Pseudoscience and post truth. Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com

• What is science?
• In the marketing/advertising/public relations biz we know very well how science can be manipulated and packaged to forward one-sided arguments.
• Market research, for instance, falls under the definition of science.
• Scientists, as you might have noticed, are human.
• They have egos, political biases, fears, phobias, childhood traumas, deadlines, unpaid bills, mortgages and families to feed.
• They are prone to grandstanding, backstabbing and corner-cutting, just like anybody else.
• “In academia, politics is so vicious because the stakes are too low”, goes the running phrase.
• It is always healthy to ask a few hard questions when a market research report lands on your desk.
• What kind of methodology did they use?
• Was “the observer’s paradox” properly taken into account.*
• Did they just deploy a bunch of interns &/or contractors to shopping malls to ask questions to random passers-by and hastily jot down answers on clipboards?
• Were these interns &/or contractors properly babysat?
• Many a poll is conducted by hungover college students on their day off.
• How do we know that they followed protocol?
• Or was the poll conducted online?
• Was the sample a quality one, big enough and properly vetted?
• There’s ample evidence that metrics and analytics in the digital advertising space are plagued by fraud, what if the same is true in the case of polls and market research in general?
• Needless to say, opinion polls have not been particularly accurate as of late.
• Just two months ago, the UK Prime Minister Theresa May, hastily called an election.
• Her poll numbers were plenty favorable so she felt it was a good chance to reinforce her position in office and her grip on power.
• Now her party, the Tories, lost its majority in Parliament and she’s struggling to form a government.
• Mrs. May might be quite disgruntled with science these days, as she negotiates Brexit in a position of evident weakness and the sharks in her own party are plotting to kick her from Downing street.
• On the other hand, and on the other side of the pond, the POTUS nailed a great win by blatantly ignoring science.
• Let’s face it: pulling out of the Paris climate agreement was a masterful symbolic maneuver for our commander in chief.
• A beleaguered president scores big political points among his increasingly restless constituency just by dissing a grandstanding yet toothless non-binding treaty.
• A treaty with no enforcement power whatsoever.
• Wishful thinking.
• Who in their sane mind really believes that when push comes to shove China or any other country will really be willing to comply in detriment of their own short term national interests?
• The Paris accord is not worth the recycled paper it is printed on.
• It is just a laundry list of niceties and toothless propaganda.
• A roadmap at best.
• More of a naive letter to Santa if we look at it from a realpolitik POV.
• Mind you, I’m not saying we shouldn’t protect the planet.
• We need to take action, like, yesterday.
• Personally, I don’t even need science to remind me that we are recklessly defacing the earth.
• We’re leaving a ticking time bomb for future generations, literally.
• My very own five senses are more than enough to acknowledge at every step that we are surrounding ourselves in a gargantuan pile of trash, pollution and toxic fumes which will affect our near future in ways unimagined.
• I repeat, I don’t need a Nobel prize in meteorology to know that.
• To be continued next week.

*“The observer’s paradox” refers to a situation in which the phenomenon being observed is unwittingly influenced by the presence of the observer/investigator.