"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."
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