What is very alarming is these things quickly attract millions of viewers/listeners.
This celebrity advice does touch on serious issues, but they also illustrate how sloppy science, celebrity culture, and social media virality too often converge to generate market-driven fear-mongering and baseless health claims, rather than serious education. Scientific rigor sometimes gets lost along the way. These things in particular, have repeatedly come under fire for their pseudoscientific claims and products.
Scientific illiteracy has morphed into science denialism. Today, people simply declare their own truths. As a consequence, science is losing its platform as a source of truth. Meanwhile, a pervasive celebrity culture — in which celebrities are considered trusted “experts” solely because of their fame — has poisoned the idea of what constitutes expertise.
Recently I came across a movie actor advising his followers online on health issues which were complete nonsense. When I added this fact to the comment section of his video, several of his followers tried to silence me!
People think celebrities from other fields know better things about science than scientists! This makes things very complicated for us. “Celebrity science” is becoming more famous than 'genuine science' done by scientists.
Unfortunately, many celebrities have waded into debates within fields in which they have neither expertise nor training, perhaps unintentionally injecting doubt into scientific certainty and often even harming public health efforts.
Scientists are worried about the tremendous harm they can cause to the followers of these celebrities.
The anti-vaccine crowd frequently falls back on the claim by anti-vaxxer celebrities that vaccines cause autism, despite more than two dozen studies clearly showing that vaccination does not increase the incidence of autism.
Science is in big trouble because of these celebrities. Frustration is creeping among the scientific community at how science gets relayed to the public. They were distressed by the fact that so many laypeople hold on to completely unscientific ideas or have a crude view of how science works. They gripe that misinformed celebrities have an outsize influence over public perceptions about health and nutrition.
A scientific celebrity or celebrity scientist is a
scientist who has gained significant public attention, usually through the
media. There are scientist-celebrities too like Neil deGrasse Tyson ( Astrophysicist), Brian Cox( Physicist), Richard Dawkins( Biologist), Sean Carroll ( Theoretical physicist) and several others. These are very good science communicators too.
Why don't people listen to the celebrity scientists? Why do they listen to people who don't know anything about science?
Only they can tell why this aberration occurs in human behaviour with regard to celebrities and their science education.
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