[nkoren]

Yeah, sadly, I think it's worth having "ulterior motives" on the list.

One of the first time I got interested in reading medical studies was when I saw a bunch of headlines announcing that a randomized controlled trial had proved that echinacea was ineffective for treating respiratory problems. This surprised me, because I'd always been a dogmatic drinker of echinacea tea whenever I had a cold, and had thought that it helped. But then again, I come from a culture of damn dirty hippies, so I was open to being wrong about it. Rather than rely on the headlines, I decided to dig up the study itself.

Here's what the study actually found: that rubbing an echinacea-infused ointment on your wrists has no effect on respiratory health.

Er... yeah, no shit, Sherlock. Literally nobody uses echinacea that way. You've just falsified a total straw-man of a hypothesis, and based on the number of headlines generated off the back of this, I think it's reasonable to presume there was some kind of funded apparatus for disseminating that bogus result.

Ever since then, I've learned not to trust the headlines when it comes to trials, reserving judgment until I've looked at the methodology. When I do, a lot come up short.

[kridsdale1]

I’ve gotten in the habit of sending study pdf files to Claude, having it write its own Abstract and headline from the rest of the content, then comparing those to the “organic” Abstract and headline.