When science becomes the jackass

A friend tells you that according to science wearing a mask does nothing to fight COVID You tell him to stop talking nonsense and he brings up a February 2020 study called Effectiveness of N95 respirators versus surgical masks against influenza A systematic review and metaanalysis published in China by seven scientistsAfter six randomised clinical trials involving 9171 participants the study found that statistically N95 masks were no better than surgical masks in preventing influenza respiratory viral infections respiratory infections and flulike illnesses Why he asks would anyone think it would be better against the coronavirusYour other friend listening to this gets riled and cites a 2020 paper that proved the exact opposite This one was called Masks do more than protect others during COVID19 Reducing the inoculum of SARSCoV2 to protect the wearer published in the Journal of General Internal MedicineWhich study would you believeThe last two years have been bad for science Wherever we turned there it was science hammering us with COVID study after study all of it supposedly evidencebased datadriven and peerreviewedmdashand no two alike Each scientific paper sounded erudite full of footnotes citations superscripts and Latin words like ibid and et al The world was full of Dr Faucis each one driving us ordinary folks insane with their own curated sets of ldquosciencebased factsrdquoExcept that their facts contradicted each other and created chaosOne study proved the virus spread through droplets before another proved it was definitely aerosolsVaccines work but not against Omicron no they work but only for 90 days sorry correction they only work if you keep taking boostersTo be fair this is exactly how science advances conjecture by conjecture hypothesis by hypothesis every lsquotruthrsquo variable and subject to scrutiny refinement and change Unfortunately a pandemic was raging and the world had a hunger for clear indisputable direction According to science if there is a peerreviewed paper on it that makes it indisputable Until it is disputedItrsquos our bad luck that these papers become the science that dictates the policyTo prove what a jackass academia is in 201718 three academiciansmdashPeter Boghossian James A Lindsay and Helen Pluckrosemdashconducted an experiment in publishing that came to be known as the Grievance Studies Affair They set about creating bogus studies with eruditesounding names to prove how easy it was to get fake papers published in weighty academic journals once they had been peerreviewedIf a paper was rejected they refined it and resubmitted it with more bogus added Five months after their project began they got their first acceptance Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at the Dog Park published in Gender Place amp CultureThey managed to argue in one paper that dogs engage in rape culture and that men could reduce their transphobia by anally penetrating themselves with sex toys In another they presented Adolf Hitlerrsquos Mein Kampf rewritten in feminist language Some of the papers were applauded and one of them won special recognition from the journal that published itIn May 2017 the peerreviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences gratefully accepted their paper titled The conceptual penis as a social construct which argued that penises are not lsquomalersquo and should be analysed as social constructs insteadEventually the hoax was revealed There was some criticism some praiseWe humans are a gullible lot and we tend to believe words we canrsquot understand people in uniform and pompous scientists who use Latin But science today is being ridiculed for not knowing what it is talking about and sounding authoritative while standing naked in the public squareFor example political correctness requires that all papers be presented within a rightsbased framework and be gendersensitive I discovered the absurdities this can lead to when I stumbled upon a paper that applied a gender framework to the study of glaciers It was called Glaciers gender and science A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research It was offended that till now only men had been allowed to describe glaciers a womanrsquos perspective was missingHow should you react to lsquoscientific informationrsquo and studies Leslie McClure chair of epidemiology and biostatistics at Drexel University in Philadelphia has suggestionsCheck how many people were studied If the study population is small in three digits the results might not be generalisableDonrsquot confuse correlation with causation Just because people who ate fatty foods also died of heart attacks doesnrsquot prove that fats cause heart diseaseAsk when the study was published and by whom perhaps it is outdated Check the political affiliations of the publisher and the authorsMost of all donrsquot believe whatever is presented as science even if it might be true Listen evaluate ask questions and come to your own calm conclusionsHere viewed from there C Y Gopinath in Bangkok throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai the city that raised him You can reach him at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper