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How Journalists Distort Science with Balance
The scientist's job is to discover truth about the natural world, and the journalist's is to report the world's events accurately. Why are these two professions so often at odds? Chris Mooney discusses how journalism fails science in this month's Columbia Journalism Review. If you applauded Jon Stewart's plea to "stop hurting America," Mooney's analysis will strike a chord; the he-said-she-said approach to truth fails in all kinds of venues. (via: WorldChanging)
This reminds me of This American Life episode 265, from May of this year, entitled Fake Science, which includes, in Act Four, "Fake science can be fun. Fake science can make people happy," which I think would make an excellent t-shirt iron-on. In Act One of the show, a reporter gets into a delightfully heated exchange with a Bush Administration wonk who defends the appointment of a highly dubious lead industry shill to a prominent position on a federal commission on lead safety, while genuine experts get passed over. You can almost hear the vein throbbing on the guy's forehead when the reporter catches him a flagrant lie about the appointee's ties to the lead industry. Have a listen... it's free.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
The more you realize journalists are wrong. It doesn't matter what the subject is, the vast majority of journalists have no clue what they're talking about. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are few and far between. Once you realize they're wrong about things you know, it leaves everything else they say about subjects you're less familiar with in doubt.
It's a pity most people still consider Fox25 the "most reliable news source". And maybe it is too...as long as you're mostly concerned with the social lives of celebrities and your neighborhood pet accidents.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Back in the 60's, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said of segregation, "The biggest enemy we have today in America is the public secular news media." They would report the two sides for or against segregation, which was really an argument for the status quo.
In reality its the rise of the stupid contrarian, the individual who is unwilling to accept the obvious but instead clings to the often illogical notion that there is always a deeper answer that only they see, which will eventually lead to acceptance of they themselves as visionaries. Blogs in particular have made life very easy for the Stupid Contrarian, as well as popular media like CSI. Scott Peterson in particular will walk free because jurors are convinced now by popular media that not only is there always DNA evidence for a crime, it is now a necessary precondition for guilt...because heck, they always find it in the last five minutes of CSI.
...is to get you to tune in at 11. You give them way too much credit. They stir the pot, scare the parents, overhype the cancer cure or weight loss drug, or show soldiers with puppy dogs as the need arises.
I beleive that it is against human nature for journalists to NOT put their own spin into a story. They may not even recognize the slant in their own writtings.
It's be a good change if executives at amjor media outlets recognized this and put in check/balances for articles rather than hiring a bunch of people who have the same belief structure.
"Fair and balanced" may have a real meaning. Perhaps public non-profit organizations such as NPR could gain back some of their legitimacy.
...yup...
Journalism is enertainment for profit and sciense is well, SCIENCE!
-- "Life's not fair, but the root password helps."
Balance doesn't mean that if one person speaks the truth for 10 minutes, you have to have another person to lie for 10 minutes.
Pish Posh! What's science ever done for me anyway? Like I have time for this, I need to get back to my web surfing and remember to take my antibiotics, as I'm recovering from surgery in my air conditioned home. Science is for geeks anyway.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Truth is often indeed subjective, but the mere existence of a differing opinion doesn't automatically make that opinion valuable or credible.
Why do you think he got fired from Time, and vowed never to do "fishwrap" journalism?
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
Lets also not forget that business often sponsors research that puts certain products in a good light. Journalists love printing that kinda stuff.
"Wine is good for you"
"Coffee is good for you"
etc...
It's all distorted science to keep share prices up.
Bill Maher once said: "Let us not become so tolerant that we tolerate intolerance" (not sure if the phrase is his own). I think it applies very well to this topic. However many journalists are still trying to remain true to a credo of balance, are now plagued with these episodes of hyperbolic need to represent both sides of the story. In essence, they become so balanced that they try and balance issues which are incomparably unbalanced in the first place.
Crossfire itself wasn't hurting America. The idea that all discussions must involve side A and side B and neither can agree is hurting America. Lack of common ground is hurting America.
Stewart's premise was that real debate isn't happening. One side yells at the other side. Whoever can delude the most people wins.
However, I don't think a fair, logical discussion of the issues would work (for long) on network television. People want to see the gladiators fight -- certainly not gentlemen.
FORTUNE FAVORS IRONY
The scientist's job is to discover truth about the natural world, and the journalist's is to report the world's events accurately.
Indiana Jones said it best:
The scientist's job is to discover *FACTS* about the natural world, not truth. There's a difference. Interpreting those facts may give you some insight into an underlying truth, but that requires a human insight, something beyond the application of the scientific method to an investigation.
In short, the way I see it there are six questions you can ask about stuff that happens: Who, what, where, when, how and why. The first five are the domain of science. The last is not, because it requires that there are alternative possibilities, and as we all know, nature doesn't cheat.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Truth is often indeed subjective, but the mere existence of a differing opinion doesn't automatically make that opinion valuable or credible.
Yes! Yes! Yes! I carouse about in orgiastic delight! You speak TRUTH, my brother, a truth that those who disdain intellectualism and science itself have used to their advantage for many years now! A balanced report on global warming is not presenting whether or not it is occuring, but the degree and rapidity of it. A balanced report on evolution is not between Richard Dawkins and Mullah James Dobson. It's between Dawkins and Gould.
Siddhartha Buddha, man, I think what you said should be emblazoned upon the forehead of every journalist on the planet.
And then we should have Rupert Murdoch drawn and quartered, set fire to the Fox News building, and then have a BBQ of Rush Limbaugh. But that's just me.
Then apply this same logic to those other articles that you don't know anything about - you can simply presume that somewhere out there somebody else is criticising that other article for exactly the same reasons.
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
It's very easy to dole out critique to journalists, a lot harder to actually be one. I write for a living, in a newspaper. My chosen field is IT and tech, and I feel like I have very good grip about the stuff. But I can't write an article like "Explorer sux0rs!, Firefox pwns j00", it has to ta in consideration every side of the subject. Not to mention that the MS lawyers would have a defamitation suit field day if I make the slightest mistake.
but consider the number of people that have walked off death row after it was found that the original "evidence" against them was bogus as proved by the new "evidence" (DNA).
Truth is a bitch. I have far less faith in science and scientists than I used to. In the late 70's academics were telling us we'd be out of fossil fuels in 10 years. And what about the continuing nonsense about what's okay and what's not okay to eat? Every damn thing causes cancer apparently.
I'm not ready to tune out the contrarians just yet.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
"...the stupid contrarian, the individual who is unwilling to accept the obvious but instead clings to the often illogical notion that there is always a deeper answer..."
That sounds to me like the hallmark of 'GroupThink', which is not a good thing. I am willing to tolerate contrarian, even "stupid contrarian" thinking, because quite often the contrarians do indeed wind up being the "visionaries" you so derride. No one says you have to belive them. Why advocate their suppression?
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
I generally agree with the article, but just to be the trouble-maker - what exactly are Mr. Chris Mooney's credentials for critiquing reporting on science? According to his bio (http://www.chriscmooney.com/about.asp) he studied English and his only background is in Journalism. There's no indication he has ever studied science except as a journalist and layman, there is no indication he's made any formal or credible study of the history or philosophy of science. There's every indication that he would happily rip someone for citing, in the context of a scientific dispute, the opinion of an individual of his own credentials. I don't see that this article really lives up to the very standard of evidence it purports to advocate. It isn't enough to simply say "all the REAL scientists know this is the way it is." If there is to be a higher order of accuracy in scientific reporting it is going to take more than this guy is dishing up to sell it to the overwhelmingly scientifically illterate general populace.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
...the journalist's is to report the world's events accurately.
The journalist's job is draw more eyes to the paper/tv station that they work for. Why do you think that USA Today has been so successful?...it's because of all the pretty colors & graphics, not because of the content or accuracy. If the statement above were true, than we'd be seeing the corrections on the front page.
Just another day in Paradise
And only I know why.
The Right is fond of saying that the media has a liberal bias, and they are right to a small extent. The media and the entertainment industry (funny how similar those two can be) is slightly left of center on certain social issues. Can you imagine an episode of Friends or Boston Public or 60 minutes concluding that abortion is wrong, or that environmental regulations are too strict?
But the conservative Right is more wrong than right. Media is driven by profit first and foremost, not by some "liberal bias". Gilette and Time Warner and Vivendi would rather see their stock go up than seriously investigate the truth. The truth doesn't necessarily translate into profit, especially when it challenges the status quo.
Mooney's article is dead on. In order to appear balanced--that is, in order to keep viewers/readers/listeners happy--that is, in order to make a profit, the news media cannot come down on one side or the other, when the truth is to the side (and not in the middle).
This is why I actually enjoy getting my news from places like Mother Jones (left) and the National Review (right). Media sources that are ideologically oriented, rather than "balanced", are often able to report arguments or issues that the mainstream media would avoid.
If sources are all that are presented without analysis, set up in a fight of loudness, we literally have teams to root for and no concept of the possible lies and inconsistent fantasies one may have and the other may not.
"Reality TV News". Incredibly cheap. Easy to commentate. Easy to "not get into trouble" but at its core it caustic: opinions and fantasies are given equal time with facts and failures, hoping they will "sort themselves out".
Some exists in the Other Party, but big examples are obvious. A commentator said that Bush and others now have just left one word off the PR concept of "Plausible Deniability". It doesn't need to be Plausible anymore. Iraq. Budget concerns. Health costs. Going to Mars without any money. Ignoring Korea and claiming "action."
Of course, most of all, Science is treated as a "opinion field" instead of a factual discipline of proof-required self-censoring societies.
Nietzsche is dead - God
I think the article is absolutely right... but I would put it this way: if 99% of the scientific community accept a theory and 1% does not, then I wouldn't agree that an article that gives both sides equal footing is balanced at all.
The root of the problem is when large and powerful organizations with political interests set themselves up and declare that they are a valid part of the scientific community when they're not. And here, there's no fault with the journalists, who don't have the background to separate legitimate scientific organizations from pseudo-scientific ones.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
you can find some folks with very outlandish views who have been proven wrong, but the views they have often seem to appeal to those with certain agendas (like journalists).
Whoa, wait a minute. I hope there aren't very many journalists with agendas, 'cuz that would make them activists, not journalists.
But I guess that just depends on how cynical you are...
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
I'm a scientist, and there is constant pressure to boil everything down into an "elevator message", the sort of one-sentence thing you tell someone on an elevator when asked what you do or what you're advocating (e.g. "Cigarettes cause cancer."). The problem with this is that real science worth doing can rarely be summarized this way without losing important details!
Unfortunately, the media doesn't want to hear things like "Global climate is very complex, and the impact of industry must be studied in detail because we don't really understand how sensitive a complex system is to big changes in certain parameters." That's boring . What they want to hear is "Global warming is dooming humanity!" or "Global warming is nothing to worry about!". Both of those get more attention and sell more product. Presenting both of these points of view in the same article makes for an exciting "debate", creates controversy deliberately, and again makes everyone's advertisers happy.
The competitive pressure for the sound bite, the quick statement that gets your attention even if it's not remotely accurate or true, is killing real journalism, science, and generally most intelligent public discourse about complicated issues.
The biggest complaint I have is that journalists and science writers dumb down the details of a story. It's not clear whether they do it for editorial reasons (the reader would just be confused by numbers anyway) or because the writer doesn't understand, or is lazy.
There are a lot of people who have what I call a "Scientific American" level of understanding. We took physics in college, but we aren't working physicists, for example. We can understand most topics if put in context, but it's a little beyond us to fully understand an article in some specialized journal.
A second complaint is that writers tends to accept the assumptions that mosts scientists do. They don't challenge the framework, but simply accept the groupthink. If a contrarian scientist comes along, they may cover the story but it's usually followed by someone saying the guy is a wacko for challenging the crowd.
So call me contrarian if you want, but just give me the numbers. The opinion of the crowd wouldn't matter as much as it does if writers gave more of the details and let us draw our own conclusions.
sigs, as if you care.
Today, scientists can't say anything that appears to agree with the church, because they'll loose their funding, their credibility and possibly their lives.
Stop. Just stop. And learn something about how science really works before you start on the persecution complex, okay?
Scientists can say anything they bloody well want providing they have the evidence to support the statement. That's how science works. That most of science does not agree with the church is entirely because the church's claims are supported by little to no evidence. Even the most respected scientists in the world must support their claims with evidence. And even Steven Hawking can be wrong.
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
1. Many Americans avoid science like the plague and a newspaper with many science stories sells less than those with sports and entertainment. Additionally science literacy in the US is poor at best. That means that many reporters and editors don't understand what they are reporting and and as a result don't do the subject justice. They may even give junk science equal weight.
2. Some science topics are so politicized (such as abortion, stem cell research, global warming, evolution) that any reporting is criticized with giving one side more weight than the other no matter how careful the reporter is. That leads to editors avoiding in depth analysis of these subjects.
3. Many science topics require a lot of space for in depth analysis and newspapers would rather give space to articles on topics that sell better. Also, they will cut off a story to make space for some fluff story, thereby leaving out the most important parts. Science journalists need to write with these space constraints in mind; put the most salient points up front before readers and editors stop reading. This is unlike in scientific journals where the entire article must be read to understand the point being made.
This is the same reason that our adversarial legal system also falls flat. Having two skilled attorneys argue each side of a case just proves which is the better debater, not which is 'right' or 'true'.
Unfortunately, I can't think of any better system. Having someone in power decide (Judge, King, etc) is worse.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
As a "skeptic" I found both Jon's comments on Crossfire and this article to be enjoyable -- in the sense that here's someone saying what we've known to be true for years.
If any of you feel this way, you might enjoy some fine skeptical sites such as:
The James Randi Educational Foundation
http://www.randi.org/
Committe for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
http://www.csicop.org/
Bad Astronomy
http://www.badastronomy.com/
If you don't believe in DNA evidence, then you're a stupid contrarian.
You better be pretty damn sure that someone is guilty if you're going to execute them for a crime, and if valid and trustworthy DNA evidence to the contrary doesn't lead you to have a "reasonable doubt" then you are not a reasonable person.
Education is the silver bullet.
This happens over and over again. You hear it a lot on the news capsules they do on the radio (and a lot of people hear). Any group with who knows what agenda can issue a press release and the media just parrots it.
Another recent case is the report by The Lancet that US troops have killed 100,000 civilians. This number is being reported everywhere as a recorded facts, as if there's a book somewhere with every name dutifully recorded. The Antibushites use it as if it were an article of faith and an unimpeachable fact, despite that every other estimate made everywhere else is an order or two of magnitude lower.
If you download the actual report, however, you see it's just complete bullshit. It was a statistical analysis, extrapolated from 63 (yes, sixty three, and a biased sample of 63 at that) death certificates, and the 95% confidence interval, even with their data massaging, ranges from 8000 to 192,000.
From the report itself:
"We obtained January, 2003, population estimates for each of Iraq's 18 Governorates from the Ministry of Health. No attempt was made to adjust these numbers for recent displacement or immigration."
Translation: our data has no connection with reality at all! In engineering, we call that a "wild ass guess" or, at other times, a "proposal."
Here's further anaylsis: http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/002543.html
So, yeah, it sucks when journalists can't report real science well, but that's a much lesser problem than journalists reporting poor science poorly. I've seen various activists hold press conferences and spout all sorts of fantasy figures, and not a single reporter questions any of them. No one asks "how were these figures obtained". They just scribble it down and regurgitate it later.
This is just one of many reasons I hope for the ELE asteroid. Humanity's capacity for self delusion is depressing.
--- Ban humanity.
I think the main problem with Crossfire is the fact that they really don't debate. A debate is something where sides talk about an issue with facts to back up what they say. Crossfire is show with people trying to yell as much stuff as possible whether it is correct or not.
What really needs to happen is they need a debate with historical facts to back up what they say.
Example:
Take the issue of tax cuts for the wealthy vs tax increases.
One might say that tax cuts for the wealthy encourage people to start businesses. This would be because they will get more money back then if they didn't.
The other side might say the money should go to the middle class because the money is worth more to them and they also buy the products that drive the economy.
Now the key would be to find which really happens.
I think that would be a great debate show that would educate people rather then let people learn the slogans of each party.
The one thing about debate is it is not opinion based it is factual information that is presented to back one side of an arguement.
Larry Krauss addressed this eight years ago in an excellent editorial for the NYTimes entitled "In Defense of Nonsense," which I reproduce below:
-----
July 29, 1996
In Defense of Nonsense
By Lawrence Krauss
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Four months ago, when his Presidential campaign still seemed viable, Patrick Buchanan appeared on a national television program and argued in favor of creationism. This, by itself, is not so remarkable, given some of Mr. Buchanan's other views.
What seemed more significant, however, was that the same national media that questioned other Buchanan campaign planks like trade protectionism and limits on immigration did not produce a major article or editorial proclaiming the candidate's views on evolution to be simple nonsense.
Why is this the case? Could it be that the fallacies inherent in a strict creationist viewpoint are so self-evident that they were deemed not to deserve comment? I think not. Indeed, when a serious candidate for the highest office of the most powerful nation on earth holds such views you would think that this commentary would automatically become "newsworthy."
Rather, what seems to have taken hold is a growing hesitancy among both journalists and scholars to state openly that some viewpoints are not subject to debate: they are simply wrong. They might point out flaws, but journalists also feel great pressure to report on both sides of a "debate."
Part of the reason is that few journalists naturally feel comfortable enough on scientific matters to make pronouncements. But there is another good reason for such hesitancy. In a truly democratic society, one might argue, everything is open to debate.
Who has the authority to deem certain ideas incorrect or flawed? Indeed, appeal to authority is as much an anathema to scientists as it is to many on the academic left who worry about the authority of the "scientific establishment."
What is so wonderful about scientific truth, however, is that the authority which determines whether there can be debate or not does not reside in some fraternity of scientists; nor is it divine.
The authority rests with experiment.
It is perhaps the most immutable but most widely misunderstood property of modern science: a proposition can never be proved to be absolutely true. There can always be some experiment lurking around the corner to require alteration of any model of reality.
What is unequivocal, however, is falseness. A theory whose predictions fail the test of experiment is always wrong, period, end of story.
The earth isn't flat, because you can travel around it, period, end of story.
This misunderstanding is at the heart of much scholarly debate in recent months, including the amusing hoax that a New York University physicist, Alan Sokal, played at the expense of the editors of the journal Social Text. The postmodernist journal published a bogus article that Professor Sokal had written as a satire of some social science criticism of the nature of scientific knowledge.
It was aimed at those in the humanities who study the social context of science, but whom he argued could not discern empirically falsifiable models from meaningless nonsense.
The editors, on the other hand, argued that publication was based in part on their notion that the community of scholars depends on the goodwill of the participants -- namely they had assumed Professor Sokal had something to say.
They too have a point.
The great paranormal debunker and magician, the Amazing Randi, has shown time and again that earnest researchers can be duped by those who would have been willing to answer "yes" to the question "are you lying?" but who were never asked.
We must always be skeptical. Being skeptical, however does not get in the way of the search for objective truths.
It merely assists in the uncovering of falsehoods.
Another popular misunderstanding of the nature of truth and falsehood in modern scie
Slashdotters and others continue to believe there is/was no bias in the media against Bush. I had one guy actually argue with me that journalists are "more exposed to the facts" than the public and that's why they tried to help Kerry.
The media can't even get basic science right. So why do people trust them for political coverage? Reading Newsweek's inside scoop on the Kerry campaign, you learn about Kerry's damaging indecision and obsession with talking to advisors on his cell phone, and you learn that he didn't release his war diary because it reveals that he met with terrorists in Paris. Isn't it rather odd that all that didn't come out before the election? And yet the media tried it's hardest to even go so far as to forge documents to attack old National Guard Service. And yet people give CBSNews a pass to this day for it--if FoxNews had done that to Kerry, everyonen would be chewing their heads off.
News editors instructed their journalists to refer to the Swift Boat Vets as "unsubstantiated claims" and yet the Kerry campaign was forced to acknowledge that Kerry wasn't in Cambodia on Christmas and that he may have earned a Purple Heart due to self-inflicted wounds. And yet the mainstream media buried that story and continued to claim the Swift Boat Vets were "exaggerating."
Moral of the story--you can't trust the media for ANYTHING.
Was it Dilbert who asked, "When did ignorance become a point of view?"
Education is the silver bullet.
Let's see:
The scientists are in search of verifiable, scientific truth, which is contained in repeatable experimentation and proven theorems.
The media are in the business of reporting truth, in all its interpretations(including what may be truth for one person, but not for others)
Balanced journalism can report the opinions as truth(provided they properly qualify it, which they do inaccurately far too often, when they bother to at all)
If the media only reported scientific truth, they might as well just translate the original scientific paper into plain english(it's closer to technical writing, not reporting) since the original paper is a report... It reports what happened in the experiment, and the theory behind it, and what conclusions one can draw within the constraints of the margins of error.
There's not much room for scientific reporters anymore, simply because they become translators. And it's a very very unexciting aspect of science, once all the theories get proven(after all, most proven theories take decades to be disproved, the ones that do get disproved at all).
It could theoretically be exciting to report on the process of "proving" a theory, provided you jazzed it up, and that can lead to all sorts of adverse consequences for the truth that just got proven. After all, when you jazz up the consequences/corollary of a theorem that just got proven, you can change its "truth value" from true to false.
The garden variety journalists seem to have a very hard time with that concept, the fact that if a theorem is true, given an exacting set of conditions/details(which get erased by the process of transforming to english) it can become false if those conditions are relaxed(after all, it's scientific truth, how could it be false?). But science only works with "whole truths" and "detailed truths" and those don't always translate well into modern languages.
There was a dilbert in which Dilbert tells dogbert he's thinking of getting acupuncture. Dogbert says "the theory here is pooking yourself with needles make you feel better."
Dilbert "When you put it like that it sounds stupid"
Dogbert "sometimes sarcasm can make you think more clearly"
Its true of news too
It must be lonely being such a genius.
I am going to learn up hard about the problems that could bring.
According to a Nov. 2, 1994 Journal of the National Cancer Institute paper abstract:
For more references, see this biased geocities page.By omitting this important relationship, the Columbia editorial is itself biased.
I was going to say "liberal", but that's hardly an accurate word to use for such absurd elitism.
Last time I checked, 'liberal' would be inaccurate to describe elitism of any degree. You should invest in a dictionary that's not written by Ann Coulter.
now you'd like to do the thinking for other people, using the media as your proxy.
If you think that the scenario you outline is limited to liberals, you are seriously deluded. Everybody twists facts to support their positions. Everybody.
I'd rather have reporters than journalists myself.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Apparently, you're saying the media should only report one side of an argument.
Did you know there is plenty of evidence to show "global warming" is a cyclic event tied to the solar cycle? In fact, the ozone layer hole grew for 20 years, shrank for 20 years, and grew again. Correlating with the solar cycles.
Did you know there is plenty of evidence (or lack of) to show Scott Peterson, just MIGHT not have killed his wife and kid? Even I think he did it, but you can't rule anything out because then you'd be reaching a premature conclusion--THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE of the goals of science which are to not rule out anything and to examine all evidence to find a conclusion.
How can you be fair and objective if you don't report every side? I'm firmly convinced that liberals, for instance, don't like Fox News because they dare report conservative viewpoints without contempt and give them the same air time that liberal viewpoints get. Heaven forbid Ann Coulter get the same airtime George Soros gets on CNN! Liberals are used to CNN and the mainstream media where journalists label others as "conservative" but never use the word "liberal." I've never heard them say "liberal group MoveOn.org" but I've heard them say "conservative right-wing group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth." What's the difference?
The point of my post is to debunk the notion that there is always subjectivity and that the minority is always right. Some times facts simpy exist. It requires a certain degree of intelligence to accept facts and not attempt to out-think them. The Stupid Contrarian never will get to this point - you can raise the temperature 10 degrees in December and they will still claim no global warming exists. Why? Because secretly they hope someone smarter than them will prove this and they will be able to claim the genius status of being the first to recognize it. Or maybe they are just a**holes who will never give in due to their own politics or perspective.
A classic pattern of the stupid contrarian is that they confuse the theoretically possible with what reasonably can be expected. In the Scott Peterson case we see people seriously considering that a Satanic cult was behind the murders. It is possible isn't it? Sure, its also possible that Martians came down and committed the crime and then high-tailed it back home. It is theoretically possible. Since we cannot say Martians did not do it beyond a shadow of all theoretical possibility, we must acquit. Thus thinks the Stupid Contrarian.
I agree with the general thrust of TFA, but I think that it gives short shrift to one of the real difficulties: that of trying to explain frequently very complex theories to the non-specialist. I'm a professional scientist, and am frequently asked to talk to the public (typically intelligent but naive in the sense of 'uninformed'). I find preparing this kind of talk MUCH more difficult and time consuming than that required for presenting to my scientific peers. There is just a vast amount of assumed knowledge implicit in any professional talk. Little to none of that background is understood by the general population (journalists included). Try to explain genome research if your audience only has a basic knowledge of DNA, with no concept of introns, exons, splice variations, or regulatory elements. So I spend half my time just trying to get my audience up to speed. This is why I have nothing but repect for those few scientist who CAN do this well. You may not like his "billions and billions", but Carl Sagan could communicate his ideas on cosmology to a naive (but intelligent) audience.
Today, scientists can't say anything that appears to agree with the church, because they'll loose their funding, their credibility and possibly their lives.
Oh, please. That's positively delusional.
Give me one, JUST ONE, example of a scientist being killed for expressing an opinion that agrees with a church.
Just one. That's all I ask.
Does anyone really believe that in the long run Exxon/Mobil will be better off when the world wakes up to what they've been doing?
The point being that journalists should use some sort of rational criteria when determining which opinions to include on a given piece. For example, if I were doing a piece on the existence of extra-terrestrials, I would go out and do research on what opinions on the subject existed. Likely, I'd come up with a list that would include: "there are no aliens because God says so," "given probability and what we know of the universe, it is unlikely there are aliens," "given probability and what we know of the universe, it is likely there are aliens," "They could, I guess," and "aliens exist and abducted me last night."
In investigating each of these opinions, it would quickly come out that several of the opinions have little in the way of facts behind them. What evidence is there that aliens abducted some guy from Kansas? Does "because god says so" qualify as evidence for or against the existence of aliens? Further, and opinion like "they could exist, I guess" isn't really worth much, is it? What does that opinion add to the discussion?
Now that the opinions have been filtered a bit, we are left with those opinions which have some backing and credibility. There are still multiple sides to the argument, and there is still debate about facts, evidence and probabilities.
Think this is elitest? Fine. Let's add those filtered opinions back into our story. But do we give those opinions equal time? Do we spend as much time on "because God says" as we do on the guy who has poured years of research into a given subject as we do for the "they could, I guess" opinion? Why?
Others might say, "give the ideas a share of time based on popularity of the ideas." Ick! That seems a pretty lame set of criteria to me. That would mean that we'd probably give the "because God says" crowd more time than the "aliens abducted me!" crowd, even though neither group has any evidence backing them up.
What I'd ask of journalists is to give various ideas time based on the credibility of those ideas. This is obviously subjective and puts a big burden on journalists to do their research and use objective criteria for considering each idea. But then again, isn't that what most people EXPECT journalists to do? The sad fact, is that popularity seems to be the most common set of criteria for reporting on a subject. When has popularity EVER been an indicator of truth?
Given this, if I were doing a program on existence of aliens, I'd focus heavily on the scientific opinions using probability, astronomy, and physics, and make passing mention of the God and abduction ideas.
Taft
You're right on W.R.T. evolution, considering that both Dawkins and Gould (R.I.P.) are decades-long internationally recognized experts in their fields. I believe you didn't handle the "global warming" thing fully, since there are *credible* opposing views.
Where evolution has been successfully used (c.f. disease resistance and accumulation of mutations, etc.) and its predictions essentially validated, there isn't much question there. Those who "don't believe in evolution" simply have their heads in the sand. However, until the recent arctic report, the human contribution to possible climate change was still somewhat arguable, though evidence was mounting. (With the arrival of the arctic temperature change report, "global warming" is headed for similar levels of assurance...)
The bottom line really is that journalists have a responsibility to detect *and report* on the current consensus of recognized scientific authorities. When there is a disagreement from the "contrarians", those arguments may be brought forward, with the clear disclaimer that they are out of the mainstream of scientific consensus, and their credibility should be measured accordingly. There *are* occasions when the contrarians are right. (I refer the reader to the treatment of proponents of plate tectonics until their eventual validation. They were considered to be *total crackpots* for many years.)
Your last paragraph is over the top though I am sure it was meant mostly in jest. While I think Murdoch/Fox/Rush are doing *everybody* a disservice, and could even be contributing to genuine disaster with their blatant and public stupidity, your last paragraph probably pisses off many who need persuading about the value of (steadily improving) scientific consensus.
Isn't it odd how everyone else is an idiot while you're full of understanding about the world?
Isn't it interesting how all journalists are wrong and that anyone sitting behind a computer has more insight into what's right all the time?
Yes, journalists make mistakes. Probably not as often as you think. On the other hand, perhaps they make mistakes as often as programmers do. Journalists also have incredible restraints, such as time or column inch limitations in which to get the idea across. Yes, it's good to be skeptical and I've seen inaccurate portrayals of things I know about as well, but by and large the reportage of tech issues I've seen in the mainstream has been reasonably on target.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
It's amazing, sometimes, how often people will say that news reports do a very poor job of reporting on the things the speaker knows about--and then the speaker will go ahead and trust news reports on things the speaker doesn't know about.
In an "Evaluating Information" tutorial that I used to teach several years ago, I wrote in the manual:
===
Newspapers are one of the worst places to go for source information. Few newspapers research any more than their biggest features. The rest are reproduced nearly verbatim from press releases, press wires, and, believe it or not, e-mail chain letters.
Even those feature articles which are researched by reporters are tainted by the newspaper's need for controversy. The official policy will usually mention "balance", but the way balance works usually makes evaluation of the information difficult. "Balance" means finding the same number of experts in opposition as are in support.
For example, suppose a newspaper decides to do a feature article about standing beneath doors in earthquakes. There are about a thousand experts in the field of earthquake survival, suppose, and two of them oppose standing beneath doorways. In the name of balance, most newspaper articles will present an interview with no more than two supporting experts to 'balance' the only two opposing experts they could find.
Suppose, now, that no earthquake survival experts oppose standing in doorways. In the interests of balance, the newspaper reporter will find a non-expert and treat this person as an expert, in order to balance the report. They might, for example, choose a doctor at a hospital. This doctor will claim that everyone who has presented themselves at the hospital for standing in a doorway has been injured. You might think this sounds silly, but the next time you're reading a newspaper or watching a news show in which a doctor is being interviewed for something other than their specialty, look at it in this perspective. Is the doctor basically saying that everyone who comes to the emergency room has an emergency?
===
This is a long-standing problem. It's become quite a bit more obvious now that it is easier to hear from experts who complain about bias--but even that can become a russian doll-like nest of "balance" acts.
Jerry
When I say, "don't lose faith in science and scientists," there are a couple things working here. First, when I say science I'm talking about deliberate and informed application of the scientific method. When I say scientists, I mean the scientific community as a whole and over the long run.
I am not saying that someone should accept that the scientific community or any one scientist is always right. After all, that would run contrary to the basic tenets of science.
After reading the cover teaser "Was Darwin Wrong?", I was absolutely expecting articles of exactly the sort described in this story. One article by a scientist arguing the validity of evolution, and one by some guy apologetically describing creationism and other pseudoscience.
Instead, the article opens with a teaser page asking the same question. Following that is a page with a giant screaming "NO". I laughed my ass off. And nowhere to be found was the sad little counterpoint article -- the magazine actually had the guts to commit to a single point of view.
The best thing now will be reading the letters to the editor in 2 months. The fundamentalists will be calling for blood, and it'll be interesting to see how the editors respond.
A lot of people seem to be missing the real problem here. Let's say journalists only report one side - which would, of course, be the "right" side. Except...right according to whom? The journalist who is NOT trained in the field (or they'd be working in a lab, not a newsroom)? The large corporation whom the journalist works for? An opinion poll of some group? The say-so of a government agency (and isn't THAT a scary thought!)? Who?
/. isn't exactly mainstream, you know...)
When people complain about a journalist presenting two sides of a debate, what they want is for the journalist to pick just one side, AND for it to be the side they agree with. This just isn't always going to happen.
Having a journalist give equal weight to some fringe view is frustrating, but if it annoys you, just remember - it's pretty much a given that something you believe very strongly is a fringe view to someone. (Such as open source/free software, which outside of
Still not convinced? Okay, imagine that a journalist does an article on something you have no real clue about. Maybe something about the economy, or south american politics, or chinese military power, or whatever. Assume they report one view. Quick! Is that a mainstream view, or is the reporter feeding you some fringe view? How could you possibly know? If the reporter gives two opposing views, well, you still don't know which is "mainstream" (whatever the hell that means), but at least you know that debate exists, you can go look the details up, and then wonder why the reporter even included one of those views. It's not perfect, but it's better than getting a monoculture rammed down your throat.
Speaking of which - Fox tends to have a pretty poor reputation around here, at least partly because they don't bother with the "he said/she said" school as much as other broadcasters do. Instead, they present what they thing is "right". Which is fine - but...doesn't look so nifty when you don't agree with the reporters definition of "right", does it?
Wow. Just - wow.
I never really knew what lipstick on a pig looked like before.
The article explaining that dinosaur tracks are mostly in a straight line, so that means they were running away from the great flood was particularly delusional.
Oh, and this gem on the speed of light was just amazing.
Education is the silver bullet.
In fairness, this depends on what you mean by "the church". These days any reasonable church recognizes that it is their job to inspire, to seek justice and compassion, etc., not, for example, to attempt to determine the exact age of the earth by calculations from biblical family trees.
One of the sources of our current problem is that discussions of religion in the United States are so dominated by the fundamentalist fringe.
While not a Christian myself, I recognize that Christianity has a lot to value in it, and it distresses me to see kids being brought up to believe that the only way to stay true to their principles is to swallow this sort of pseudo-science.
--Bruce Fields
I have a Ph.D. in physics, but I don't consider myself to be a god-like, super-genius who knows all there is to know about everything. However, every time I meet someone for the first time and they discover what I do, the typical reaction is that I am all-knowing and all-seeing. They then proceed to ask me about anything and everything, from Steven Hawking's theories about time and whether or not cell phones cause cancer. Most of the things non-scientists ask me about are things that are so far outside my area of expertise that I know just as little as they do about the topic. People are in awe of scientists because they have terrible misconceptions about what kind of people choose careers in science and what scientists actually do at work all day. They also tend to think that we get paid way more than we do!
The awe that people have for scientists can lead journalists to consult scientists who know absolutely nothing about the topic of their story. Journalists are not immune to the "someone who has a Ph.D. in physics must know everything" syndrome. I remember seeing a story on TV when Cassini was launched in which the journalist consulted an "expert" on the issue of whether the radioactive material Cassini used as a power source posed a significant danger if something went wrong during the launch. The "expert" was a scientist, however he was a string theorist. If the journalist had even a little knowledge of the issues involved, they would have consulted an aeronautical engineer AND a nuclear physicist AND a medical doctor AND a meteorologist to help assess the risk. String theory has nothing to do with any of these things!
Everyone, even some scientists, tend to react emotionally when they hear certain words and phrases. Some examples: "radiation," "cancer", "anthrax," and "giant asteroid passing within 10,000 miles of Earth." Journalists and politicians know this well, and use it to their advantage every chance they can get. Unscrupulous scientists also know how people react to these things and do not feel guilty about using the public's fear and lack of understanding to promote themselves. The scientist I saw on TV for the Cassini story should have admitted to the journalist that he was not an expert on spacecraft design.
Until the public at large learns more about science and how to determine if someone is really an expert, politicians and journalists will always be able to manipulate science to their advantage. Scientists can help by trying to educate people, but they also have to be willing to admit when they don't know something.
It occurs to me as I start writing that even if you read this, I'm probably wasting effort. If your listening comprehension is so bad, why should I assume your reading comprehension is better?
Stewart's point, obviously lost on dumbasses everywhere, was that mainstream political reporting and commentary is doing all of us a grave disservice by not examining the truth behind partisan spin machines on both sides of an issue.
Right now even the "legitimate" press is mired in muck by partisan hackery that just serve to focus and amplify the often empty, dishonest arguments made by their respective "sides". These hacks are so plentiful that politicians can cherrypick interviews with sympathetic hosts and push their self-serving crap to a wide and sympathetic audience.
Nowhere in, "blue said, red said" pseudo-debate TV is there room for factual analysis. You couldn't hear it over smirks, the zingers, and the general din on those shows anyway.
Intellectually honest, well-defended arguments just don't make for good ratings, even on news networks. In the ratings game, flashy soundbites beat buttoned-up substance *every* *single* time.
And it does hurt us. It makes us dumber, as you exemplify, and it turns the "watchdog" press into the lapdog press.
Plainly, Stewart's point to the Crossfire gang was, "You're not helping, but you could and you should."
He's right, I'm right and you're a moron.
I remember reading this article a while ago.
....
A recent Cincinnati Enquirer headline read, "SMELL OF BAKED BREAD MAY BE HEALTH HAZARD." The article went on to describe the dangers of the smell of baking bread. The main danger, apparently, is that the organic components of this aroma may break down ozone (I'm not making this stuff up).
I was horrified. When are we going to do something about bread-induced global warming? Sure, we attack tobacco companies, but when is the government going to go after Big Bread?
Well, I've done a little research, and what I've discovered should make anyone think twice
1. More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread eaters.
2. Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.
3. In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever and influenza ravaged whole nations.
4. More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
5. Bread is made from a substance called "dough." It has been proven that as little as one pound of dough can be used to suffocate a mouse. The average American eats more bread than that in one month!
6. Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low occurrence of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and osteoporosis.
7. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat, actually begged for bread after only two days.
8. Bread is often a "gateway" food item, leading the user to harder items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter and even cold cuts.
9. Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey bread-pudding person.
10. Newborn babies can choke on bread.
11. Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 400 degrees Fahrenheit! That kind of heat can kill an adult in less than one minute.
12. Most American bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.
In light of these frightening statistics, we propose the following bread restrictions:
1. No sale of bread to minors.
2. No advertising of bread within 1000 feet of a school.
3. A 300 percent federal tax on all bread to pay for all the societal ills we might associate with bread.
4. No animal or human images, nor any primary colors (which may appeal to children) may be used to promote bread usage.
5. A $4.2 zillion fine on the three biggest bread manufacturers. Please send this e-mail on to everyone you know who cares about this crucial issue.
Remember: Think globally, act idiotically.
Journalism is enertainment for profit No, Journalism is used (and subverted) for entertainment and profit, particularly in the USA.
While I wouldn't disagree that scientists are people and have their own particular biases, and that the game of science is certainly politically (in the general sense) I have to call crap on a lot of this woefully biased rant.
You're basically saying scientists are a bunch of leftist commie pinko fags, or words to that effect, so they are not to be believed. Yeah, everyone should believed that biased statement. At least scientists support their ideas with experiment.
The parent post makes the claim, without direct experience or other support in evidence, that only scientists proposing to advance "popular" notions get funded. That's pure bunk.
First off, what is "popular" in science is often popular because of large amounts of evidence that it is right. Should we spend millions of dollars on a project to show that the Earth is actually flat despite the "popularity" of other ideas? No, of course not. That would be stupid, not political.
Do some scientists perhaps torpedo competing points of view on review panels? Yeah, but not as much as the parent post seems to think. And when it does happen, it's usually a personal issue and not a political one.
The thing about SCIENCE, as opposed to scientists, is that it is apolitical. It's self-correcting. Tobacco companies funded their own pocket scientists at ridiculous levels, and science still managed to conclude that smoking is bad for people. Science also managed to conclude that continental drift happens, even though the idea was very unpopular.
I get upset when non-scientists rant about science in an uninformed way. The linked article was really great, coming from a non-scientist who had done some research. The parent post says "I am an agnostic on the Global Warming question because I know that the science is so screwed up I can't believe ANY of it" -- how does this non-scientist poster "know" this? There has been lots of research, and the majority of scientists in the field are not agnostic about it; they chracterize their uncertainty, quantitatively when possible.
Scientists LOVE to fund "unpopular" ideas when the proposers provide some evidence that they might be right. Overturning popular ideas is how new knowledge is developed. We actually don't like to fund refinements to standard models ad infinitum.
Now going back to my NSF proposal due Monday, especially worrying about how to play up its innovative aspects, which is a large part of the grading criteria.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
"the discrepancy between the Lancet estimate and the aggregated press reports is not as large as it seems at first. The Lancet figure implies that 60,000 people have been killed by violence, including insurgents, while the aggregated press reports give a figure of 15,000, counting only civilians. Nonetheless, Dr Roberts points out that press reports are a "passive-surveillance system". Reporters do not actively go out to many random areas and see if anyone has been killed in a violent attack, but wait for reports to come in. And, Dr Roberts says, passive-surveillance systems tend to undercount mortality. For instance, when he was head of health policy for the International Rescue Committee in the Congo, in 2001, he found that only 7% of meningitis deaths in an outbreak were recorded by the IRC's passive system. The study is not perfect. But then it does not claim to be. The way forward is to duplicate the Lancet study independently, and at a larger scale."
"The centre of its estimated range of death tolls--the most probable number according to the data collected and the statistics used--is almost 100,000. And even though the limits of that range are very wide, from 8,000 to 194,000, the study concludes with 90% certainty that more than 40,000 Iraqis have died. This is an extraordinary claim, and so requires extraordinary evidence. Is the methodology used... sound enough for reliable conclusions to be drawn from it?"
"Dr Roberts used a technique called clustering, which has been employed extensively in other situations where census data are lacking, such as studying infectious disease in poor countries... They interviewed a total of 7,868 people in 988 households. But the relevant sample size for many purposes--for instance, measuring the uncertainty of the analysis--is 33, the number of clusters. "...the data from individuals within a given cluster are highly correlated. Statistically, 33 is a relatively small sample (though it is the best that could be obtained by a small number of investigators in a country at war). That is the reason for the large range around the central value of 98,000, and is one reason why that figure might be wrong. (Though if this is the case, the true value is as likely to be larger than 98,000 as it is to be smaller.) It does not, however, mean, as some commentators have argued in response to this study, that figures of 8,000 or 194,000 are as likely as one of 98,000. Quite the contrary. The farther one goes from 98,000, the less likely the figure is."
"The second reason the figure might be wrong is if there are mistakes in the analysis, and the whole exercise is thus unreliable. Nan Laird, a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health, who was not involved with the study, says that she believes both the analysis and the data-gathering techniques used by Dr Roberts to be sound. She points out the possibility of "recall bias"--people may have reported more deaths more recently because they did not recall earlier ones. However, because most people do not forget about the death of a family member, she thinks that this effect, if present, would be small. Arthur Dempster, also a professor of statistics at Harvard, though in a different department from Dr Laird, agrees that the methodology in both design and analysis is at the standard professional level. However, he raises the concern that because violence can be very localised, a sample of 33 clusters really might be too small to be representative."
"This concern is highlighted by the case of
This is a nasty, unsupported statement. Journalists are trained to assimilate information fast, and to write well and fast. They aren't trained to be experts on all subjects, and they suffer from a changing landscape in which they must be more generalists. How many newspapers have dedicated science reporters these days? Not many. And those that do tend to have a single science reporter, as opposed to a team of reporters with expertise in different areas of science.
Scientists, on the other hand, focus on their own subject. I would be shocked if any layperson could "learn up hard" about astronomy and catch me up on any serious errors in my understanding of much of the field (I freely admit up front I don't do hardcore magnetohydrodynamic simulations).
And actually, if so many scientists have so many ideas that "go against what is blindingly obvious" then why must someone even "learn up hard" to realize this?
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
I didn't say that scientists aren't frought with human frailties. I cleared stated they are, so why do you claim otherwise? Why lie about what I said just a few lines above?
I claimed that SCIENCE as an establishment is self-correcting and, in the long-term, unbiased. The media hyped up cold fusion, which is one of the things the linked article is all about, and the scientists themselves used a press conference to announce their results rather than a peer-reviewed journal. The vast majority of scientists didn't believe the claims and awaited experimental verification. That's how and why science works.
Over the long-haul, mountains of observational data will crush weak, but politically supported, scientific positions.
Are fradulent claims bad for science? Sure. Are they common? No way. Do they get smacked down when they can't be supported? Yes.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Exactly. And the bigger problem is science is highly politicized. So it would be great if journalists put some effort into debunking bad science, but then most journalists are just as biased and in the same way.
Oh, really? That would explained how the mainstream media has allowed the Bush administration, and campaign, to blithely lie about so many things. But don't take my word for it, take Dick Cheney's (corrected) word: http://www.factcheck.org/
Yeah, Kerry's campaign did it too (though not as much). But these are things the press in the U.S. are just not reporting, and it favors whoever's in office at the time, not "liberals" or "conservatives." Indeed, the way the press has almost coddled this administration speaks volumes against your point.
And no one has done more coddling than Fox News, who would like us to believe that they're just balancing out the rest of the press.
But it's just not true. A truly balanced would be scarcely useful, because all they could do is report what the two "sides" in a debate are saying, without being allowed to do their own searching for the truth, which would immediately be pounced upon by the side (or both of them!) who is found lacking.
The only time they present opposing views is to either ridicule them or create some sense of conflict to sex up their story. Neither scientists or journalists are very interested in searching for the Truth if it collides with their politics.
Don't you see some sort of irony in your words?
Mark this ladies and geeks, mark what I'm about to say because it's becoming obvious that it's going to become more and more relevant in the coming years:
The people who speak out about a bias in the media and sciences do so by reacting to the percieved bias, thus making themselves guilty of the thing they complain about, whether their compaints were valid or not.
Lets look at the Science game for a moment. Just who are those grant providers you speak of? Major universities and government agencies like the NSF, staffed with academics from the university world.
And, you know, big corporations that do a lot of funding and are increasingly using universities as a sort fo extended job training that doesn't actually promise a job at the end of it.
If you haven't figured out yet that universities are 0wn3d by the left/socialists/progressives/whatever they call themselves this week you probably are one of the ones who think the Red states are filled with idiots and want to leave for Canada.
Doesn't it seem at all strange that so many universities, places of Higher Freaking Learning, have so many people there who subscribe to a worldview opposed to your own? Doesn't this at least cause you to examine your own beliefs?
Part of the journey to getting a doctorate degree is to defend your beliefs, or your thesis anyway, against attack. I've done a hell of a lot of self-belief examining in my life, but I'm not at all sure I've done enough. I think every damn human who lives on this damn world needs to. My question to you is, do you?
As for the red states -- many of them are not *that* red, there were a lot of close calls across the country, and Bush won by only 3% of the vote, which means that if 1.5% had voted the other way, it would have been a popular tie. And you don't have to be an elite-Jewish-doctor-commie to think that this country is going to get a lot loonier during those additional 1,461 days.
So there are no 'respectable' scientists who hold opposing views on politicized scientific issues because by definition you can't BE a 'respectable' scientist since the people who decide who gets to be a scientist won't allow those with opposing views to stay in the club.
Are you arguing this because you've found actual bias, or are you arguing it because it has to be argued in order to preserve the moral superiority of your beliefs?
Kinda like why you don't find many pro life
Well, he is a man.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I tend to agree with "Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." There is a certain percentage of scientists who get locked-on certain ideas and never change them despite new evidence, and later generations don't have a problem. That would seem to set the long-term upper limit at something like 35 years, the typically length of a scientific career. Still, they tend to be brushed aside long before they die and provide some friction, rather than a wall, to advancement.
I'd still claim that science moves a lot faster than politics or philosophy, and certainly some fields of science move lightning fast.
In my specialty, astronomy, we're to a great extent technology limited. Every major new advance in detector or instrument technology can mean dramatic new results. For instance, in the last ten years we've learned of over a hundred extrasolar planets when before we knew of none. We also learned that the universal expansion is accelerating, most likely the result of "dark energy" which we didn't even know existed. We've learned not only how to detect black holes in other galaxies, we've been able to measure their masses. And there are lots of other things as well, perhaps not so important, but that could become important.
How exactly has our understaning of philosophy or politics advanced in the last ten years>
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Thank you for finally speaking the truth. People are so blind today. They get so snowed by all the big words and fancy college degrees that they don't take a step back to see what a bunch of crap science really is.
In addition to global warming, due to how screwed up science is, I also don't believe in microbes, magnetism, or the biggest communist conspiracy of them all: gravity.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Sure, you're right--science takes time. Self-correction in science takes time. But there are two things meant by self-correcting here. First, that fraud is uncovered. This occurs on the timescale of current research. Verification is fast, and attempts to build on another researcher's falsified work will (generally) quickly identify those falsehoods so that they can be excised from the accepted body of evidence describing a scientific problem. Of course, even here, fast is actually pretty slow to the public eye, which sees very little to none of the science behind some newspaper article giving a precis of it.
Second, self-correction also means changing the accepted interpretation of a scientific problem as new evidence comes to light. This, of course, takes time (c.f. flat earth-->round earth). Discoveries and new ideas take time to surface, but we're getting better at it, largely because science operates largely on a hypothesis-driven research model. Despite his appeal to our Horatio Alger self-made-man ideal in the US, the garage tinkerer who looks to just happen upon some interesting discovery is pretty ineffective.
Also, your comparison of the timescale of science's successes to the timescale of the betterment of the 'general human condition' was a joke, right? Look at the advancements in medicine, in materials science, in communication, in {insert damn-near any cool aspect of modern living here} and tell me that one again. 'Science' (as we're talking about it here) has been a dominant paridigm of discovery for, say, a few hundred years (of course somebody will argue with this, but I'll toss it out there anyway). In that time, look at what it has given us.
Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard, be evil.
The estimate a year ago was 15,000 dead Iraqis [may require registration]. At that time there were only 230 US soldiers dead as well, so assuming the Iraqi death toll paces the US death toll, that would imply around 75,000 Iraqis killed. That's not far off from the 100,000 estimate.
Global warming is mostly in dispute because it is (a) not an immediate consequence of Newtonian laws, the only stuff regarded as being completely true, and (b) politically highly inconvenient, as no-one likes this. The theory of global warming is one century old, it has been predicted, and it is measured. It's now one degree warmer than a century ago. It is merely highly inconvenient for current governments, hence lots of funding goes to efforts to disprove it, to no avail. The political bias in science you mention is not for global warming, it's against it. Lots of funding has gone to dispel the global warming hypothesis, all to no avail, the evidence is on the side of the global warming hypothesis.
Just to put it bluntly: if you see an avenue to divorce the measured global warming from the consequences of human action, I'm sure your current government will be eager to fund you. So on whose side is the political bias here?
And science/engineering related majors should be required to minor in sociology/psychology. Otherwise they are a social hazard. Yes, it's always the other professions that need regulating, isn't it?
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Lets look at the Science game for a moment. Just who are those grant providers you speak of? Major universities and government agencies like the NSF, staffed with academics from the university world. If you haven't figured out yet that universities are 0wn3d by the left/socialists/progressives/whatever they call themselves this week you probably are one of the ones who think the Red states are filled with idiots and want to leave for Canada.
This is kind of foolish. For the most part, the political views of scientists are not know even to the administrators of the university where they work. Most scientists publish scientific papers, not political tracts. I work in a scientific department, and I couldn't tell you where most of my immediate colleagues stand on the political spectrum. I would imagine that on average they are more liberal than the general population, but that's only playing the odds--highly educated people tend, statistically, to be more liberal than average.
Similarly, the granting agencies that fund my research are unlikely to have any idea of what my political views are. I've sat on NIH Study Sections, and I'm hard put just to read all of the grant proposals that I am responsible for--I certainly don't have time to research the politics of the applicants. I have never heard political issues raised in a Study Session discussion. Yes, there are fashions in science, and if you are trying to get support for a proposal that challenges the generally accepted view, you need more compelling evidence than if your work fits with the generally accepted view. But in most cases, that is appropriate--a particular view becomes accepted because there is strong evidence to support it.
In the case of global warming, there's no particular vested interest that wants global warming to be true. Global warming or not, climate modeling and weather prediction is important enough that it will attract research support regardless. On the other hand, there are powerful economic interests that will be hurt by the measures that would be required to control CO2
Most brand name scientists of teh past century were all too eager to sign onto socialist utopian and fascist schemes because they promised a world governed by reason and science, i.e. themselves.
Most scientists, today as in the past, are not interested in running things--if they were, they would have gone into politics or government rather than science. Most are pretty focused on their own research interests, and are primarily concerned with being able to continue their research.
The thing about SCIENCE, as opposed to scientists, is that it is apolitical. It's self-correcting.
True, of course, but this sorta misses the same point that so many of your critics are also missing: The original article wasn't about science at all; it was about the media's "balanced" misreporting of scientific news.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It's a funny old world.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
About 4 years ago CNN.com ran a story entitled "Cloned algae taking over coastline".
The story focused on a type of algae that had been asthetically enhanced through selective breeding and cloning for the aquarium trade, but that had gotten into the wild and done well in places in the mediteranian and now in southern california. At that time CNN had discussion forums and the usual erruption of pro and anti-GM/frankenstuff debate.
Now I personally have quite a bit of experience with cultivating both houseplants and aquatic plants, and in those fields the term 'clone' is simply used to refer to a plant grown from a cutting. Nothing sinister in that practice whatsoever unless you're up to putting granny's flowerbox to the torch. I pointed this out and lambasted the author of the article for ignorance and deceptive reporting. That pretty much killed the debate, at least regarding the algae, and CNN amazingly revised the article a few hours later and removed all mention of cloning.
Of course it's sad that this algae is damaging some marine environments, but the journalists excitement to jump aboard a hot-button issue like that got in the way of the truth in a big way. Especially since the problem is in California, where "Cloned plants" could get banned by the overactive legislature.
Here's a similar article that still exists: http://www.rense.com/general2/ag.htm if you type in "Cloned algae california" to google it's amazing how many misleading stories there are about it.
Having worked in the research branch of a Federal science installation, I would have to say that you have a point. When the global warming theory started becoming a big issue in the late 80s, there was an effort to make sure that it was documented that any new or current projects had something to do with it or the more general term "Global Change". Why? Funding. It helped open up different funding channels that otherwise weren't available. It didn't matter if the actual work really had anything directly to do with it or not. As long as the proposal made the case that your project would help advance research in that topic in some way, shape or form, the easier it was to get it approved. IMHO, it was still valid work that needed to be done, but it helped make the pols higher up in the food chain feel happy that they were doing something about the problem.
If you think about it, scientists that are using this avenue to get funding AREN'T going to say it's not a problem because if they do, their funding disappears.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
The biggest problem with science and journalism is the same problem scientists have with science. We mistake scientific theories for fact! Science is a process of examining a set of facts, presenting a THEORY, testing a THEORY and then revising a THEORY. The final step is to look where the THeory doesn't match the facts and start over.
Theories are nothing more than descriptive models of the universe. Thus a geocentric universe was an adequate theory untill instruments became sensitive enough to make the theory unworkable. At that point, a better theory was embraced. With limited accuracy, both theories were useful for predicting the position of the planets. The heliocentric model held untill we realized the universe was bigger than we thought. Now we find that it too was flawed and needed improvement (replaced with spiral galaxies, local clusters etc).
Fifteen years ago, the medical community thought Prions were junk science. Now it is the leading theory describing Mad cow desease. New data, better model.
Do not procalim scientific fact to loudly. You will eventuall be proven wrong. Instead, proclaim that the best available model says... Then admit that it may change in the future.
Just last week, I was at a banquet for the 2004 International Meeting of the Institute of Human Virology -- a meeting where most of the top scientists in HIV research (as well as in tumor biology and virology) congregate and discuss results. One of the speakers was a science journalist by the name of Jon Franklin. He gave a speech entitled "The End of Science Writing" and it is sort of eery that today's slashdot post is so reminiscent of its tone and words. If you have the time, and especially if you're a scientist, please read it. Here's a little excerpt:
As for me, I saw the handwriting on the wall but thought I could be of some value educating the next generation of science writers. In 1989 I took a job as head of the science journalism department at Oregon State University. OSU is Oregon's premier science campus, and its journalism department was the only undergraduate science journalism department in the country. There are several graduate institutions that teach science journalism, but most journalists do not have advanced degrees.
In any event, shortly after I arrived the voters of Oregon approved a tax-cutting measure that fell heavily on higher education. OSU decided science journalism was expendable. I knew the news industry wasn't going to support the program, but I thought science might. The critical player was OSU's dean of sciences. I went to him, hat in hand. I'll never forget his response.
"That's your problem," he said. "We don't need you."
I left the university, of course. Shortly thereafter they closed down science journalism. It looked for a while like they might also close the ballroom dance program. But they found money to keep that. Also, that year, the university undertook a multimillion dollar renovation of its football stadium.
--Jon Franklin
Linux at home
It's taken me forty minutes to write all this out. Why do I do this to myself?
Mine:
The people who speak out about a bias in the media and sciences do so by reacting to the percieved bias, thus making themselves guilty of the thing they complain about, whether their compaints were valid or not.
Yours:
Not at all. I claim bias in the media because they state as settled fact things very much in dispute, like Global Warming, they report the claims of left leaning groups as fact and the claims of the right as "claims from the right wing thinktank.....". And so on and so on.
Everything is in dispute. I can spuriously dispute anything you, or anyone else, says just because I don't like it. Dispute is cheap, even the dispute of think tanks. It is true, of course, that I can invent spurious theories. Research is expensive however, and the people who believe global warming is real tend to have fewer vested interests than those who think it is not.
I was speaking in general there, for starters. That is a trend that provides a lot of the right's energy, the perception that they are somehow discriminated against unfairly. But their reactions to it are often filled with the same kind of discrimination. That's the core process that fuels Fox News, and other like-minded groups and sources.
Global warming is a difficult matter to make conclusive arguments about, since of course we have only one planet and cannot infalliably see into the future. But it *is* possible to look at the composition of our atmosphere, and compare it to measurements taken some time ago, and see that there's quite a bit more carbon dioxide in it now than previously, check here.
The biggest area of debate these days, or at least the one I hear the most about, is the Evolution vs. Intelligent Design argument, which is very bitterly-fought these days, and has the most junk science proping it up.
Further, there are more and more junk studies out there, produced to confuse the issue, usually without sufficent scientific backing and funded by heavy polluters. This tactic is being used more often, and these studies tend to be pounced upon, disproportionately, by the current U.S. administration against all other evidence.
But here's what I consider to be most telling: What is it that makes global warming a controversial issue? What is the connecting logic that equates increased CO2 emmisions to a left-wing agenda? There is a lot of support for global warming, and although it is not *completely* proven, there are many more scientists who think it is wisely cautious to reduce emissions levels than those who think, damn the tiller, full speed ahead.
Mine:
Doesn't this at least cause you to examine your own beliefs?
Yours:
Not a bit. What do clostered ivory tower intellectuals know about the real world?
Your words are telling. I was saying that *everyone* needs to examine their own views, and was hoping to spark something of that in yourself by saying it. Self-examination is, in this age, just about the only route to truth that could be considered remotely objective.
Also, your word "cloistered" implies an ivy wall, but in fact I don't see much reason to assume they are all that separate from "real" people. Getting a job in academia, especially these days, isn't all that different form getting a job elsewhere, and that's the only way I can see someone thinking them separate from the rest of the world. They still have the same television news shows to choose from, the same newspapers to pick from, the same websites to browse. Old cliches about them being away and apart haven't been true for a long time, not since the creation of mass media at least.
Yours:
And I don't trust their paid for research anymore than I buy into the NSF's when it is on a political subject. Both are pushing a political agenda and trying to gain respectabil
This is not just about science. It's even more visible in politics, which of course the primary example here was, since it was about abortion. Also it doesn't have anything to do with journalists being balanced, rather the opposite.
The idea that journalists should be fair and balanced is used as a reason for being incorrect. Nobody is ever objective, and a good journalist is not balanced, but honest. Instead of hiding opinions behind a veil of alleged objectivism, any writer should be clear about where he/she is standing in the controversy.
The idea of balance and objectivism is made worse by the idea that you should have separate people for doing news: Journalists. The result is that most of what is said in the news is said by people whos knowledge and education is in words, not in the subject that is covered. A journalist usually do not have the knowledge to say what is wrong and what is right, and is likely to spread false information even if he tries to be objective and balanced.
We need to stop listening to journalists, and start listening to people who know what they are talking about.
Seems like if you are going to report on science, the reporting shouldn't be about who has the most scientists backing a theory, but reporting on the *science* behind why more scientists believe one theory than the other.
That is to say, science isn't democratic. In some rare cases, the majority of scientists can be dead wrong about a theory. It's highly unusual, it's true, but not without precedent. So, if you are going to report about science, report on the experiments and studies that have been done, along with meaningfully explanatory commentary, to show *why* the majority of scientists feel a theory does, or in this case, does not, have validity.
Fact of the matter is most university types were educated far beyond their intelligence, and only the ones who couldn't succeed in the real world tend to make careers in academia.
Wow. What a "fact." Success in academic science is actually much harder than success in the "real world." I'll actually support my statement. Every year of my academic career, I've seen graduate students and post-docs forced out of science because they can't cut it intellectually, lack the necessary work ethic, or just can't find very-hard-to-get academic positions. Now, any given year I only know about a couple of cases personally, but over the last 10-15 years I've seen it many times.
And you know what? Pretty much every time these people go into the "real world" and find high-paying technical jobs quickly. I'm talking scientists now, people with physics/astronomy backgrounds.
Furthermore, few in science go into the "real world," fail, and come rushing back to "easier" academia. Pretty much the only new grad students from the "real world" coming back from advanced degrees are ones who have been very successful. Non-successful "real worlders" can't even get into decent grad schools.
You sometimes say some things that make sense, that I can agree with, then you go and make some outlandish statements that betray real hatred and a misunderstandingor ignorance of the subject at hand.
P.S. The ivory tower isn't so cloistered. It's just a different jungle.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)