Science Friction

This is a serious effort to demonstrate how documentaries are often more about cherry-picking "facts" and distorting the words of qualified interviewees. Even shows on venerable platforms can be guilty of this. The truth is, all media is aimed at making money, but many are purveying a view of the world that is either unscientific, or obviously misleading.

You especially want your children to see and understand what is presented here.

A lot of people claim they are "doing their own research" and using low-quality documentaries to do so. Scientists and scholars have often tried to help out some films and TV shows, only to find that their facts have been cut and spliced to represent something else entirely.

This was an interesting look at how so many legitimate researchers have been misled and misrepresented, ultimately wasting their time trying to help set the record straight.

It's in many fields--archaeology to physics to biology--all of them.

People who think that documentaries are providing secrets that THEY don't want you to know should see what it is that, in fact, THEY don't want you to know. It's kind of enlightening.

We're way past the 3-channel days, and now have a selection of channels of various political angles--don't get me going on some of them!--and even some, say the History Channel, from which we'd expect something credible.

As Gershwin wrote in "Porgy and Bess," "It ain't necessarily so."

Idiocy sells. In my own case, when I was about 15, long, long ago, I read "Chariots of the Gods." I was excited, thought myself to be a step beyond those ignorant fools who haven't yet seen the light.

By the time I was 16, I laughed that it was adolescent nonsense.

These post-truth, post-reading days, we often see claims as aburd as those in that "book" and we look to confirm or deny them. So we can turn to various cable channels to confirm or deny. Unfortunately, they're not very accurate or reliable.

I like those who represented truth in the film, some of whom, Jamie Ian Swiss and Michael Shermer, I've met and spoken with. But there are many others, scientists, lecturers, scholars, who had written something or lectured on it. When the material went to some of those media, their words were pathietically misrepresented.

That's the whole theme of the film. It's well done, reasonably entertaining, not pedantic.

It's a film that I purchased and show to some "true believers," especially those who refer to some of those cable channels as credible information sources.,

My profound hope is that some of the channels are better at screening what they show. I may, if they do so, watch them. Until then, I recommend Science Friction.