Are You Eating a Credit Card Every Week?
Channel: vlogbrothers
Date: 2022-06-17

No. But how we ended up here is very weird and I really wanted to talk about it. Here are the things that had to go wrong for this headline to spread across the internet:

1. An organization funded science because they wanted a talking point.
2. The organization amplified a misleading version of what the study found.
3. The authors of another paper were mislead, though it would have been easy not to be mislead because they're scientists.
4. Peer review did not catch the stat because it was a background stat, not part of the papers methods or results which peer review doesn't spend much (if any) time on.
5. News outlets did not investigate the source of the background stat and published it as if it were fact.
6. Humans with varying levels of reach and power online took mainstream headlines at face value and did not check before sharing. 

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