Below is an excerpt from an audiobook.

If you’re not getting your research published regularly in journals – preferably ‘high-impact’ journals like Nature and Science – then you’re not going to get that professorial position at a redbrick university. This wouldn’t matter, so long as journals published every study that was submitted to them, regardless of whether or not they found whatever they were looking for. But, of course, they don’t. Science journals – not all science journals, but most, including most of the big names – publish results that are interesting and novel. That might not sound too terrible, but it means that a study which finds something interesting – ‘psychic powers are real’, for instance – is more likely to be published than a study which finds something more boring, like ‘we looked for evidence for psychic powers and didn’t find any’.

Chivers, Tom. Everything Is Predictable: How Bayes’ Remarkable Theorem Explains the World (pp. 91-92). (Function). Kindle Edition.

As an academic it is sad, though I often don’t trust what I read. Recently from personal experience I’m questioning how much protein we really need. I shifted my focus from protein to more a plant based diet. Cut back on beef and processed food. For myself, just myself my numbers in terms of blood sugar and cholesterol improved. When I was a kid it was eat your fruits and vegetables or at least or pressure to eat more veggies. Nowadays everywhere I go someone somewhere is selling protein and it’s like the cure all. Yet if everyone is so protein deficient now yet in the past when there weren’t all these protein supplements how did we even survive? OK, a little sarcastic and you get the point.

I’ve more than one friend mentioning issues with fruits and veggies today – yet they happily eat cake and ice cream and think nothing of it. Million thoughts there – though no reason to talk about the issues with cake and ice cream – not interesting. What goes viral as well just isn’t always the most helpful. Spreading fear around fruits and veggies… If anything aren’t processed foods in part made from fruits and vegetables? Are processed foods made from only the best no pesticide healthiest fruits and veggies on the planet or the cheapest? Not to mention the artificial ingredients…

Thus the additional point not only what gets published but also what goes viral we need to be careful of and take it with a grain of salt.