The Problem Of Fake Science
Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,
Last week, I was able to generate from artificial intelligence a fake study that proved that eating waffles increases baldness. It was filled with footnotes, citations, and complicated math and models. It was kind of scary to see how credible the results felt. You had to look carefully to see the problems. I shared it with others who immediately said something like, “I can believe it.”
Don’t eat those waffles; your hair will fall out. Science says so!
Think of this. We’ve never before been in the position to generate such seemingly scientific content on any subject under the sun within a matter of seconds. This power has only existed for two years. Many people do not even know it exists, much less how easy it is. Bad actors are in a position to use this power anytime they want. They can count on legacy levels of trust in “science” to pass off such fakery as real.
This past week, we saw yet another piece of fake science retracted from publication. This one is a big deal. The publication is The Lancet, one of the most prestigious venues in the world. It had published the study, which was thoroughly peer-reviewed. But it turns out that the authors had pulled the wool over the eyes of the experts.
The retracted paper is one of many generated from a huge and well-funded trial of therapeutic drugs used to treat COVID-19. The trial in question was called TOGETHER. It was funded with grants from FTX, the crypto company later shut down for fraud, alongside financial companies holding large pharmaceutical stocks and think tanks funded by the industry that hoped to sell vaccines. If the study was correct, getting the shot would seem like the only option.
The authors peppered all the journals with papers on the results.
Only one has been pulled so far, but the others will likely do the same in time. This includes the New England Journal of Medicine, a venue that prides itself on its low retraction rate.
The TOGETHER trial was conducted then released fully four years ago. Questions and criticisms have been roiling and boiling all this time.
When the study came out in 2021, it was invoked as one of the major reasons to pull hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin from the shelves. Even if your own doctor wrote a prescription, the answer was no.
I will never forget that day when I walked into my neighborhood pharmacy and showed them my prescription. The girl behind the counter excused herself to talk to her manager, who shook his head no without saying a word. That sent me on a scramble to get some sent by overnight mail from New York City, from a person who had ordered some from India. I felt better in three hours.
I later learned that although millions of people did something similar, because it was the only way to get effective meds, the practice is, shall we say, frowned upon.
Why had all the pharmacies in my local neighborhood denied me proven treatments that my own doctor had prescribed me? Because they believed the science.
This is the problem of fake science. It has real-world consequences. We supposedly live in the age of science, but the credibility of all the institutions is now in free fall. The slogan “science” was deployed to justify a level of attack on freedom that we had never before seen. As a result, the reputation of science in general has taken a huge hit.
The TOGETHER trial at least had the appearance of plausibility. After all, they had actually done a real trial. The SURGISPHERE trial, in contrast, released early on in the summer of 2020, was discovered to have entirely made up all its data. Its conclusions were thereby invalid. And to be fair, the fake science was not entirely one-sided. Some studies indicating the reverse results have also been shown to have faked data.
In the end, hundreds of thousands of papers during this period were published, and these days, the retractions are happening as quickly as the acceptances in the old days. My friends, this is not just a PR problem. This is a genuine crisis for the credibility of science itself.
When the science tells you that you cannot safely have a Thanksgiving dinner in your home or sing praises to God without killing grandma, it is risking the very foundations of the scientific revolution.
Add artificial intelligence to the mix, and you make the problem worse by ten-thousand-fold.
A major incident along these lines happened to me one week ago. I was at an event when two British guys with big smiles and posh accents were going around to attendees to rail against fake meat. It’s a cause with which I’m sympathetic. That is the beginning of how people let their guard down.
They were putting people on camera, and just before turning it on, they would present a study stating that fake meat causes autism. The interviewee is then instructed to endorse the study on camera. They got me on camera to denounce fake meat—I fully complied—but then pressed me to endorse their study. At that point, the incredulous part of my brain engaged and realized something was wrong. I declined to say what they demanded.
The next morning, I realized the prank. These very compelling guys had generated this unsigned study for the purpose of tricking people. The goal was simple but also rather brilliant. It was to prove that advocates of health freedom will endorse any study that seems to back their biases. The final product was likely a documentary designed to discredit the whole movement—and the Trump administration along with it.
The plot was foiled. In the meantime, I’ve had the chance to reflect on the meaning of it all. We live in very strange times when empirical science has been deployed as a weapon for political purposes. More than 500 papers have been retracted, but countless others stand vulnerable.
My worry is that this experience has bred a kind of nihilism that surrounds the entire enterprise. Pranksters moving around scientific conferences with fake studies intended to troll people are not only unhelpful, they further undermine trust.
A key point of the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries was to advance a firmer way of knowing what is true. In former times, faith took center stage with theology as the queen of academic disciplines. But the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton—all were great thinkers—seemed to prove that observation and induction were a better basis of knowing.
This revolution in thought coincided in time with huge advances in technology, medicine, and prosperity for everyone. The world was changing dramatically, with growing levels of mobility, choice, and material advance. We had firmly left what came to be called the “dark ages” and entered into new times. Science was the new king of thought.
There was always a problem lurking in the background. If we want to elevate observation and empirical work over faith and deduction, we are indeed overthrowing one form of ecclesiastical authority. But are we not valorizing another form of authority, namely the observers, the scientists, the people generating, holding, and interpreting the data?
Indeed, we are.
In other words, we can talk all day about science, but there is no getting around the issue of trust itself. We can trust the church and theological authorities. We can trust our own reading of revelatory texts such as the Bible. Or we can trust science and the scientific establishment.
The reason is simple.
No one person is in a position to know and verify all the facts associated with what we call science. We have no choice but to believe the teller. When it turns out that the teller is not playing fair or has another agenda, where does that leave us?
Here is the core problem we face today in the realm of science. It seems that so much has gone wrong that the scientific revolution is itself losing its grip on the public mind. We do not yet know what replaces it.
Reflect for a moment on what has survived with no injury to its reputation. I speak of Euclidean geometry, named for the Greek philosopher of the fourth century B.C. Euclid’s methods survive today. The reason is that the bridges work and buildings soar to the clouds. Consider the method: deduction based on the logic of space as measured with math.
There are schools of logic, math, and geometry, but internal consistency is a must and something anyone can verify. Deduction is democratic. It does not invoke the credibility of any authority but logic itself, and hence builds in its own reliability test. The proof is whether the thing being built actually stands.
I’m struck by the incredible irony that these principles have stood the test of time, even 2,400 years later. Euclid’s insights predated the scientific revolution by more than 2,000 years.
None of us knows what will emerge from this chaos, but these do seem like times of tremendous transition. We are moving from one failed paradigm of knowing what is true to something yet to be determined. That is the most important debate of our time.
As for those waffles, be careful out there!
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/22/2025 - 21:00
Seattle's Jason Rantz
Via AFP
Recent comments