Eating more red dates can replenish blood, not eating staple foods can lose weight, and garlic and onions can prevent cancer...... Have you stepped on these "pseudo-science" pits?
Nowadays, popular science short videos are emerging in an endless stream on various platforms, covering medical and health, common sense of life, culture and history and other fields, and the forms are also eclectic, including real people, animation simulations, experimental demonstrations, and online generation through AI technology.
What needs to be vigilant is that there are many "fake popular science real profits", they use the cloak of popular science to harvest traffic, and sell them in a big way, which not only misleads the public perception and tarnishes the spirit of science, but also makes many netizens fall for deception, ruin wealth and hurt themselves.
Why is "pseudo-popular science" rampant? How do we acquire real knowledge in the flow of information?
Source: Xinhua News Agency
One
To make popular science more reliable and the audience more spectrum, we must first clarify the difference between "popular science" and "pseudo-popular science".
Popular science refers to the dissemination of scientific knowledge and scientific spirit through scientific methods and rigorous attitudes, improving the public's scientific literacy, and helping people improve their cognitive or problem-solving skills. For example, the short popular science video of "Jilin Rime" not only brings the wonders of rime, but also explains the principle of the formation of rime to people.
Pseudo-science, on the other hand, is a kind of misleading information dissemination that uses scientific terms or concepts to package its own opinions, but does not actually follow the scientific method, but only acts anti-science in the name of science. For example, "solar flares may cause headaches and insomnia" and "people with stones should not eat soy products...... These claims seem novel, but in fact they lack scientific basis and rigorous argumentation.
Source: Cheng Can
Health preservation, beauty and skin care, parenting and tutoring, agricultural technology and other fields closely related to people's lives are the "track" preferred by pseudo-popular science. Some anchors and bloggers use "serious nonsense" to think about what people think and what people are anxious about, and strive to meet the "rigid" needs.
Of course, the way they "debuted" is different: some package the harmless image of humans and animals, neither bring goods nor drainage, and purely rely on click-through rates to gain income; Others use obscure terms and scary data to create "demand" for the audience, and then take the opportunity to peddle various health products, nutrition products, and cosmetics.
"Where knowledge does not exist, ignorance pretends to be science." Each of us has our own blind spots in knowledge, and if we are not careful, we may be exploited by pseudo-popular science. Listen to the "online teaching" of experts without leaving home, and you don't need to register someone to prescribe a "good cure", but the consequence is often that learning becomes "learning waste", beauty becomes disfigurement, and seeing lesions hurts the body.
Image source|Picture worm
Two
Since pseudo-popular science is so unreliable, why does it still have so much dissemination?
In addition to the rigid demand for knowledge in each of us, the "good camouflage" of pseudo-popular science is an important reason.
Grip people's hearts. "At first, it was just a sore arm, but I searched the internet for symptoms, and now I'm sure I have cancer." This joke, which has been widely circulated on the Internet, reveals the current situation of some Internet medical accounts exaggerating science popularization and spreading anxiety.
Compared with text and pictures, short videos with exaggerated titles and tense background music are easier to grasp. For example, for the elderly, "secret recipes" such as "mung bean soup to fight cancer", "bone broth to supplement calcium", and "sleeping on a bare bed can treat lumbar spondylosis" are particularly attractive; For young people, "treasure books" such as "stem cell repair, skin repair, anti-aging", "meal replacement to lose weight and be healthier" are also easy to tempt; For mothers, it is difficult not to be regarded as a guideline for "parenting classics" such as "supplementing protein powder to enhance the baby's resistance" and "supplementing trace elements to make the baby healthier". Even though people may be skeptical about some of the claims, sometimes they try it with the mentality of "what if it's true".
Good at acting. Some influencer economic institutions will package the identity of bloggers and anchors as doctors or experts in a certain field, help them operate their accounts, and then give free treatments through private messages, join fan groups and other means, and finally realize the realization of monetization.
This kind of content often uses exaggeration, sensationalism, and other techniques to "dress up", and appears in the posture of "seeing trees but not seeing forests" and "having ordinary science". For example, in a pseudo-popular science article, the first half uses news hotspots and health information as the "beginning", and in the middle uses "user" praise and "expert" interpretation and endorsement, and finally enlarges the move to start promoting the product. For most people, it is easy to be fooled if an opinion or argument is dressed up in scientific jargon and testified by "experts".
For example, when using words such as "angle", "frequency" and "vibration" to describe a health care device, it sounds more scientific and standardized; Slogans such as "XX and his team of experts invented small molecule cutting technology to purify and extract traditional Chinese medicine into a paste formula" and "This technology, which claims to be ten to fifteen years ahead of the world, aims for world patents and Nobel Prizes", also seem to be more authoritative and convincing.
Source: Xinhua News Agency
Three
Pseudo-popular science is actually a kind of rumors, and when rumors spread, it is easy to accumulate and reverse black and white, causing confusion in the public's cognition, causing "bad money to drive out good money", and at the same time dissolving social trust.
To take off the cloak of pseudo-popular science and prevent pseudo-popular science from harming our "real life", we need to continue to make efforts in "big popular science".
Vigorously Peizhen. "If you want to be free of weeds, you must plant crops", and you must "be more serious" when dealing with "distortion". True science popularization should take the initiative to move to the center of the Internet stage, speak out actively, timely and accurately, and occupy a large amount of traffic with positive energy. Today, across the country, students watch the "Tiangong Classroom" held by astronauts on China's space station in real time; On the short video platform, Wang Pinxian, Wu Yuren and other popular science experts have gained millions of fans; During the holidays, science and technology museums and exhibition halls around the country are "hard to find"; and so on, all of which show that popular science is entering people's lives in various ways.
Of course, we can't ignore that "how to do a good job in popularization" is still a difficult point in popularizing science. It is necessary to pay attention to breaking the traditional model of "one-way output" in the past, and popularize more content and hot content that is close to the lives of the people, so that the public can increase their knowledge and improve their literacy in the process of in-depth experience and interaction.
Crack down on hypocrisy. For the public, if you find pseudo-popular science, you must not believe it, do not pass it on, and report it; For platforms and regulatory authorities, it is necessary to crack down on pseudo-popular science as soon as it appears, and never show mercy to the "big fool" that confuses the public; All platforms should find ways to do a good job of "entrance" as much as possible, such as reducing the output and dissemination of pseudo-popular science content by strengthening qualification certification, standardizing information sources, and improving the function of rumor labeling.
Self-improvement. In the face of all kinds of "planting grass" and all kinds of "new theories", be more cautious and ask a few more "is it true", this is the network literacy that everyone must improve in the era of the information explosion. At the same time, we usually pay more attention to the study of scientific knowledge, arm our brains with real science, and strive to cultivate "sharp eyes". If you can always maintain a truth-seeking spirit and a skeptical attitude, you will be able to continue to disenchant, stay awake and stay away from rumors in the disruptive online world.