Fake Studies

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This is a list of things that people believe, based on "Studies" that have been debunked or discredited:

Examples: Fake Studies : 14 items


2014.06.06 DGU Disinformation -
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When Republican Politician (Jim Rubens) used a shoddy study (that used only 10 examples) that claimed armed civilians drastically reduce casualties during mass shootings, PolitiFact slammed it as false.... by using a worse study to refute it: their "expert" could only find 3 cases of a DGU's (Defensive Gun Uses) stopping a mass shooting? I show dozens in my Mass shootings stopped by armed civilians article, without even trying. So while the issue is complex, and no one is going to agree on an exact number reduced, there's zero doubt (to the informed) that civilians with guns have reduced casualties in mass shootings. Claiming that as completely false, is completely dishonest. The only debate is how "drastically" it has helped.

Beepocalypse - There was this huge scam (perpetuated by the left) for many years that bees were dying, and it was going to be the end us of all, because bees were so important to the ecosystem. Colony Collapse Disorder was sensationalized as the greatest threat to humanity since Nuclear weapons. A decade later, nothing had happened and most had forgotten the media's sensationalism. But the informed remembered, and learned from the mistake.

Climate Consensus - Consensus/popularity is politics, Science is skepticism (and proof). A quick glance and the 97% Scientific Consensus for AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming), proves that those who repeat it are either fools (unaware of where it came from) or liars (dishonest), there really isn't a lot of middle ground on this one. The actual consensus is surprisingly small, and the studies that say otherwise are embarrassingly bad, and the one thing that most Scientists have a stronger consensus on, is that IPCC and the media are misleading the public (and overhyping things).

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Medicare-for-all popularity - FakeNews, "Medicare-for-all is popular", even in red states. RealNews: Medicare-for-all is popular amongst the uninformed. Support drops below 37 percent (58% opposed) if survey takers are told that the bill would eliminate private insurance companies. Instead of informing viewers/readers of that fact, or what it would mean, FakeNews outlets love to popularize that Medicare-for-all myth. That's not news, it's propaganda.

Minimum Wage Laws -
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The minimum wage and living wage warriors seem reluctant to accept the economic realities: price and wage controls almost never work. There are extremely rare cases where they can work (or do minimal damage) in one small location for short amounts of time, but there's no magic wage that's right for everywhere and everywhen at once. Thus wage controls start out bad and get worse over time. While a few discredited studies (like Card & Krueger) show that raising minimum wage doesn't have large impacts, in a few situations, for short periods of time. But each study like that has dozens of rebuttals and refutations that show the flaws in their methodology, and counter studies that it does impact employment (and wages), in the wrong way. So if you see a Study or News that claims minimum wage doesn't hurt employment, you know it's Fake. A few socratic questions show the problems: (a) What's a fair wage for both NYC and B.F. Idaho? If $15/hr is good, why not $150/hr? If only 9% of minimum wage workers are below the poverty line (and 91% are not), wouldn't giving money directly to that 9% be better? If minimum wage is a starting salary, why should it have an ending value (be a livable wage)?

Numbers Covered by Obamacare -
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Those claiming 20 million more people are insured because of Obamacare (ACA) either don’t know what they’re talking about, or are bald-faced liars. We're around 29 million people short of the campaign promise for universal coverage. And it's well below the 20 million new people covered that the fools and frauds like to claim. The facts: about 2.8M were covered because of Obamacare, and another 4-6M because of medicaid expansion, at a cost of about $20K per new person covered.

Organic food fraud - Is Organic food better for you or the environment? It depends. Usually it replaces controlled chemical dosages (medicines for plant, soil and pests) with organic herbal remedies. Some work, some don't. For some crops it doesn't matter, for some it does. Generally, it takes more land to get the same yield, which means worse for the environment and you have to ship it further (or it costs more, so people shift to worse alternatives). So while it's a win on a few things, it's a loss on others, and not a clear win overall. The biggest champions of are suffering from Dunning-Kruger (aka self-delusion, Progressivism / Cultural Marxism, and so on).

Plastic Bag Bans - Plastic Bag Bans are Anti-Science so the left loves them. Here's what we know: paper bags are worse, many people just buy their own plastic bags (which are thicker and worse), and if you replace plastic bags with cloth bags, then you increase diseases/illness (it is shown that food born illnesses went up after bag bans). It takes between 131 - 20,000 uses of cloth bags before you hit environemntal break-even on a single cloth bag (double that if you recycle them). But to reduce disease, you're supposed to wash them after every use: which means that they use more energy than plastic, and die after ≈50 washes so can never hit environmental break-even. So going to reusable bags is bad for the environment, it's bad for people (sickness), and it's bad for liberty: which is why the left loves it so. It teaches conformity over common sense.

Secondhand Drinking - As if the threats of secondhand smoking weren't enough moral preening to rationalize hectoring everyone around you for their lack of virtues, along comes secondhand drinking (which harms 53M Americans). I shit thee not. How long until that gets the left to champion bringing back prohibition?

Secondhand Smoke - Since the left's war on smokers wasn't working fast enough (despite exaggerations and fear mongering), and they had used Junk Science against smoking, they could also use Junk Science (the EPA's now debunked "study" on secondhand smoke) to warn the public about the dangers of Secondhand Smoke. (Later, the fakers seriously tried adding 3rd hand smoke -- that if you touched residue in a smokers house, you could die). I don't like smoking, first or second hand, but remember Japan? Japanese men are some of the heaviest smokers in the world (with some of the longest life expectancies), and since they live in smaller dwelling than most, their wives and daughters are subjected to secondhand smoke in more frequency and intensity. The results? They have the best life expectancy of any Women in the world. Diet, lifestyle, and genes matter far more. So stop the rationalizations -- some people don't like smoking, and so are making junk-science excuses for their attacks and hatred. We know this because places that banned it for years/decades had no difference in death or disease rates: so the issue of public health has been debunked.

Smoking -
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Persecuting smoking and smokers is a modern witch hunt among the left, as proven by the intolerance of progressive areas (California, Oregon, Washington, NY, Mass., etc). Of course that's anti-Science. While smoking isn't healthy it's not as unhealthy as a bad genes, not exercising, bad diet, or bad attitude (stress) -- if you can regulate smoking based on public health claims then the state could regulate all those others (and some are trying. Many of the studies were fraudulent to get the laws, doubly so for the second hand smoke scares, or the false (unsupported) claims that it increases healthcare costs (they die quicker so it saves money). It was all flim-flam to allow the anti-liberty fascists to tell us what to do with our bodies, in our property, "for our own good".

Smoking and Healthcare costs - An argument used to justify anti-smoking laws was that smoking increases healthcare costs -- as if that meant that it was OK for the government to then tell you what you can do with your body as a cost savings measure. Yea, exterminating people at 30 saves healthcare dollars as well, so what? We don't need Logan's Run. On top of that, the whole idea was faked. Canada did a study that found that the lifetime costs of smokers healthcare was far less than the average, which makes sense to the non-mouth breathers.
  1. Most healthcare costs are in the last few years of life.
  2. Smokers die quicker (on average) -- meaning they cost less over their lives!

That means the justification used to ban smoking should be used to encourage it, and we should charge smokers LESS for healthcare, and start giving kickbacks for skydivers and stunt pilots. If you really want to save healthcare costs, ban leftist know-nothing idiots from interfering with others lives: imagine how much that de-stresser will save society.

Stanford Prison Experiment - There was a study done by Professor Philip Zimbardo in 1971, which divided people into two groups: guards and prisoners, and within days the prison guards had become brutal monsters and the prisoners hapless victims, showing that authority corrupts, prisons are bad, and victims are noble. If you're ever read or seen this in News, you are a victim of FakeNews. The truth is it was a faked study that has never been reproduced (despite many efforts), and the real truth is that humans will play along with a sham for money, and the News will lie for attention. Both were magnified because it fit a leftist agenda, that Cops/Authority/Humans are fundamentally bad and need the liberals to protect us from them.

Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez -
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Thomas Piketty is a French Economist (and woman-beater), who used Emmanuel Saez's discredited research (study) on how things haven't gotten better for the middle class, as the basis for his new socialist manifesto called Capital in the 21st Century (a play on Marx’s Das Kapital). Economically, the study/book was crap: politically, it was gold. It told the left leaning and their media what they wanted to hear. So it made the NYT best seller list in Fan Fiction, and everyone talked about it. It was peer reviewed and debunked in spades, but not before the gullible gobbled it up as a tasty plate of confirmation bias. Nom nom.

Written 2018.06.14