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Bad Science in the Press
An anonymous reader writes " An editorial in The Guardian presents a good run down of what is wrong with science reporting today and tries to point out why this is. From the article: 'Why is science in the media so often pointless, simplistic, boring, or just plain wrong? Like a proper little Darwin, I've been collecting specimens, making careful observations, and now I'm ready to present my theory.'"
Science is complex. More often than not very well-trained and experienced scientists get it completely wrong. That said, somebody with a minimal scientific background (ie. a Journalism major) will very often screw up more complicated scientific articles. But likewise, many scientists dislike writing such articles. So we end up with a situation where those in the know would rather not write, and those not in the know are the ones who do write. And the result is lousy scientific articles.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
There are many efforts directed at educating scientists about the journalistic process, but fewer that aim to educate journalists about science. One of the arguments for the imbalance is that it is more efficient for scientists to learn about media constraints than it would be for journalists to learn about science. Some argue that a lack of scientific knowledge on a journalist's behalf may actually benefit their interpretation of science publications, allowing the author to be less biased when translating the information for public consumption. Others believe that introducing science journalists to the scientific process will help to correct inaccuracies and omissions of important information in the media.
Michael Chricton had an excellent piece on the decline of science reporting in an address at Caltech. His observations should be required reading because they get to the heart of what's wrong with "science" these days. (I use science in quote marks because it's only tangentally related to real science.) A sample:
Hell, I remember as a kid reading "50 Things You Can Do To Save The Earth" or some other such claptrap that argued that some massive amount of the rainforest disappared every day - and a little multiplication found that if such a figure were true the rainforest (and all forests on Earth) would have disappared in a year.
Whether "intelligent design" or "global warming", science is being used as a tool of politics - which is something it is not and never should be.
Journalists exist to be published. That is their function -- that's what they love, to see their name in print. They don't really care what they say exactly; they only care that their article pleases their editors, which in turn sells more newspapers or magazines.
I got a real education when I lived next door to a fairly high-up Sports Illustrated reporter. In watching him do his work, he would basically try and find an angle, and then shape the facts to fit his angle. Technically, he wouldn't "lie", but he would definitely flake and form things to give the impression that he'd decided to write ahead of time. That was generally for background pieces that he would write, but even for sporting events he followed that formula. He would write his article before the event had even finished, sometimes with multiple endings in case things went for one outcome or another (this is Standard Operating Procedure in the industry).
In realizing his "algorithm" to producing articles, I began to look at other journalist articles. And lo and behold -- I saw the same sort of pattern. When you realize this, you can see the "angle" they've decided to write, and the pattern shows up like a flashing red light. All the successful ones do this. They decide ahead of time what would make an exciting article to write.
This is why people get misquoted all the time. It's because when a journalist talks to someone, they aren't interested in what that person has to say, they want specific quotes that they can use to back up whatever they are writing.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Unfortunately, science via the media is almost worthless, and there is a pretty broad consensus around here from what I can tell. It is even worse when politics are involved. Here is my reasoning as to why.
1: Scientists who work in a particular field are self-selected to work in that field. Of course a cancer researcher thinks fighting cancer is important, or a global warming researcher thinks protecting the environment is important. This is not meant to attack these people, but I hope that you realize that one should take account of this when listening to their opinions. The result of this is one layer of hype for their research.
2. The second layer of hype is funding. If you want money to cure cancer, save the planet, or build better Legos, well, the first step is to scream bloody murder about how big the problem is and how wonderful your solution is. Like it or not, but scientists have every reason to hype their research - and as a research scientist myself, I can assure you that this is the way things really happen. This is a second layer of hype.
3: Then we get to the media, which receives this already-double-hyped information from the scientists. Well, what is the media's job? Selling information...and we all know their basic strategy is....hype!. So the "science" the average Joe reads in the newspaper is now triple-hyped.
4: Finally, we get to the big issue - politics. Most politicians get their information not directly from scientists, but from various media sources, lobby groups, and think tanks. But as noted, this information is already triple-hyped. Do you want to guess what the politician does? He/she then selects the information that best backs his or her position, and then hypes it.
By the time your favorite politician spews anything related to "science", you can be rest assured that it has been hyped so many times that it now bears no resemblance to anything approximating fact, and should be duly ignored. Before you start finger pointing, please get over the fact that both parties do it and are equally as bad (research anything related to Republicans vs Global Warming, or Democrats vs genetics/race/sex for all the anti-science details).
Perhaps it has to do with our daily TV & pop Magazine (Times, Life) and Newspapers that assume we're stupid and write/talk/present things to us as if we're at the 6th grade level.
If that's all you see, read, or hear 90% of the time - it will eventually filter down into your communication unless you actively prevent it. It will eventually spread to all media.
The british newspapers, I'm told, write at a 12th grade level.
If you ever watched the Daily Show where they showed the difference between George Bush's Social Security town hall meetings and the one PM Tony Blair did before his election - you will see the stark contrast in how the media treats it's viewers - intelligent adults vs. idiotic grown children.
(In short, it was 1000000 x more confrontational with people asking intelligent questions versus here where everybody had to kiss GWB's balls to ask a stupid & simplistic question)
I tried to find the clip but I can't find it.
As a scientist myself I'm very unhappy about the way the reporting of science has created a vicious circle. Journalists misreport science, the article comes up with some arguments as to why but in the end I'm tempted to think it has a lot to do with trying to summarise very complex things when you don't entirely understand them. But scientists are also to blame here; there is a general lack of both ability and interest in communicating our work more widely (the phrase "media don" is considered pretty offensive in certain circles). Unfortunately the kind of climate the journalists have created for us makes this venture even less appealing than it was in the first place. The eventual result is that people like myself don't like talking to journalists because we don't want to be involved in perpetrating a load of hype and making ourselves look unscrupulous in the eyes of our peers. The answer is probably getting scientists to try to write their own "popular" articles directly and to facilitate this would require that the systems that measure academic performance in terms of publication in impact-rated journals begins to pay some sort of recognition to activities of wider dissemination. Right now, you could be on the news once a week and have your own TV show discussing your work and it would do less (technically at least) to help you keep your academic job than publishing a two-page note in the back of an obscure journal. You might say that an academics job is to produce new research, not go on the TV. I think this is where the real question lies; what role should a scientist be occupying in the 21st century?
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
What interests me is how good astronomy reporting seems to be compared to all other science reporting. It faces the same guantlet as other articles, avoids the math and loves to fear-monger possible disasters, but somehow it seems to communicate the more-or-less current theories in a way that seems understandable, interesting, even inspiring.
Is it a difference in how the media approaches the subject? Astronomy seems to have an aura of purity (biology seems to only be reported to create ecological or evolutionary flamewars; medicine research sounds more like infomercials than news; engineering ... well, doesn't exist in the media). Have astronomers learned how to package their data/analysis in nice neat packages?
You are making the mistake many do in looking at bias - there doesn't *have* to be a coordinated effort for what the original article wrote to be true. In fact it's very very rare and usually not productive/widespread for it to be coordinated. It's too transparent.
You need look no further than slashdot - it's moderation tends to be heavily biased in many topics. I can assure you (and a little looking around will confirm it if you do not already know) that there is no controlling entity that seeks to impliment this bias. Yet there is still a VERY strong bias for pretty much similar reasons through many of slashdots readers.
It's like an ant colony where there is no "hive mind" to control things. Each participant does it's thing and the whole ends up being something specific.
It can be that a very few want this and hire people who are like minded (that is usually self sustaining - you usually only hire people you think are correct). It may be that the nature of the job pushes people who think that way into the field. It may be just random chance that one day went over the saturation point - it could have went anyway and just chose that one. There are many other explaination than "Grand conspiracy" - group think happens all the time with no controlling authority or grand conspiracy.
Personally I think the original authors are correct. At least in my experiance (in real life and when I was in the university) 3/4 (and note the 3/4 - there were some very nice very broadly educated people there also) of the humanties distrusted science and journalist students were mostly humanaties people (rare person who is really interested in science but chooses to do non-science for a living - nature of the job chooses people who think that way). If they believe that to be reality, thier editors believe that to be reality, then it's just the nature of the beast.
Just as there is no grand conspiracy to make science minded people think and write that the "Earth is 4000 years old people" are crazy (and our writings are VERY biased against them because we think they are, at best, wrong), so too does the average journalist do that. That's why if you want news about science you need to look to specialised journalist - not the times, cnn, fox, abc, nbc, or whatever general news rag (and don't look at a science journal for general news - they are usually pretty poor at it).
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
As TFA pointed out:
;P")
1. It's not about articles written by actual scientists, and not about articles published in real scientific journals. It's the mainstream media that makes a mockery of science.
2. There is a group that seems to be on a crusade to present science as just hocus-pocus babble, as some new religion where self-serving high-priests spout obfuscated nonsense, and where if you asked 10 different scientists about any topic you'd get 11 different conflicting theories.
The article blames it on humanities students, but personally I think that's pointing the finger at the wrong group. In my personal limited observation -- but bear in mind that it's no scientific sample or anything, and generally it's just "IMHO" -- it's just a case of the dumb and uneducated feeling a _need_ to drag everyone back to their level, and articles that catter to that dumb and uneducated majority.
The article itself skirts with that answer when it says that those articles treat you like you're dumb and couldn't possibly understand any real scientific terminology or statistics. Well, bingo. Because they're written for people who don't, and who _want_ some positive reinforcement that the muck of mediocrity (and sub-mediocrity) is cool- That any kind of academic achievement, humanities included, is (A) just some nonsense techno-bable, (B) irrelevant in the real world, (C) a scam, and usually (D) all the above.
And a lot of publications are basically just prom-queens. They'll print what sells. That means what their intended audience wants to hear. If that audience wants to hear that the nerds they mocked in school still didn't really achieve anything, and nowadays are a bunch of quacks and witch-doctors bickering over whose techno-babble religion is better, they'll publish just that.
(Before I go any further, let me mention though that by "education", I don't only mean strictly school. I also mean, in fact even _especially_ mean studying on your own, above and beyond just sitting and daydreaming in class. So if you've made the effort to learn something and improve yourself, even without an university degree, you're _not_ the category I'm talking about.)
And outside magazines, it gets even worse. Every single example is taken out of context and polished into shining proof that education is irrelevant, and sitting on your ass in front of the TV is just as good. Examples you occasionally see even on slashdot include:
- Start with the fact IQ test results are irrelevant for a lot of jobs, and indeed many would even question if they measure "intelligence", or that something as complex as the many aspects of human intelligence can be squeezed into a single number. But then extrapolate it to mean that _intelligence_ as such as irrelevant to any real jobs, or indeed a _handicap_ in the real world.
(In the words of a Slashdot poster in a recent post, the less intelligent have more other (presumably better) advantages, like empathising better with each other, since they're the majority. And, I quote, "So the next time, someone praised you for being intelligent and well-off....just bear these in mind.....seriously, it may not be a good thing in my not-so-honorable opinion
- Take some speech of someone rich and successful, e.g., Steve Jobs, and cut out of context the part where he mentioned he quit college. But conveniently ommit that he also says that he went to study on his own the things that interested him. So we're talking someone who still worked hard at improving himself, _not_ an example of a couch-potato that made it bigger.
Or even going as far as making up a fake speech of such a successful person where he calls college students losers again and again. (See the fake Larry Ellison speech being occasionally waved around.)
- That some prominent scientific figure, e.g., Einstein seems to be the favourite poster child, didn't do that well in school either, so it's ok for us to sleep in maths and physics classes too. But conveniently mi
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Evolution is something the church gave up on decades ago, and the rest of the world knows is fact- but the American press feels "Intelligent Design" deserves presentation on equal grounds and parrots the President when he says it deserves "consideration"."
Well, actually here's a link to a poll that contradicts the "the rest of the world knows is fact" assertion:
Natural selection fighting to survive in the US
It's scary, really. Basically only 26% of those polled actually believed Darwin. (Ranging from 27% among the whites to as low as 14% among the blacks.)
To make ignorance even scarier, even in this group, 15% of them said that life existed from day 0 and never changed, and 10% said evolution was guided by some supreme being. Makes me wonder if they even have a clue wtf they're talking about, if they think "evolution" means life staying unchanged.
So, anyway, now let's subtract those 25% (10% + 15%, since both are really are creationists or ID fans in disguise) from that 26% group, and you're left with 26 * 0.75 = 19.5% who actually do believe in the real evolution theory. That's it. Less than 1 person in 5.
So with all due respect, I'd challenge that assertion that "everyone else knows evolution is a fact". It may be so for you and me and our equally nerdy, educated friends, but if we're talking the bulk of the population, less than 1 in 5 are anywhere _near_ sharing that point of view.
Also 64% supported teaching Intelligent Design in schools.
So basically when the press is giving ID equal opportunity, rest assured that it's not just for Dubya's sake. It's really cattering to those 80.5% who actually do believe in creationism or ID, or those 64% who are obviously ignorant enough to not be able to tell the difference between science and pseudo-science babble.
Seriously, whenever I start thinking that maybe we nerds are just elitist with our snotty attitude about the ignorant, uneducated masses... such a study comes along and proves it in hard numbers and percentages that we _are_ right, after all. The majority really _is_ that dumb and uneducated.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi