> A photo tweeted by a famous French physicist supposedly of Proxima Centauri by the James Webb Space Telescope was actually a slice of chorizo.
> …
> Klein told French news outlet Le Point that his intention had been to educate people about fake news online
While I respect the position that people should always check sources, “person famous in their field posts a lie about something well within their field, then tut tuts when people outside their field believe the expert” feels a bit too smug to me.
How does he think dissemination of scientific knowledge actually works? 99.99% of people don't have the education to truly verify breakthrough scientific work.
It's a lot of pageantry and ethical training to make the appeal to authority more valid, but it will always at its core be appeal to authority.
I think a lot of people are very wary of phrases like "believe the science" and have come to see them as actually meaning "believe the well-paid people on the TV and don't you dare question any of it." I completely agree most people are not capable of actually understanding most science, but there's also been a growing faction of "science zealots" who view science and scientists as somehow above all the problems that affect every other things humans do.
Hopefully people involved in the real dissemination of scientific knowledge can read more than 144 characters. He indicated in the same tweet thread what it really was.
The fact that people can refence just one part of the thread and have it go viral out of context is pretty symbolic of our modern times.
I don't know if there's such thing as the "real" dissemination of scientific knowledge. You just have concentric circles of people that each know a bit less about the subject matter. The farther you get from the handful of experts on a particular subproblem, the more false a statement has to be to be noticed as false.
Which is silly because that's not what an appeal to authority is.
Appeal to authority is defending/supporting an argument by citing the authority of the person presenting it.
It's not the inclination people have to take at face value information of low-consequence/importance because it's within the field of the speaker's expertise.
I think that undermines the inherent objectiveness of scientists. If people have to be skeptical of scientists they will not believe anything that they say (take the ideas of relativity or quantum mechanics). Scientists have one thing going for them in public communication and trustworthiness is it.
> If people have to be skeptical of scientists they will not believe anything that they say
Wait, are you seriously arguing that people shouldn't be skeptical of scientists? I was a scientist at doctoral course level and I sure didn't blindly believe whatever was written in a paper, or said by another researcher: a lot of papers are weak, biased in their protocol, or even straight-up arrangement with reality. This last point is quite obvious for anyone who worked in a lab. Also career has to be built and objectivity is not something rewarded by the system, so there is a lot of bullshit spread around.
A paper is a data point. Can be a weak or a strong one. The opinion of a scientist is another data point, not "science".
You were a scientist so you have the power to understand.
For the general population the choice is between the voodoo man, or a professor. I prefer people to choose to blindly believe the professor (which carries a risk) than the voodoo man (which is always crap)
In many countries you can study Homeopathy in the university. Is that a professor you should trust?
Do you remember peak ivermectin? There were many articles published by real medical doctors in real journals. Is that a professor you should trust? (I read a few of the articles. Most of them were just awful, and I was ignoring the non statistically significant ones.)
The list of food that babies can not eat before they are one year old changes from country to country, and even from one medical doctor to another. Find a few friends abroad and compare.
What if a military expert tells you that a normal looking truck is a secret mobile factory of weapons of mass destruction? Should you invade?
What about cold fusion, aka low energy nuclear reactions, aka [I don't remember the new name]? I think they are published by people with real degree. (I recommend to ignore the heat measurements because it's too difficult. Look for the data about neutrons or isotopes.)
I'd like too that people follow the advice from serious professors instead of voodoo man, but sometimes the distinction is not so clear. At one point people must choose the expert to follow.
For some topics there are easy rules, like "preregistered double blind randomized controlled trial published in a serious peer review journal or it didn't happen", but each word there need a long explanation of the meaning and a long explanation of why it is there. (And remember to read the details, because some papar have weird exclusion criteria, like dropping the death cases.) (And defining which journal are "serious" is a very difficult task.)
Like I sais in a sister comment: certainly. The difference is that you may have something like 10% of crackpots at the university (in science), when that number is a strong 100% in pseudoscience/voodoo/religion etc.
> In many countries you can study Homeopathy in the university. Is that a professor you should trust?
Absolutely not. In order to be a homoeopath, at least in France, you have to study medicine. Then some of the graduates who apparently were mostly partying when studying go for that and this is why I always double-check what my MD prescribes. She is really great but I have a limited trust in everything.
But see, I have a PhD in physics and I have been running the skeptics branch at my university. So again I am special.
> The list of food that babies can not eat before they are one year old changes from country to country, and even from one medical doctor to another. Find a few friends abroad and compare.
My children were raise in three countries (one in Asia, two in Europe). I've seen that but these are nutritionists - a branch of "science" that is at least laughable. A friend of mine who is a tenured professor in nutrition, when she was doing her PhD, asked me to review the statistics. I could not - it was such rubbish, and she was such a good friend that I told her to find somebody else or just give up - the people who will be reading her thesis are as clueless as she was regarding statistics.
> What if a military expert tells you that a normal looking truck is a secret mobile factory of weapons of mass destruction? Should you invade?
If I had to make the decision? I would ask several of them and then yes, invade. Are you able to tell the difference between a MIS-45 X and a normal truck? I cannot (and made up the name).
> What about cold fusion, aka low energy nuclear reactions
Cold fusion popped up, and then disappeared when more people started to test it. I was studying at the time this happened and I think it went on foe a month or so. And then nothing - exactly because the scientific community called bluff.
> At one point people must choose the expert to follow.
As you see I agree with most of you points (and I guess you have a scientific background because of the (very good) examples you gave. But I do not see your point.
You need to give a simple rule for the general population. Between choosing the scientific community that sometimes fail and the bozos in pseudoscience I say - blindly trust science.
> 10% of crackpots at the university [citation needed] (in science [citation needed])
:)
Anyway, the 10% of crackpots are overrepresented in the news coverage, and there are many "institutes" and "associations" with serious names, that sometimes it's difficult.
I think that there are courses of homeopathy in some German universities, but it's difficult to find and I don't know enough about German universities to know it it's a big serious one or just a minor crazy one.
So I used Google to search in my university. I knew it was a mistake. The first two links are
It's the bigest university in the capital city of Argentina. My university is split in 13 faculties, each one is quite independent. Both page look like serious pages of real courses, for graduate students or specializations. I can try to search in the other 11 faculties, but I don't dare, because I expect a few more. (I don't expect to find results in all 13, for example the Engineering faculty probably has no course about homeopathy, I hope.) Can you try searching at your university?
About cold fusion, it reappears from time to time. This was popular a few years ago from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer but the degrees of the inventor are ... strange.
The last interesting case I remember is https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603... HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24795744 (80 points | Oct 15, 2020 | 71 comments) It looks like a serious team in a serious institution in a serious journal. But the list of new elements that appear after the "fusion" makes no sense at all. Suspiciously, they are very common in the plumbing and other parts of the device, so my guess is just involuntary contamination instead of fusion.
I am French and I am ashamed that my country is THE country of homeopathy (together with Germany). You see homeopathy everywhere and I am tired discussing with people about that. I once took part in a radio broadcast with some crackpots and ate 5 tubes of Oscillococcinum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscillococcinum) when they started to tell how important the right prescription is.
There was also a guy who was channelling something something energy something quantum with his hands and was afraid of how powerful it was. He came with a lady who fainted when he touched her head. I asked him to concentrate as much as he could and fry my brain. He did not want to do it because he would kill me. After some back and forth he touched my head and obviously noting happened. I had bad waves or something mike that, apparently.
As for the "education" for homeopaths in France, this is done after medical studies which is completely crazy. These people are idiots.
> choice is between the voodoo man, or a professor
Those categories are not mutually exclusive. Universities are filled with gender or other crackpot theories "academics" that don't follow scientific methods. Even in the real science realm, having academics credentials is a more effective way to turn into a voodoo man in an unrelated field than starting from scratch.
Certainly. The difference is that you may have something like 10% of crackpots at the university (in science), when that number is a strong 100% in pseudoscience/voodoo/religion etc.
Yes, I’m saying that. You are a scientist but imagine what the space of skepticism in the general public actually looks like. Anybody with a political motivation can ‘take down’ climate change, vaccines, or even a tound earth.
> Anybody with a political motivation can ‘take down’ climate change, vaccines, or even a tound earth.
And this is a good thing because the first two things on that list, given the impact it has on the living style population, must be discussed publicly. Politics exist precisely to address those kind of broad impact topics.
The last and lasting blow done to scientific credibility was precisely about the so-called vaccines. A barely tested medical product based on a tech that never worked previously released by a big company known for corruption was decreed to be "science", all while changing the definition in dictionaries to make it a "vaccine". No discussion on the subject even by experts was tolerated, the big internet companies erased opposition and some governments went as far as stripping basic rights (movement, expression, business) to citizens, all in the name of science.
The fact is, this isn't a data-based or scientific approach at all. It's only power-tripping. A data based-approach would have shown clearly about 3 months in the crisis that the population at large isn't even at risk. Explaining to the population the risk ventilated by age would have been 100 times more scientific than the fear-mongering broadcasted continually on TV. Science needs to be used as a justification carefully, and using it dogmatically for pushing something that was ironically not even scientifically proven to be effective nor without risks (I'm pretty sure the newspapers in my country never reported the thousand or so dead directly imputable to it) is the exact opposite.
I agree science needs to be used as a justification carefully, and pushing COVID vaccines out quickly may or may not have been a good use of that power (consider other diseases though). But I still believe that science needs that credibility in order to have a fighting chance of influencing policy because science is so difficult and in places counterintuitive that a public "debate" about it will inevitably end up with a worse truth.
Politics doesn't exist precisely to address those topics, politics exists for people to obtain power. Discussing those topics may be a route to power. Without a respect for science as a more objective truth than rhetoric, power will be secured by the most appealing rhetoric, whether or not that voice conflicts directly with the science that we know.
Appealing to authority is not wholly awful. In an instance of a low-risk decision (whether to trust an authority) it seems shitty for him to try to make this a lesson on it.
If an Astronomer posts something to a bunch of people who know nothing about space and just like cool pictures, why taunt them with how they can't tell a zoomed-in chunk of fat from a sunspot?
If we can't believe people who are experts in their field, who can we believe? That mindset damns the entire field of science communication and outreach
Are we supposed to take the lesson that we should simply never believe anything? Just give up on the concept facts and objectivity and give in to the chaotic maelstrom?
Or are we supposed to go out and build our own space telescopes to verify every piece of information for ourselves?
Neither of those are tenable, we have to be able to trust some people some of the time.
Frankly I think tricks like these just erode confidence in science and science communicators. How many people excitedly shared these cool space images with their friends, and now have to deal with the embarrassment of looking like a fool for trusting a legitimate authority? Are those people going to be as excited when the next batch of legit photos come out, or will they withdraw and lose their excitement for fear of being tricked again? You may laugh, but these kinds of experiences do determine people's, and society's, behavior.
The goal of science communication is to educate and excite the public, and by extension, drive funding for new advancements. Smug gotchas like this actively impede that effort.
The answer is not to base your beliefs off of every tweet that comes across your feed. Don't buy in fully to every rumor you hear. If it is too much effort to form an educated opinion about something, you don't need to form an opinion at all
It is plausible viewed in a two inch image on a smartphone with one sentence of description. If you look at it in any more depth is obviously not. Perhaps this is not the appropriate level of detail for communicating and understanding cosmology
Why? I am not a cosmologist and the images I see here and there are quite similar. Plus a physicist tells me that it is a new image of a star so why should I doubt?
"Quite obviously" depends on your knowledge of the topic. Scientists are there to help us decide what is true and what is not - and not erode the limited trust we have in science already.
If this was a picture of a pokemon - sure. But this round thing with red and white spots togather with a reasonable explanation was not funny at all.
The picture he posted is so obviously and visibly a slice of chorizo that it really is no more than a good joke, nothing smug about it.
IMHO, it does demonstrate his point very well if some people took his statement that it was Proxima Centauri at face value simply because he is an expert.
It is not "obviously and visibly a slice of chorizo" to me ... google pictures of venus and it's not clear that this photo is in any way clearly a fake to a lay person.
A lay person will know chorizo much better than celestial bodies, at least in Europe. Of course there will always be someone to say they don't know what chorizo looks like but that's life... Otherwise we cannot do anything.
Anyway, it's odd that people would argue on this instead of just laughing it off as "well played", but people argue over everything these days...
It must just be a cultural difference, as in the US all our meats are reduced to a fine pink homogenized sludge before being made into anything. Those lumps of fat or whatever -- unacceptable, and what is that a pepper seed? Too spicy!
As an anecdotal data point, I showed the tweet with the picture to my wife (who has zero astronomy knowledge) without telling her anything and her immediate first reaction was "it looks like chorizo!".
There is a huge difference between distinguishing fake artist rendition Venus from real Venus pictures and distinguishing a slice of sausage vs a celestial body.
In the former the fake Venus is supposed to look like Venus. In the latter the sausage looks like nothing you can find in space.
IDK if it's that smug. It was just a prank/troll. Possibly, it got a bit more circulation than expected or was less obvious than expected. It feels kind of like a "ha! on your toes" style that translates poorly from personal into online media.
I mean, it is a pretty good example of how fake news works.
He said in the same thread it was fake.
Tons of people retweeted the image without the greater context, and it still carried the authority of having been said by a renowned scientist.
In a strange way, this incident may demonstrate that science does work. One scientist said something dumb, was criticized for it, and was forced to retract in short order.
Science is never just one person. There's no President or Pope of science. You can criticize any individual authority, no matter how prominent.
Imagine if he continued to insist that the chorizo was a star in the face of severe criticism, and in fact used his power and influence to end the careers of anyone who refused to agree with him that the chorizo is a star. (This is of course an analogy to something.)
This article presupposes that Proxima Centauri is not, in fact, made of chorizo. Whereas we have long known that the moon is made of cheese. I think Klein is floating a test balloon to gauge the public's willingness to consume the 'celestial charcuterie' theory of the heavens.
> This article presupposes that Proxima Centauri is not, in fact, made of chorizo.
I don't think it does.
It can both be true that Proxima Centauri is made of Chorizo and that the French Scientist tweeted a picture of some Chorizo that was not Proxima Centauri.
Also, it could be made of chorizo but not sliced and facing normal to our line if sight. And where does the light that shines on Proxima Chorisii come from?
>It can both be true that Proxima Centauri is made of Chorizo and that the French Scientist tweeted a picture of some Chorizo that was not Proxima Centauri.
Things get less clear-cut if we consider the "one electron universe" theory...
> “According to contemporary cosmology, no object belonging to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere but on Earth,” he said after apologising for tricking so many people.
It would be a lot of fun if someone competent with physics explained how celestial bodies would behave if they were made of meat. That'd be a fun Youtube video imo.
Maybe not that much smaller? The density of meat is close to 1gm/cm³, that of the sun about 1.41gm/cm³, but the sun is relatively small for a star and larger stars are less dense.
I’m neither an astrophysicist nor a food expert, but sausages have lots of carbon and contain a reasonable amount of water and thus, oxygen, so I don’t see young stars match them chemically. Maybe, some really old ones will, fairly short befor they run out of stuff to fuse.
With the pressure coming from the inside of the star from burning fuel, I think this meat-star would implode since it is just meat. Unless of course sausages under pressure emit energy. How much sausage would it take to start a thermonuclear process?
What exactly happens would probably depend on what type of star it would turn into, give the elemental makeup of meat.
I'm assuming that pressure would cause temperatures in the middle to rise high enough to break everything down to its constituent elements, and then some sort of fusion would start, eventually breaking down the entire thing.
I bet it would be a _very_ messy process, as things explode and implode, burn and outgas. Eventually things would probably settle into a fairly unremarkable star, except with very odd proportions of various elements.
So what your saying is that it would cook itself as it collapses and somewhere in the process there'd be a point where the sausage is perfectly toasted?
Well, the water in it would first heat and turn to steam as the Chorizo collapses in on itself, which would eventually result in a steam explosion and a Chorizo Mass Ejection. That might disrupt the cooking process a bit, but you may also get some perfectly-cooked Chorizo launched your way.
I don't think a steam explosion would be enough for a mass meat ejection. Stars regularly undergo fusion and that isn't enough for mass ejection unless it it becomes a runaway process in the case of Stellar death
The steam explosion is based off two assumptions: You're starting with cold sausage that heats up as it coalesces into the star, and that the steam gets trapped by the solid mass of sausage above it. Stars normally coalesce out of hydrogen that doesn't need to go through as drastic of a change as a sausage would when transforming into fusing plasma. My assumptions are probably at least partially incorrect because my field of expertise is really ribs and brisket.
Speaking for the food producers of Earth and the Solar System, I object to calling whatever material this extra-solar planet is made of "chorizo". If some expedition were to be made to this planet and return a thousand years later with a 10,000 km long sausage (nicely preserved due to the vacuum I suppose), it should not be be able to confuse the consumers by selling it under a brand name connected with Earth sausages, regardless of how tasty it might be. That would just play right into the hands of whatever corporation was able to furnish the first expedition to leave the solar system.
Cmon we've been joking with exactly this picture for years now on the internet. The other really popular joke one is the pancake that, specially in B&W, looks like a moon!
> These aren't the times for such jokes. Many people take this as proof of lying experts that ridicule the non experts.
You can make these jokes in your peer group but outsiders of these group may feel degraded.
On the contrary, I've spent the last 2 years watching "experts" in my own field make absolute fools of themselves, to the point where a number of formerly respected leaders in science and medicine have lost all credibility. The kind of "expert" that would mindlessly re-tweet an obvious picture of a salami as a scientific discovery is giving you prima facie evidence that you should have some level of doubt concerning their judgment.
The general public needs to be more informed of the following two facts:
* Appeals to authority, no matter how credentialed, are not arguments. Always start from the assumption that the "expert" is wrong until you can prove otherwise. If you aren't capable of evaluating the evidence for yourself, don't repeat it.
* You don't know what you don't hear. Even if you have heard from a true "expert", the media will regularly distort or cherry-pick their sources to make whatever sensational claim that drives clicks. So-called "experts" are often pulled from a list of twitter users that are tweeting in support of a reporter's desired headline just prior to deadline, and all other experts' opinions are ignored.
I'll add a bonus:
* Celebrity is a hell of a drug. Even the most credible speaker faces an almost irresistible force to dress up factual claims with opinions. Particularly if they're personally scared / emotional, on one of those horrid cable news panels, or both.
Bottom line: if you don't have training in a discipline, you aren't qualified to judge a claim within it. Treat the whole thing as no different than a television program about celebrity gossip, because that is what it is to you. Don't just blindly trust a quote or a talking head simply because some writer/producer at a news agency told you to trust them.
In the end you don't get a better informed and critical audience, you get people who don't believe you if you say 1+1 is 2.
We live in times where people discuss if earth is flat and rules by lizard people fro the inside of the earth.
If you always start from the assumption that the expert is wrong, you have no time to do anything because the world now has so much knowdledge you can't check it evrything fast enough.
And some point you have to trust people and that some are experts.
What you're saying is that you'd rather believe "experts" than not believe them. This is religion, not rationality.
> you have no time to do anything because the world now has so much knowdledge you can't check it evrything fast enough. And some point you have to trust people and that some are experts.
...or you can choose to stay agnostic on most claims, and simply do your best to contributing to the noise of the world based on hearsay and your own uninformed opinions.
You totally missed my point.
Everything is believe. Everything you know came from your sensory input.
Here's the big question. How do you know that the evidence your sensory apparatus reveals to you is correct? What I'm getting at is this. The only experience that is directly available to you is your sensory data. This sensory data is merely a stream of electrical impulses that stimulate your brain.
In other words, all that you really know about the outside world is relayed to you through your electrical connections.
That would mean that...you really don't know what the outside universe is really like at all for certain.
Stop clutching your pearls. Experts lying and ridiculing non-experts is massively widespread. We (tech community) do it all the time to VCs, investors, media, business teams, PMs, etc.
I'm not sure exactly who "we" is, but I've spent more than a reasonable amount of time on the internet for years and don't recall having seen either picture.
Although Klein definitely is a scientist, it's not exactly your random scientist. He's got strong credentials. He's got also a huge talent for explaining some links between physics and philosophy. If you happen to understand french, make sure you watch some of his videos.
This isn't even a story of fake news or how the masses are idiots since the tweet took off because people thought it was funny (just read the comments).
I worked with a guy that said the moon landing was fake. The only evidence he could provide was the number of images of space that claim to be real but end up being doctored or fake, every time I called him out on his bs I was wrong and the image was fake.
I think these fake photos are ones his friend offers up to him as evidence. It's not too hard to find "fake" images from NASA; they release a lot of composite images, false color, etc. Presented in the wrong way, or to somebody inclined to cynical skepticism, these can be construed as 'fake' and used to reinforce that cynical skepticism.
An important question to keep in mind when playing this game: was the fake photograph ever a real fake photograph, or is it a fake fake photograph? Sometimes people deliberately construct fake photographs specifically to be debunked as fake, to bolster their claim of the whole thing being fake. e.g. I photoshop a picture of Mount Rushmore on the Moon, claim I got the photo from NASA and say "Look how obviously fake it is! NASA thinks we're utter fools." Except usually it's more subtle than that. They'll take a picture of a desert on earth, adjust the colors to make it look like Mars, then present both the original and the altered alongside each other, claiming the doctored image of an earth desert is purported to be real by NASA. If you can bait somebody into defending the faked image, you can debunk them easily since the whole thing was a setup.
Many of the images that we get from NASA in general aren't event "photos", they're composite images, just as you said. For example, a lot of "color" images are composites of black and white images shot through blue,green,and red filters and then re-assembled on the ground. They're "true" in the sense that they're not deliberately falsifying things, but not they're not "true photos".
Somewhere (can't find the source at the moment) I recall reading that some of the early lunar reconnaissance photos were purposefully made lower quality by NASA because the U.S. wanted to keep it a secret from the Soviet Union just how good our orbital photography had become.
Just because it has some obvious and provable editing does not mean that it's a falsification.
TBH, I think extreme skeptics (e.g., flat-earthers) play a useful role in public discourse.
They effectively shine a light on the limits of each person's ability to justify their beliefs, vs. what beliefs are generally accepted just because nobody challenges them.
I've seen a similar effect in several Christian communities in the U.S. If a Christian is mostly surrounded by other Christians, it's easy to accept lots of beliefs because they're not challenged. But if they end up in an environment where people challenge those beliefs, or if there's a lot at stake for holding wrong beliefs, they tend to scrutinize their beliefs much more carefully. I think, overall, they benefit from pruning down their beliefs to a smaller set of better-justified ones.
So to the extent that flat-earthers help others think more critically, I'm glad they're part of public discourse.
I was just talking about this this-morning with a friend. We're discussing the on-going Alex Jones trial.
When I first heard that the moon landing was faked, I did stop to ask myself "Wait, could it be true?". When I first heard that 9/11 was an inside job and that the folks on the news were "crisis actors", I did pause and ask myself "wait, could it be true?" When I first heard some of Alex Jones' stuff years ago, I again stopped to wonder if there was perhaps some truth to any of it.
To be clear, I don't believe any of those conspiracies. And Alex Jones' stuff hurts my brain. But I have always been of the opinion that it is good that we have a few "crazies" who are "way out there" in our society to serve as a check on all of us. I agree with you: "to the extent that flat-earthers help others think more critically, I'm glad they're part of public discourse." It always felt to me like having a few of those folks around was a healthy balance, even if we mostly wrote them off. Somehow.... it seems like that balance is way way way off today. I don't want these types to disappear altogether, but I'd like to see us get back to some sort of balance.
This hasn't been my experience. A lot of people say they think the moon landing was fake because they have a general distrust of anything the government says, and are particularly skeptical of anything from the cold war era. But they may still be willing to listen to reason if you approach the subject with a compassionate mindset, not shaming them for questioning authority but instead acknowledging the basic legitimacy of their anti-authoritarian skepticism. After all, the government has done shady shit before, it just happens that the Moon landing isn't one of them.
The depth of publicly available information about the Moon landings helps a lot too. Most people have only seen a few minutes of video footage at most, and may conclude that Hollywood could fake that video. But the amount of documentation about even the most minute detail of the Apollo program is staggering. If it were all fake,it would be the greatest most detailed work of science fiction ever created. Seriously, it would put Star Trek/Wars to shame. No fiction has lore with such fractal depth of detail as NASA, not even close. Not even Silmarillion comes close.
No matter what your belief is, I think we can all agree that a user with the name Michael Collins defending the moon landings is probably one of the best examples of nominative determinism we will ever get
I think you are right. There is no desire to learn the truth.
Since the early 1950s NASA had completely public video feeds for just about everything they did. News organizations around the world had access to the feeds, as well as the freedom to send their own cameras and recording equipment. Newsrooms all over the world have footage in their archives of the same launches, from different angles. And their own copies of NASA footage too. How do you fake all that?
If I remember correctly, during the Mercury program one of the splashdowns was so off the mark that it took the Navy a few hours to recover the capsule. The major US news orgs didn't want to deal with it so they broadcast old footage of an on-target recovery but got caught because other orgs showed the real thing.
After thinking about this for a minute, I think the point wasn’t that people shouldn’t have fallen for this in particular, but to give everything a tint of uncertainty. It’s a pretty clear cut example of “no matter how believable it was, it can still be not even a little bit true”. In many contexts I’d call that a rather unproductive observation, but in the context of fake news, we have many people perceiving different realities built on a whole network of strong beliefs about what exists and what happened. Uncertainty about everything is probably actually exactly what’s needed to break free of a grip like that.
i.e. "the internet is full of lies" But that doesn't mean sources of truth do not exist. Sources of truth do exist, though, what is read online should be carefully considered. I mean, isn't that kind of the thinking around telling people to not clicking links in emails, text messages and generally stopping to ask whether a piece of information seems too outlandish to be true or too shocking? So yeah it's definitely felt like the internet is full of people who aren't "mature enough" to invest so heavily into the internet of late.
If he did not allow the joke to spin out for more than (say) 24 hours, and if he doesn't make a habit out of this stuff, then I'd cut him slack and say: Well done! A good joke can go very far in 24 hours, esp'ly if not marked with the disclaimer "April 1". But then again, if he had made a fake timestamp in the corner with "April 1" then nobody would be complaining.
Serious q for any astrophysicists here: could the JWST resolve any surface features of Proxima Centauri? (In infrared of course.) Would be mind-blowing to see if so.
I see this as pretty high brow academic trolling in vein of the Sokal hoax [0] - but I suppose it's a sign of the times the "publication" is a single tweet.
It’s only a troll if you tricked people. How many of the 12000 tweet likes were people liking the joke vs people legit confused? The article quotes two of them.
It's amazing how little coverage this story gets, and no coverage at all from mainstream media. They don't seem to cover any story that would bring their credibility into question.
Even the headline of the article I linked above is misleading: "Scientist tried to pass off piece of chorizo as a distant star" -- Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to Earth besides the sun. So yeah, it's a "distant star", but it's also the closest one to us outside of our solar system.
> It's amazing how little coverage this story gets, and no coverage at all from mainstream media.
I'd like to see less "someone did/said something goofy on Twitter" in mainstream media, not more. This "story" warrants maybe a Reddit or Fark link, not breaking news from CNN.
> …
> Klein told French news outlet Le Point that his intention had been to educate people about fake news online
While I respect the position that people should always check sources, “person famous in their field posts a lie about something well within their field, then tut tuts when people outside their field believe the expert” feels a bit too smug to me.