I found the article, “It’s news, but is it true? ” quite intriguing because I am often fooled by the misleading information on the news myself. I already knew the presence of “a new study” is made in science but I never really questioned its validity as more so its precision. In a section of the article, it states that up to 45 high-profile medical research findings all claimed to have found something that worked. However an epidemiologist John Lonannidis concludes that, “when finding were tested further, in larger and better controlled studies, almost a third turned out to be either wrong, or much weaker than the initial claim.
” Evidently, the scientific research to resolve an epidemic is often an exaggeration of what it claims and in many cases the research cannot support its claim that it sets out. Therefore, the misinterpretation of information often misleads us to believe in invalid and inaccurate information in which we should use our reasoning in conjunction with logic to assess information before deeming it true. The media could care less if they are providing incorrect information because their only concern is receiving money from the news.
I know that media is able to inadvertently oversimplify, misrepresent, or overdramatize scientific results. This becomes the prominent reason for only publishing ‘initial findings’ of scientific research and not so much its results of the findings as they are extremely probable to be proven incorrect. Therefore, our unavailability to the entire truth limits our ways of knowing since we are only provided with findings that are in most cases not justified leaving us with misleading information (most times).
I found an interesting phrase in the article that puts the whole idea of scientific claim in perspective. In a newspaper, even though “science shows up in the headlines in black and white, it should instead appear in the infinite shades of grey that more accurately reflects the inherent uncertainty. Interesting way of thinking about science claim is by comparing shadings of gray to its uncertainty in real life which of course is true and bold black which would represent hard facts. As humans, we are naturally appealed by information that evoke an emotional response and something that is surprising.
This being the reason why we are mislead by such information presented by media because we want to be told only what we like to be told. I think we should sustain our use of logic and reasoning before accepting all the gossip, unjustified scientific claims, and other fanatic claims in order to avoid being misled. imprecision of scientific research Show preview only The above preview is unformatted text This student written piece of work is one of many that can be found in our International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge section.
