Your 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 COVID-19: Reducing the inoculum of SARS-CoV-2 to protect the wearer, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Which study would you believe?

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The 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 evidence-based, data-driven and peer-reviewed—and 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 “science-based facts”.

Except that their facts contradicted each other and created chaos.

One study proved the virus spread through droplets, before another proved it was definitely aerosols. 

Vaccines work, but not against Omicron; no, they work but only for 90 days; sorry, correction, they only work if you keep taking boosters.

To be fair, this is exactly how science advances, conjecture by conjecture, hypothesis by hypothesis, every ‘truth’ 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 peer-reviewed paper on it, that makes it indisputable. Until it is disputed.

It’s our bad luck that these papers become the science that dictates the policy.

To prove what a jackass academia is, in 2017-18 three academicians—Peter Boghossian, James A Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose—conducted an experiment in publishing that came to be known as the Grievance Studies Affair. They set about creating bogus studies with erudite-sounding names, to prove how easy it was to get fake papers published in weighty academic journals once they had been peer-reviewed.

If a paper was rejected, they refined it and re-submitted 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 & Culture.

They 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 Hitler’s Mein Kampf rewritten in feminist language. Some of the papers were applauded, and one of them won special recognition from the journal that published it.

In May 2017, the peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences gratefully accepted their paper titled The conceptual penis as a social construct, which argued that penises are not ‘male’ and should be analysed as social constructs instead.

Eventually, the hoax was revealed. There was some criticism, some praise.

We, humans, are a gullible lot, and we tend to believe words we can’t 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 square. 

For example, political correctness requires that all papers be presented within a rights-based framework and be gender-sensitive. 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 woman’s perspective was missing.

How should you react to ‘scientific information’ and studies? Leslie McClure, chair of epidemiology and biostatistics at Drexel University in Philadelphia, has suggestions.
Check how many people were studied. If the study population is small, in three digits, the results might not be generalisable.

Don’t confuse correlation with causation. Just because people who ate fatty foods also died of heart attacks doesn’t prove that fats cause heart disease.

Ask when the study was published and by whom; perhaps it is outdated. Check the political affiliations of the publisher and the authors.

Most of all, don’t believe whatever is presented as science, even if it might be true. Listen, evaluate, ask questions and come to your own calm conclusions.

Here, 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 cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper