1 to 52 credit cards worth of plastic in a year from what you are telling me... that's honestly a much scarier headline than the one CNN used holy heck
One of the difficulties I find when I am searching for alternate sources of the same information, I find multiple tertiary sources that are based on The same tertiary source. I find it difficult to find secondary or primary sources. This video has helped me to try and identify secondary or primary sources.
If I see something sketchy, It's a lot of work to go back to the secondary and then primary source. And in a lot of cases, the primary source will be an academic journal that may just be too dense to easily understand if you're not in that field. Those sources aren't written for your average science-nerd consumer, but rather for PhDs in that field. Ya, once in a while, when one important article gets under your skin, doing SIFT is great advice, but there's so much Mis/Dis information out there these days, that it becomes a part time job to filter it all out. I just wanna read the news and be confident I can trust it, so I can get on with my life! I got other things to do and read! :D Personally I use media/bias fact checker to get a good feel for the bias/accuracy of a news source, and cultivate my own RSS feeds of sources that I feel I can trust. But that doesn't make me immune to mis/disinforamation. It probably means I'm exposed to less of it, but in turn that probably means I let my guard down more often than I should. This video is great, but I'd really like a deeper dive on how to make this whole processes easier or more automated or .... something.
There used to be a twitter account called something like 'IN MICE' to highlight the many medical Headlines that said "If you do X then Y will happen to you!"
but they were all from "Journalists" cherry picking parts of scientific papers where the experiment was only carried out on lab Mice
Nevermind tertiary, these days most people are getting info from quaternary sources and beyond. The layers of hearsay/embellishment/selectivity has left us in abject funhouse mirror universe of disorientation.
I decided it would be best to experimentally verify that a credit card weighs 5 grams, not least because they have had wired insert-to-pay microchips, and then wireless tap-to-pay chips, added within recent memory. Here are the results measured on my Ohaus Cent-O-Gram quadruple beam 311g balance, calibrated to 5.00 grams using a 1970-S US nickel coin (specified mass is 5.00 grams):
KeyBank (chip but no tap): 4.78 g
Bank of America (chip but no tap): 5.23 g
Chase (chip and tap): 5.13 g
Discover (chip and tap): 4.96 g
Unfortunately, I've already shredded any cards old enough to be swipe-only (no microchip), but I did weigh an ID card that's of similar construction: 4.82 g.
I can't tell you how many times the news has gone on about "what the science says", only for someone on the opposite side of the spectrum to find a study that they say says the opposite, causing so many arguments and fighting online, so I check both sources only to realize they're the same exact source and the answer lies somewhere in the middle or completely outside either scope. Sometimes the study's author comes out to clarify what their study actually says, but by that time, people are so blind to other realities that they will try and "debunk" the author by citing their own study again, thinking they're providing new information they think the author has never heard before, even though they wrote it.
I've spent years researching science across the board (I studied scientific journalism in school and have used my notes from that class for over a decade now) and even though my forte is genetics and evolutionary biology, I find it increasingly difficult to read contemporary science papers in full without misunderstanding something. Please listen to the authors and experts when they explain these topics. They're still human and can make mistakes, but they tend to be able to under
Please don't end the series yet. This series is so important right now. Also thank you for saying that ChatGPT is not a primary source.
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I eat a credit card every week,
and my roommate doesn't know where they all go.
but they were all from "Journalists" cherry picking parts of scientific papers where the experiment was only carried out on lab Mice
KeyBank (chip but no tap): 4.78 g
Bank of America (chip but no tap): 5.23 g
Chase (chip and tap): 5.13 g
Discover (chip and tap): 4.96 g
Unfortunately, I've already shredded any cards old enough to be swipe-only (no microchip), but I did weigh an ID card that's of similar construction: 4.82 g.
My conclusion: Okay, credit cards weigh 5 grams.
I've spent years researching science across the board (I studied scientific journalism in school and have used my notes from that class for over a decade now) and even though my forte is genetics and evolutionary biology, I find it increasingly difficult to read contemporary science papers in full without misunderstanding something. Please listen to the authors and experts when they explain these topics. They're still human and can make mistakes, but they tend to be able to under