Is Science Even Scientific Anymore?

Science is a revered subject.

Of course it is; it provides studies and information about pretty much anything to the public, it dispenses cures for diseases and looks into any other new sicknesses, and it creates papers and diagrams for educational purposes.

Which is why, of course, humans have chosen to bastardize and drag the name of science through the mud.

It might not be so bad if the misinformation was unintentional. Some of the greatest philosophers and scientists in history have believed that the Earth was flat. Mistakes are made all the time, especially during something like science, which often involve careful research. So it would make sense that some scientists would get something wrong once in a while. Humans are subject to human error, after all.

Unfortunately, some people have chosen to lie intentionally. Which is probably why things like the flat earth and chemtrail theories all exist.

So why would people do this? Why would they slander the good name of science? What reason could they possibly have?

Money. It’s money. Always money.

Specific organizations known as “paper mills” now churn out false papers and studies in hopes of making money. According to Anna Abalkina, a social scientist at Free University of Berlin who studies paper mills, new scientists hoping to get some more credit and titles under their belt may pay up to thousands of dollars to be named as the author of one of these fake papers.

That paper itself might not be written by these paper mills, either. Aside from creating the papers themselves, paper mills might hire scientists to write manuscripts containing fake information for them.

All of this begs the following questions: How does change the ways we look at science? Who is science even for nowadays? And what did science mean before everything went to feces (the scientifically accurate term)?

Well, now it’s a lot harder to tell if a scientific study is real or not. After all, there are only a few universal truths in life: Death, taxes, and Morgan Freeman.

The only real way we can tell if things are real is if the website they originate on ends with “.org,” “.edu,” and “.gov”. Actually, the current President does think the climate crisis is a “hoax,” and some of the current employees of his administration leaked war plans on a Signal chat, so that last one might not be trustworthy anymore either.

So if sites that we used to trust may now be deceitful, then who even needs to use them in the first place?

Well, namely students. We need it for the most niche things: Geography assignments, studying for the upcoming biology test, or finding out how you can boost mutation chances in Wobbledogs (That last one might not be a universal experience, actually).

It’s not just teenagers writing research papers (in MLA format), either. Other researchers need to use studies to further their own findings all the time. They need to use examples to put in their own writing, and finding other papers is part of researchers doing research. If credible papers are hard to tell from false papers, how will anyone be able to do any research?

As I stated before, I think that science used to be, and still is, a topic that should be awed and prioritized. Without science, we can’t make any technological advancements, no new papers about flora and fauna, you get the idea.

Anyway, now that I’ve faked this news article, I think I can sell the author position to an aspiring journalist.