[arjie]

People have loved this kind of content-slop for a while now. It’s a genre of entertainment writing that has replaced celebrity gossip but is no more meaningful. I suspect it’s because there are demographics where the word ‘study’ or ‘paper’ has some cachet.

It’s true that think-tanks and advocacy groups have used the fact that a certain style of writing signals legitimacy for their own ends for quite some time now. Perhaps the realization here should be that Marlboro-paid scientists also did so and that these kinds of science cuckoo articles are common even in science.