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Make dinosaurs weirder
(mander.xyz)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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There's a website (can't be bothered to google it right now), where they reconstruct modern-day animals from their bones as if they were dinosaurs. It's ridiculous.
That's why I think that most of paleontology is just speculative nonsense. You get these nice pictures of dinosaurs in their natural habitat, then you read the paper and it turns out, all they have of that dinosaur is an imprint of half a knuckle bone.
Astronomy is similar. You get pretty images of exoplanets with clouds, continents and oceans, and then you read the paper and all they had was periodic flickering of a star when the planet orbits in between the star and us.
At that rate, they could just also invent a space faring dinosaur civilization from the same fragments of information and it would be just as grounded in reality.
I don't think you can prove that people can't do something well, by doing it yourself poorly.
"Look how humorously badly I keep missing the target! See? Sharpshooters could never hit something like this at this distance!"
Roughly 30% of published, peer-reviewed scientific studies are estimated to be not reproducible. Because nobody takes peer reviews seriously and everyone is just rewarded for publishing, no matter how much of it is garbage.
Remember the "chocolate helps you lose weight" study that went through every stupid newspaper? It was obvious garbage, employing p-hacking, using a fake researcher's name, using a made-up university institute. And yet it went through peer review without issue, was published in a journal and was picked up by every newspaper under the sun.
Then the author stepped forward and said he only created this fake study to show how easy it is to publish a garbage paper. The thing he didn't expect was that nobody cared. Nobody printed anything about him retracting his own obviously fake study. No consequences at all were taken to his finding.
Because everyone is incentivized to publish every piece of toilet paper they can find, and nobody cares about the quality.