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French scientist's photo of ‘distant star’ was chorizo
- EddieDante 4y agoI knew that star looked tasty for a reason.
- franciscop 4y agoCmon we've been joking with exactly this picture for years now on the internet. The other really popular joke one is the pancake that, specially in B&W, looks like a moon! https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/pancake-that-resembles-cratered-moon-2114949758 https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/pancake-that-resemb...
- croes 4y agoThese aren't the times for such jokes. Many people take this as proof of lying experts that ridicule the non experts. You can make these jokes in your peer group but outsiders of these group may feel degraded.
- timr 4y ago> These aren't the times for such jokes. Many people take this as proof of lying experts that ridicule the non experts. You can make these jokes in your peer group but outsiders of these group may feel degraded. On the contrary, I've spent the last 2 years watching "experts" in my own field make absolute fools of themselves, to the point where a number of formerly respected leaders in science and medicine have lost all credibility. The kind of "expert" that would mindlessly re-tweet an obvious picture of a salami as a scientific discovery is giving you prima facie evidence that you should have some level of doubt concerning their judgment. The general public needs to be more informed of the following two facts: * Appeals to authority, no matter how credentialed, are not arguments. Always start from the assumption that the "expert" is wrong until you can prove otherwise. If you aren't capable of evaluating the evidence for yourself, don't repeat it. * You don't know what you don't hear. Even if you have heard from a true "expert", the media will regularly distort or cherry-pick their sources to make whatever sensational claim that drives clicks. So-called "experts" are often pulled from a list of twitter users that are tweeting in support of a reporter's desired headline just prior to deadline, and all other experts' opinions are ignored. I'll add a bonus: * Celebrity is a hell of a drug. Even the most credible speaker faces an almost irresistible force to dress up factual claims with opinions. Particularly if they're personally scared / emotional, on one of those horrid cable news panels, or both. Bottom line: if you don't have training in a discipline, you aren't qualified to judge a claim within it. Treat the whole thing as no different than a television program about celebrity gossip, because that is what it is to you. Don't just blindly trust a quote or a talking head simply because some writer/producer at a news agency told you to trust them.
- croes 4y agoI don't believe you. And that's the bottom line. In the end you don't get a better informed and critical audience, you get people who don't believe you if you say 1+1 is 2. We live in times where people discuss if earth is flat and rules by lizard people fro the inside of the earth. If you always start from the assumption that the expert is wrong, you have no time to do anything because the world now has so much knowdledge you can't check it evrything fast enough. And some point you have to trust people and that some are experts.
- timr 4y ago> I don't believe you. I haven't asked you to "believe me". What you're saying is that you'd rather believe "experts" than not believe them. This is religion, not rationality. > you have no time to do anything because the world now has so much knowdledge you can't check it evrything fast enough. And some point you have to trust people and that some are experts. ...or you can choose to stay agnostic on most claims, and simply do your best to contributing to the noise of the world based on hearsay and your own uninformed opinions.
- croes 4y agoYou totally missed my point. Everything is believe. Everything you know came from your sensory input. Here's the big question. How do you know that the evidence your sensory apparatus reveals to you is correct? What I'm getting at is this. The only experience that is directly available to you is your sensory data. This sensory data is merely a stream of electrical impulses that stimulate your brain. In other words, all that you really know about the outside world is relayed to you through your electrical connections. That would mean that...you really don't know what the outside universe is really like at all for certain.
- snapcaster 4y agoStop clutching your pearls. Experts lying and ridiculing non-experts is massively widespread. We (tech community) do it all the time to VCs, investors, media, business teams, PMs, etc.
- COGlory 4y agoThis is especially the time for jokes. And the more anyone argues it isn't, the more it becomes so.
- franciscop 4y agoSorry but I don't recognize your authority to tell people when to tell jokes or not.
- yetihehe 4y agoOr that high res image of jupiter https://www.reddit.com/r/fakehistoryporn/comments/dn3wej/new_high_res_image_nasa_just_released_of_jupiter/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fakehistoryporn/comments/dn3wej/new...
- dylan604 4y ago"This asset has almost never been seen. Make the first move." Hmm, exactly this picture and the website's stats don't quite line up! ;P
- thfuran 4y agoI'm not sure exactly who "we" is, but I've spent more than a reasonable amount of time on the internet for years and don't recall having seen either picture.
- franciscop 4y agoI was on mobile forced to use Google Japan and in a rush so that was a similar-ish pic, the one I had actually seen before was this: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/pancake-moon--78039006027433850/ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/pancake-moon--7803900602743385... But either works, as long as it's a pancake that looks a bit like the moon.
- 1wd 4y agoAt least since the 2018 "Blood Moon" eclipse https://imgur.com/gallery/2tzJh9O https://imgur.com/gallery/2tzJh9O https://twitter.com/JanCastenmiller/status/1022949488602882049 https://twitter.com/JanCastenmiller/status/10229494886028820... https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jul/28/space-stations-dark-rituals-and-chorizo-how-social-media-saw-the-blood-moon https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jul/28/space-statio... https://tineye.com/search/d719f24d68e9175cab643a8997dd24e285e82b79?sort=crawl_date&order=asc&page=1 https://tineye.com/search/d719f24d68e9175cab643a8997dd24e285...
- bad416f1f5a2 4y ago> A photo tweeted by a famous French physicist supposedly of Proxima Centauri by the James Webb Space Telescope was actually a slice of chorizo. > … > Klein told French news outlet Le Point that his intention had been to educate people about fake news online While I respect the position that people should always check sources, “person famous in their field posts a lie about something well within their field, then tut tuts when people outside their field believe the expert” feels a bit too smug to me.
- curiousgal 4y agoHe is French after all. /s (I'm half-French).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- belval 4y agoI read your comment before seeing the picture so I somewhat agreed with you initially, but this is not even subtle, it's a good joke...
- dalbasal 4y agoIDK if it's that smug. It was just a prank/troll. Possibly, it got a bit more circulation than expected or was less obvious than expected. It feels kind of like a "ha! on your toes" style that translates poorly from personal into online media.
- sp332 4y agoAs a prank, it's fine. But they tried to make it a lesson about fake news, which is not very useful.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoI mean, it is a pretty good example of how fake news works. He said in the same thread it was fake. Tons of people retweeted the image without the greater context, and it still carried the authority of having been said by a renowned scientist.
- curiousgal 4y agolmao he even plagiarizes tweets? Oof
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Perceval 4y agoThis article presupposes that Proxima Centauri is not, in fact, made of chorizo. Whereas we have long known that the moon is made of cheese. I think Klein is floating a test balloon to gauge the public's willingness to consume the 'celestial charcuterie' theory of the heavens.
- eevilspock 4y agoA branch of that theory posits that black holes are higher dimensional beings that happen to like the taste of this universe. Also that entropy proves expiration dates are misleading; shelf life is not a cliff but a monotonically decreasing value.
- benj111 4y agoAlso that the universe is a U shaped cylinder. I believe string theory deals with what happens at either end
- jstanley 4y ago> This article presupposes that Proxima Centauri is not, in fact, made of chorizo. I don't think it does. It can both be true that Proxima Centauri is made of Chorizo and that the French Scientist tweeted a picture of some Chorizo that was not Proxima Centauri.
- ithkuil 4y agoAlso, it could be made of chorizo but not sliced and facing normal to our line if sight. And where does the light that shines on Proxima Chorisii come from?
- fallingfrog 4y agoMaster troll, I salute you. %)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dangerface 4y agoI worked with a guy that said the moon landing was fake. The only evidence he could provide was the number of images of space that claim to be real but end up being doctored or fake, every time I called him out on his bs I was wrong and the image was fake. Thanks Scientists!
- nsxwolf 4y agoIf it makes you feel any better, it's essentially impossible to convince a moon landing hoax believer they are wrong.
- Kon-Peki 4y agoI think you are right. There is no desire to learn the truth. Since the early 1950s NASA had completely public video feeds for just about everything they did. News organizations around the world had access to the feeds, as well as the freedom to send their own cameras and recording equipment. Newsrooms all over the world have footage in their archives of the same launches, from different angles. And their own copies of NASA footage too. How do you fake all that? If I remember correctly, during the Mercury program one of the splashdowns was so off the mark that it took the Navy a few hours to recover the capsule. The major US news orgs didn't want to deal with it so they broadcast old footage of an on-target recovery but got caught because other orgs showed the real thing.
- CoastalCoder 4y agoTBH, I think extreme skeptics (e.g., flat-earthers) play a useful role in public discourse. They effectively shine a light on the limits of each person's ability to justify their beliefs, vs. what beliefs are generally accepted just because nobody challenges them. I've seen a similar effect in several Christian communities in the U.S. If a Christian is mostly surrounded by other Christians, it's easy to accept lots of beliefs because they're not challenged. But if they end up in an environment where people challenge those beliefs, or if there's a lot at stake for holding wrong beliefs, they tend to scrutinize their beliefs much more carefully. I think, overall, they benefit from pruning down their beliefs to a smaller set of better-justified ones. So to the extent that flat-earthers help others think more critically, I'm glad they're part of public discourse.
- anonymousiam 4y agoIt's amazing how little coverage this story gets, and no coverage at all from mainstream media. They don't seem to cover any story that would bring their credibility into question. https://metro.co.uk/2022/08/05/french-physicist-forced-to-apologise-for-chorizo-space-photo-17128489/ https://metro.co.uk/2022/08/05/french-physicist-forced-to-ap... Even the headline of the article I linked above is misleading: "Scientist tried to pass off piece of chorizo as a distant star" -- Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to Earth besides the sun. So yeah, it's a "distant star", but it's also the closest one to us outside of our solar system.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jnovek 4y agoI’m pretty sure Vice is the mainstream media. It’s worth billions of dollars, smaller but comparable to CNN.
- ceejayoz 4y ago> It's amazing how little coverage this story gets, and no coverage at all from mainstream media. I'd like to see less "someone did/said something goofy on Twitter" in mainstream media, not more. This "story" warrants maybe a Reddit or Fark link, not breaking news from CNN.
- poulpy123 4y agoWhy would twitter joke be massively covered ?
- draw_down 4y ago
- amelius 4y agoTikTok level humor now entering HN.
- fsloth 4y agoI see this as pretty high brow academic trolling in vein of the Sokal hoax [0] - but I suppose it's a sign of the times the "publication" is a single tweet. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
- tgv 4y agoSokal was really of another order.
- hombre_fatal 4y agoIt’s only a troll if you tricked people. How many of the 12000 tweet likes were people liking the joke vs people legit confused? The article quotes two of them.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoJust so long as it's not a sped up video of him dancing while gesturing at smug text overlays.
- wiz21c 4y agoAlthough Klein definitely is a scientist, it's not exactly your random scientist. He's got strong credentials. He's got also a huge talent for explaining some links between physics and philosophy. If you happen to understand french, make sure you watch some of his videos.
- everyone 4y agoVice has a GDPR cookies implementation that's on the lower end of what I've seen to date. Defo in breach of the rules.
- tboyd47 4y agoThey think we're total idiots.
- hombre_fatal 4y agoThis isn't even a story of fake news or how the masses are idiots since the tweet took off because people thought it was funny (just read the comments).
- balentio 4y agoIn an age of disinformation, I think we likely need a lot less confusion--not people trying to provoke more of it.
- roywiggins 4y agoJourney to the Meat Planet with Carl Sagan: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP7K9SycELA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP7K9SycELA Truly a wonder of nature.
- tpoacher 4y agoThere are many jokes that experts made thinking they should be "obvious" but subsequently entered canon knowledge in their fields. "Cello scrotum" comes to mind.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ejb999 4y ago"trust the science"
- bendbro 4y agoYawn. Please redirect this to r/all
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ubermonkey 4y agoThe thing is: the photo is OBVIOUSLY a slice of sausage. I don't understand how anyone could be taken in at all.
- Forge36 4y agoI can see both. It was weird going in already knowing it was fake and thinking "that looks like a star". I can see how someone with less exposure to both could be confused.
- twhb 4y agoAfter thinking about this for a minute, I think the point wasn’t that people shouldn’t have fallen for this in particular, but to give everything a tint of uncertainty. It’s a pretty clear cut example of “no matter how believable it was, it can still be not even a little bit true”. In many contexts I’d call that a rather unproductive observation, but in the context of fake news, we have many people perceiving different realities built on a whole network of strong beliefs about what exists and what happened. Uncertainty about everything is probably actually exactly what’s needed to break free of a grip like that.
- ianai 4y agoi.e. "the internet is full of lies" But that doesn't mean sources of truth do not exist. Sources of truth do exist, though, what is read online should be carefully considered. I mean, isn't that kind of the thinking around telling people to not clicking links in emails, text messages and generally stopping to ask whether a piece of information seems too outlandish to be true or too shocking? So yeah it's definitely felt like the internet is full of people who aren't "mature enough" to invest so heavily into the internet of late.
- fsckboy 4y agoFrench scientist tweets an accurate, true-color image for the first time after a long history of tweeting false-color images, and people are upset?
- genmon 4y agoSerious q for any astrophysicists here: could the JWST resolve any surface features of Proxima Centauri? (In infrared of course.) Would be mind-blowing to see if so.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- angry_octet 4y agoNo, it's far too small. We'd have to send dozens of JWSTs far out of the solar system in order to build a large enough baseline to resolve details.
- imakeinternet 4y agoThis is by far the best bit of journalism I've seen from Vice in a while.
- daveslash 4y ago"Those are Balls...." ~ Barry Zuckerkorn
- edmcnulty101 4y ago10 billion dollars and we can't tell if it's a star or...chorizo.
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoI think he fucked up and does not have the courage to say so. He is hiding behind all these explanations instead of saying "when writing the tweet I found it funny. It is not and I am sorry". This is what a real scientist would say.
- euroderf 4y agoIf he did not allow the joke to spin out for more than (say) 24 hours, and if he doesn't make a habit out of this stuff, then I'd cut him slack and say: Well done! A good joke can go very far in 24 hours, esp'ly if not marked with the disclaimer "April 1". But then again, if he had made a fake timestamp in the corner with "April 1" then nobody would be complaining.