"Science is constantly producing new studies, as you would know if you ever watched TV," John Oliver said on Sunday's Last Week Tonight. "And when studies aren't blanketing TV, they're all over your Facebook feed." If you love science, you'll love Oliver's segment; if you love news recaps of scientific studies, well, he wants you to be a more skeptical news consumer.
"There are now so many studies being thrown around, they can seem to contradict one another," Oliver said, citing coffee as an example. "And after a certain point, all that ridiculous information can make you wonder: Is science bullshit? To which the answer is clearly 'no,' but there is currently a lot of bullshit masquerading as science." For the next 15 minutes, he walked through some of the reasons, from the lack of replication studies to confirm initial research — "There is no reward for being the second person to discover something in science," he said. "There's no Nobel Price for fact-checking" — to the way scientific journals and organizations describe findings in news releases, which are then simplified even more on TV morning talk shows. "It's like a game of telephone — the substance gets distorted at every step."
The media isn't the only culprit. "There's no doubt, some of this is on us, the viewing audience," he said, placing himself with news consumers, not people with HBO talk shows. "We love fun, pop-y science that we can share like gossip, and TV news producers know it." Oliver made a final plea: "Science is, by its nature, imperfect, but it is hugely important. And it deserves better than to be twisted out of proportion and turned into morning show gossip." And then he threw up his hands and gave people what they want (with some snark): TODD talks, a dumbed-down version of TED talks with the tagline "because science does not have to be an exact science." Watch below. Peter Weber
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