The term “filter bubble” is used for a situation in which someone receives only a stream of information that agrees with his beliefs. The term was originally used to describe computer algorithms that give you only a stream of stories, news items or posts that match your interests (such a flow of items also having a tendency to match your own beliefs about things). But the term “filter bubble” is also used in a wider sense, to mean any stream of information or opinion that was designed (by computers or humans) to conform to the beliefs and expectations of a particular type of person.
- The New York Times.
- Quanta Magazine
- Scientific American
- The web site of the journal Nature
- LiveScience
- The web site of the journal Science
- Nautilus Magazine
- BBC.com
- National Geographic
- Wikipedia.com
- No coverage of the paranormal, or only biased or untruthful coverage. Human experience with paranormal phenomena is extremely vast, consisting of a huge variety of anomalies experienced by a large fraction of the population. Such experiences include things like ESP experiences, apparition sightings, near-death experiences, precognitive dreams, visions of the terminally ill, anomalous experiences with mediums, and UFO sightings. Besides the vast amount of experiences that have occurred outside of laboratory settings, there is a gigantic amount of evidence for paranormal phenomena gathered under laboratory conditions, including abundant laboratory evidence for both ESP and unexplained physical disturbances and manifestations. But in the filter bubbles of the favorite web sites of scientists, there is virtually no reference to such important realities. If any reference is made, it is likely to be jaundiced or untruthful.
- Very little coverage or discussion of facts inconsistent with the beliefs favored by those inside the filter bubble. The person in the materialist filter bubble believes that the human mind is purely a product of the brain, or perhaps just an aspect of the brain. He also believes that the brain is a machine for storing and retrieving memories. There are many observational facts that conflict with such dogmas, typically facts that are not even contested. For example, there have been quite a few persons with normal, near-normal or above average intelligence despite having little functional brain tissue or only half a brain (discussed in this series of posts); synapses (claimed to be the storage sites of memory) are made up of proteins that have average lifetimes of only a few weeks; and autistic savants with brain damage can show memory recall abilities far beyond that of a normal person. But within the filter bubbles of the favorite web sites of scientists, you will get very little or no discussion of these and very many other facts that conflict with the claims of materialist orthodoxy. A similar situation might have occurred in the 1970's if a pro-Nixon newspaper were to have only a few lines in its paper (buried in the back pages) referring to the Watergate affair.
- Uncritical regurgitation of extremely dubious experimental results or theoretical speculations. Besides a replication crisis in modern science, there is a vast problem of hype, triumphalist overconfidence and exaggeration, in which extremely dubious speculations, flimsy explanations or weak experimental results are constantly being trumpeted as momentous science breakthroughs or "facts." In the favorite web sites of scientists, such dubious results and weak intellectual products are typically reported without criticism, and often hyped even further, often in a way that seems designed to bolster prevailing dogmas and prejudices. The result is typically a kind of "pom-pom journalism" in which pushover fanboys tend to fall for authority pronouncements and professorial party lines "hook, line and sinker."
- A story on the BBC Science Focus site had this utterly bogus Fake News headline: "We finally know how life on Earth started, staggering new asteroid discovery suggests." The study discussed provided not the slightest warrant for such a claim, and none of the study's authors made such a claim. The study merely claimed to have found the tiniest trace amounts (roughly 1 part in a billion) of some chemicals used by living things, in a sample taken from an asteroid. As I discuss at length in my post here, the claims made in the study are not reliable, because the amounts reported are such negligible trace amounts that we can have no confidence that the reported chemicals came from the asteroid, rather than from earthly contamination. The BBC article on this study has quite a few statements as bogus and untrue as the article's headline.
- About the same time there was an equally bogus headline on BBC Science Focus, a headline of "Alien life on Mars: Ancient beach discovery may offer clearest proof yet." No evidence of life on Mars has been discovered. No one has found the building components of life on Mars (protein molecules), nor has anyone ever found on Mars the building components of the building components of life (amino acids).
- A laughable BBC article attempting to persuade us that Charles Darwin was some brilliant origin-of-life theorist. Entitled "Darwin's hunch about early life was probably right," the piece is laughable partially because Darwin's published works contain no deep thoughts about the origin of life. The only thing Darwin wrote having any relevance to the origin of life was a mere sentence he wrote in some letter on February 1, 1871. All he said was this: "But if (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity &c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter will be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed." Far from being a great insight, we now know that functional protein molecules require hundreds of well-arranged parts that have to be as carefully arranged as the letters in a useful instruction paragraph, making their accidental origin unthinkable, and also that life requires hundreds of different types of protein molecules, making the origin of life exponentially more difficult than what is described in Darwin's sentence (and by exponentially more difficult I mean like 10 to the hundredth power more difficult).
- In 2018 the BBC reported on a science experiment by using the false headline “'Memory transplant' achieved in snails.” But you need not think very hard to realize that there's something very fishy about such a story. How could someone possibly get decent evidence about a memory in a snail? The study was an example of junk neuroscience. Judging from the paper, the effect described involved a way-too-small study group size of only 7 snails (the number listed on lines 571 -572 of the paper). There is no mention of trying the test more than once on such snails. Such a result is completely unimpressive, and could easily have been achieved by pure chance, without any real “memory transfer” going on. Whether the snail does or does not withdraw into its shell is like a coin flip. It could easily be that by pure chance you might see some number of “into the shell withdrawals” that you interpret as “memory transfer.”
- A BBC "Science Focus" story gave us this very false "almost finished" narrative about research into the origin of life: "While we don’t know exactly how life began, we have a lot of clues. Let’s start with the easiest bits: what is life made of and where did those components come from? Living organisms contain thousands of chemicals: like proteins and nucleic acids that carry our genetic information. These chemicals are complex, but we now know that their constituent parts form quite readily." No, we do not have "a lot of clues" about life's origin. The constituent parts of proteins (amino acids) do not "form quite readily," and the evidence the article cited for such an opinion (the Miller-Urey experiment) did nothing to show that such amino acids "form quite readily," because it was not a realistic simulation of the early Earth, as I discuss here.
A BBC article told us this utterly false claim about parallel universes: "Physics has found all sorts of reasons why they should exist.” This claim was Fake News, for reasons I discuss here. Physicists have not provided any actual justifications for believing in parallel universes.
An article at the BBC Science Focus sight tried to persuade us that "do it home" brain zapping device may be good for treating depression. The article referred us to a study run by people being paid by a corporation selling such a device. We were incorrectly told that this was like a double-blind study: "It was a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomised study – something close to a gold standard in research." The study was not actually a double-blind study, because when the device is producing real brain stimulation, you can tell it is running. So the people getting the real brain stimulation would have been more likely to have reported improvement (due to a placebo effect) than people using "sham" devices that did not provide brain stimulation. A double-blind study is like a study in which people get a pill, and they have no way of knowing whether the pill is real medicine or merely a do-nothing placebo pill.
An article at the BBC Sky at Night magazine has the incorrect title "NASA’s new SPHEREx telescope set to reveal what happened just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang." The claim was total baloney. No telescope could ever do any such thing. According to what cosmologists tell us, the first 250,000 years of the universe's history, matter and energy were so densely packed that all light or energy signals from before that time must have been hopelessly scattered a billion trillion times, making it physically impossible to ever devise a telescope looking back to get signals from the universe's first 100,000 years. The BBC story was a bad example of a misleading news story. It began with this baloney claim: "NASA’s new SPHEREx space telescope will soon launch on its mission to answer some of humanity’s most fundamental questions around how life, and even the Universe itself, came to exist." That telescope won't do anything to tell us how life began or how the universe began.
A bbc.com story announced, “Researchers have released the most accurate map ever produced of the dark matter in our Universe.” But how can someone have a map of dark matter locations when dark matter has never been observed? All attempts thus far to make direct observations of dark matter have failed. Dark matter doesn't even have a place in the Standard Model of Physics, and no evidence for it has turned up at the Large Hadron Collider. The BBC claim was false. No real "map" had been produced.
A recent BBC news article had a bogus headline of "Fly brain breakthrough 'huge leap' to unlock human mind." Here is an excerpt from the story: "Now for the first time scientists researching the brain of a fly have identified the position, shape and connections of every single one of its 130,000 cells and 50 million connections. It's the most detailed analysis of the brain of an adult animal ever produced. One leading brain specialist independent of the new research described the breakthrough as a 'huge leap' in our understanding of our own brains. One of the research leaders said it would shed new light into 'the mechanism of thought'." The claim at the end of the quote is obviously very absurd. Fruit flies don't think. So there is no conceivable study of the brain of the fruit fly that could shed light on what allows humans to think.
The recent case of scientist Nikku Madhusudhan making groundless claims about detecting dimethyl sulfide at planet K2-18 b was a good litmus test of whether a science news source will fall "hook, line and sinker" for very untrustworthy scientist boasts. For reasons I give in my post here, the claims were groundless. There is zero robust evidence that such a gas was detected at planet K2-18 b, and zero evidence of any biomarkers at this planet. Most of the mainstream science news sources flunked the test, although we got some good science journalism at The Atlantic and Ars Technica, which presented reasons for being very skeptical about Madhusudhan's gloryhound boasts (I quote them in my post). The BBC flunked this litmus test very badly. One of its stories falsely claimed that dimethyl sulfide had been detected, at planet K2-18 b ignoring very many reasons for disbelieving Madhusudhan's boasts. The BBC article was entitled, "Scientists find 'strongest evidence yet' of life on distant planet." No such evidence had been found. On the day Madhusudhan's paper was published, I published a post saying that his claims were groundless, and that "nothing reliable has been done in this paper to show any likelihood of the existence of dimethyl sulfide on this planet K2-18 b," and that "nothing reliable has been done in this paper to show any likelihood of the existence of any biomarker on this planet K2-18 b." In the following days we had articles in mainstream publications quoting scientists saying they were very skeptical about Madhusudhan's paper, such as the Gizmodo.com article here and and the National Geographic article here.