Studio711.com – Ben Martens

We see headlines all the time about two seemingly unrelated things. “Eat bugs and you’ll score 10% higher on SATs.” John Oliver had a great video talking about how the media completely misses the point of scientific studies, but it’s even worse than that. Even if you do your homework and read the scientific study, you still might not have the truth. This video does a good job of explaining why, but it comes down to statistics and false positives. For “real” science, studies need to be repeated by other researchers to replicate the results, but in this current social landscape, nobody cares about those replicated results because they take a long time, cost a lot of money, and they aren’t as interesting as the original attention-grabbing headline. Stick around to the end. He does a good job of wrapping it up and explaining that we’re not as doomed as the previous 10 minutes of the video might imply.