The Clickbait Hype-Heavy World of Scitainment

 In my post "Why the Academia Cyberspace Profit Complex Keeps Giving Misleading Brain Research Reports" I discussed the economic reasons why we keep getting misleading research about brains, and misleading headlines about brain research. The analysis in that post holds true not just for brain research, but for scientific research in general. We live in an economy in which misleading stories about scientific research and groundless but interesting-sounding scientific speculation are highly incentivized. To give a short synopsis of what I discussed at much greater length in that post, the economic motivations are like this:

(1) Scientists are judged by how many papers they publish and how many citations such papers get.

(2) Because of publication bias (in which papers reporting positive results and particularly interesting-sounding positive results are more likely to be published), scientists are strongly motivated to publish papers claiming positive results and also claiming interesting-sounding results.

(3) Wishing to make themselves appear like sources of important research breakthroughs to help justify their exorbitant tuition, universities are motivated to produce press releases exaggerating the importance of research papers published by their professors.

(4) Since science news is published on web pages with ads that generate revenue for the people running or funding the web pages, with revenue proportional to how interesting-sounding a story is, those running science news web sites or science analysis web sites have an enormous economic motivation to create clickbait headlines that generate higher numbers of page views, and more advertising revenue. Science news sites these days are almost always built in the form of headlines that you must click to read the story, and each time this causes a web page with ads to appear, the people running or funding the site get money from views of the ads displayed on the page you opened up.

The result of all of this is a very wacky world we might call the world of scitainment, to coin a word that combines the words "science" and "entertainment." Scitainment is a part of the internet that blends science and entertainment. Very much of what we read in this strange world of scitainment is true, and very much of it is false. The world of scitainment blends fact and fantasy, always trying its best to produce entertaining stories and clickbait headlines. It's all about luring you in to click on the stories, so that you go to pages that generate ad revenue for the people running the web sites. 

To show you how lies and fantasy are all mixed up with truth and hard facts in this strange world of scitainment, let us look at the "science news" offered on recent days.

• On the Livescience site we have the utterly untrue headline "Building blocks of life' discovered on Mars in 10 different rock samples." The story discusses some observations of biologically irrelevant chemicals on Mars, none of which are ingredients of life or building blocks on life.  
• The same Livescience site has an article claiming a woman was hit by a meteorite while drinking coffee outside, although a space.com story tells us no such thing happened. 
• ScitechDaily.com has the phony baloney headline "Tracing the Origin of Life – Researchers Uncover How Primordial Proteins Formed on Prebiotic Earth." The paper in question "Boron-assisted abiotic polypeptide synthesis" did not report any experiment producing a protein molecule. The paper reported the formation of something very much simpler (a polypeptide chain) after 200 hours of heating at 130 degrees centigrade, a temperature of 266 degrees Fahrenheit, unlike any that ever would have existed on the early Earth. The "Materials and Methods" section reveals that the paper did not involve any experiment simulating early Earth conditions. We read about glass vials that were baked at 500 degrees centigrade for five hours before use, and how the amino acids were purchased from a chemical supply corporation. The difference between a functional protein and a mere polypeptide chain is like the difference between 500 carefully arranged letters to make a functional instruction paragraph, and some row of a few scrabble letters or Alpha Bits accidentally arising on the floor. 
• The Science Daily site (www.sciencedaily.com) which so often uncritically passes on untrue and clickbait science press releases has an article entitled "Genes for learning and memory are 650 million years old." No one has ever discovered genes for learning or memory in any organism. Scientists lack any credible explanation for how learning occurs in any organism. The genes mentioned are for mere mood or stimulation chemicals such as serotonin, dopamine and adrenaline, which do not at all explain learning or memory.
• Another story on the clickbait-heavy scitechdaily.com site has a headline claiming "Scientists Shed New Light on Dark Energy." No such thing has happened, and dark energy (still never observed) is as mysterious as ever, with its very existence still being dubious. It seems that nowadays a major rule of science journalists is this: "When all else fails, and you can't think of a headline, just claim that new light was shed on some topic."  So we have endless science stories about dubious research and groundless speculation with titles claiming that "new light" has been "shed." 
• We have another case of an unwarranted use of "shed light" in a MedicalXPress.com story entitled "Study sheds light on where conscious experience resides in brain." No such light was shed, and the paper seems to be another case of neuroscientists showing us one of their worst habits: trying to make heavy insinuations about "neural representations" when no representations were found in the brain (where can never be found any actual representations of what we see or remember). The study may be another case of neuroscientists causing risks for the poor or the sick for the sake of shoddy science results, because the study seems to have the usual Questionable Research Practices so abundant in today's experimental neuroscience, such as way too-small study group sizes (often as small as three subjects), lack of pre-registration, lack of a blinding protocol, and no sample size calculation to determine how big the study groups should be. In this case ten very sick people with intractable epilepsy apparently had 64-128 electrodes  implanted under their skulls, which raises the question: was it really necessary for these sick people to have all of these electrodes implanted, or did the desire to make these suffering patients part of this poorly-designed experiment factor into the decision to implant so many electrodes in their skulls? Making a point about fMRI studies that applies just as well to electrode brain studies, a scientific paper says, "It is established that in fMRI studies, small studies (n=16) fail to reliably distinguish small and medium-large effect sizes from random noise as do larger studies (n=100)." But in the paper I just referred to, we see study group sizes such as merely n=3. 
• A story on the clickbait heavy site www.sciencealert.com has a headline of "Physicists Just Figured Out How Wormholes Could Enable Time Travel." No, they sure didn't. It's just a vaporous speculation about a "ring wormhole."
• A story with the headline "How the brain enables consciousness" is inexplicably included on today's Google page of science news. The link takes us to a story that merely says that "science has not yet explained how the brain functions to enable consciousness." It's the old "story completely different from the clickbait headline" deal. 
• At the Business Insider site, we have the headline "Harvard scientists unveil anti-aging drug combination to reverse aging in record time." That claim seems to be mere baloney. No drugs have been invented to reverse aging. The related new stories refer to a paper authored by David A. Sinclair and others, a paper talking about "cell reprogramming." It provides no evidence that any human's age has been reversed, or that anything like age reversal in a human has occurred.  "Cell reprogramming" is typically some deal where you use some chemicals to get rid of epigenetic marks that cells may accumulate, which in some cases can be signs of aging. A rough analogy might be that "cell reprogramming" is a little like wrinkle removal, something that merely gets rids of one sign of aging. There is no evidence that anything discussed in the paper would turn back the clock on a human and give him more years of life or vitality.  The Conflict of Interest section of the paper tells us that Sinclair is "a consultant, inventor, board member, and in some cases a founder and investor in Life Biosciences (a reprogramming company), EdenRoc Sciences/Cantata/Dovetail/Metrobiotech, InsideTracker, Fully Aligned, Zymo, Athletic Greens, Levels Health, Galilei, Immetas, Animal Biosciences, Tally Health, and others." We should be wary about the reliability of statements in Sinclair's paper, because he has a strong financial interest in reporting results that will increase the value of his biotechnology investments. The paper's title is "Chemically induced reprogramming to reverse cellular aging." But the phrase "cellular aging" only appears twice in the paper: one being a mention of screening for signs of cellular aging, and the other being a sentence asking "Is it possible to reverse cellular aging in vivo without causing uncontrolled cell growth and tumorigenesis?" Why has the title referred to reversing cellular aging, when the body of the paper has no substantive statements using the phrase "cellular aging"? The paper includes the very false claim that the genome and epigenome "work interdependently to coordinate the production and operation of life’s molecular machinery." All kinds of fantastically complex molecular machines (mainly protein complexes) arise in the body, but neither the genome nor the epigenome specify which proteins make up the teams of proteins that are protein complexes, and it is an unsolved mystery as to how such protein complexes arise. As two scientists said in 2019, "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking."

While examining the recent science news, I found one encouraging glimmer, some candor. One of the sites mentioned above has an article entitled "Life Didn't Arise as Described in Textbooks." We are told that a nonsense story that science authorities have told for 70 years is just plain false. It isn't true that an increase in oxygen can help explain the appearance of multicellular organisms about 650 million years ago. There was no such increase in oxygen. We read this:

"Defying expectations, the result shows that Earth's oxygen concentrations had not increased. Indeed, levels remained 5-10 times lower than today, which is roughly how much oxygen there is at twice the height of Mount Everest. 'Our measurements provide a good picture of what average oxygen concentrations were in the world's oceans at the time. And it's apparent to us that there was no major increase in the amount of oxygen when more advanced fauna began to evolve and dominate Earth. In fact, there was somewhat of a slight decrease,' says Associate Professor Christian J. Bjerrum, who has been quantifying the conditions surrounding the origin of life for the past 20 years. The new result puts to rest a 70-year research story that advances the centrality of higher oxygen concentrations in the development of more advanced life on our plane."

But why did it take 70 years for scientists to realize the invalidity of the crazy idea that an increase in oxygen might have caused miracles of complex biological innovation and information-rich systemic organization, which has always been as nutty as the idea that an empty factory could produce jet aircraft if you simply squirted the right gas into the empty factory?