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Is Good Scientific Journalism Possible?
scida sends in a link to his blog post exploring the question of whether, roughly speaking, science journalism is an impossible task. From the post: "I have spent the better half of the past six months trying to understand one thing: how can you effectively present primary scientific literature to the general public? Is this even possible? ... During the past few months, I have spent entire days locked up in my office, writing my first manuscript to be submitted to a peer reviewed scientific journal. While doing so, I have come to realize the following: details can change everything. There are a number of assumptions I have been forced to make while analyzing my data, many of which are critical for both my methodology and the development of few of my arguments. Why? Often, the information I require simply isn't available (the studies haven't been done, or the studies that exist are based on assumptions of their own). Now, can someone unfamiliar with a particular field, nay, a sub-discipline of that field, recognize these assumptions for what they are?"
To write anything well, the writer must (a) understand the material, (b) write to the level of the user, and (c) tell a coherent, interesting story.
If you can do that, you can also weave in the portions about assumptions, undone studies, and so on, while still being entertaining enough for a "normal person" to read. If you can't, it's better that you write for a specialized audience (if at all) that might be more forgiving of the writing's shortcomings.
That is all.
1) copyright - how do you copy relevant portions of a publication without getting caught up in this nightmare? could you imagine the price of journals if this were required? There are now plenty of journals that allow you to read content for free.
Copyright is an issue only if you believe that science should be governed by economics. I'm sure you can guess from my nick what I think of THAT idea- science should be funded by government and the results of any given study should be considered public domain works. We're 10 years past the need for paper publishing of anything, and electronic publishing costs are negligible at best.
2) not everything can be made explicit. There are many aspects of any scientific field that are "fundamental" and would be tedious to have to re-explain every time.
Oh, poor scientific writer, needing to actually explain "fundamentals" because it's TEDIOUS. I suggest that a free-to-read model could replace such explanations with mere hyperlinks, but only if we first divorce science from the shackles of a capitalist "intellectual property" model.
3) putting that much data into an article may make it too large and unwieldy to read. If people have issues with something, they can pay or do whatever else it takes.
Thus utterly undermining the scientific method with needless economics, hampering the pursuit of knowledge.
4) to state that any assumption will look sloppy may be true; however, unless you are willing to conduct many more experiments prior to leading up to whatever your studying, wouldn't you be forced to make some assumptions. sometimes - esp for a small study - you are willing to leave certain things unanswered so you can publish and get the money that you may need to prove your assumptions were true to begin with. As long as disclaimers are made in your original paper stating further study needs to be done, this may not be an issue
Agreed. The only place this is an issue for is for those who believe that science leads to a definition of reality. For those willing to take the study for what it is, it should be sufficient to link to explanations of the fundamental assumptions and leave it at that.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Good as far as it goes- but in this day and age of electronic searching of possible relevance, do you really think you can count on ONLY the people in your field reading your paper? Cross-specialty research can lead in interesting directions as well- but only if your paper is understood by people *outside* of your specialty.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I think the real question is... "is good journalism possible?"
The answer, of course, is "no". Sure, it's possible in theory, but in practice it isn't. The fundamental problem is that journalism is produced by people who have spent their time mastering a subject other than the one they're reporting on. Even in the rare case of the "renaissance reporter" who understands both his own trade and the subject matter he's reporting, his report is still subject to the whims of an editor, the constraints of the medium, and the demands of the market.
On the few occasions that I've been the subject of journalism, the article has gotten facts wrong. On the many occasions that I have read articles about subjects I know well, I have invariably discovered basic errors in the articles. I think it's highly unlikely that journalists are only ignorant of subjects which I know well; it's much more likely that journalists are ignorant of all subjects and that good journalism in any field is impossible.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
In other words, there's just too much ground to cover. It isn't possible to be fully explicit, not without writing a book instead of an article. The reality is that science (and my field, mathematics) is extremely specialised these days, and this has resulted in a disconnect between those doing research work and the general public (personally I feel this disconnect it worst in mathematics). Now I do certainly feel that trying to heal that disconnect, at least a little, is important (it is another of the motivations for my project to explain advanced mathematics to a general audience), but that is a life's work in and of itself, not something you can do on the side while writing an article.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
A "keen interest" is nice, so is a "sharp mind", but nothing short of a serious degree in the field is useful.
I am a research mathematician; I've also done research in physics (where I have a B.Sc. and have taken some graduate courses).
Almost every science article I read trying to discuss results in these fields is bad beyond words. The words "utter crap" hardly begin to describe how bad they are. The writers so completely fail to grasp what the scientists are talking about that their writing it at best devoid of content and usually simply doesn't make sense. To add insult to injury the description of researchers and research are stereotypical rather than factual, and mostly serve to perpetuate myths rather than to give an impression of what science really is like.
The truth is, of course, that it is nearly impossible to understand current research in many fields. We've been working on problems in number theory for over 2500 years. We have made a lot of progress, but you can't understand what a modern number theorist is talking about without learning the ideas that have been developed to tackle number theory since then (hint: this is a large fraction of mathematics). This is not to say that it's always impossible to give a vague impression of what the number theorist is doing to an average person (though mostly, it is). However, the translation cannot be based on an average mathematician trying to talk at a "sharp-minded" journalist with the hope of information being transmitted. The person doing the translation must be a mathematician with a flair for explaining mathematics to non-mathematicians (people like Barry Mazur and Tim Gowers come to mind), and the reporter must have some mathematics. Otherwise what was a coherent explanation from the mathematician becomes completely garbled after paraphrasing and editing by the reporter.
Of course, this situation is difficult for scientists who'd like the public to pay for what they do (luckily, mathematics is cheap to do and we get paid for teaching calculus to students who don't need it), especially theoretical physicists. I know far more physics than the average person and yet cannot understand most of what a theoretical physicist is talking about.
PS: Note that you can't understand where current philosophy is coming from, or why they say what they say, without knowing what the philosophers of the past wrote. Perhaps this is why no journalist is trying to write about current trends in the philosophy of identity or of language.
It's also worth looking at Scientific American from the 1950's and 1960's when it was being edited by Gerald Peale. It's particularly interesting to compare to issues from the 1980's just before it was sold.
In the early issues, every concept is clearly explained in terms that should be accessible to a competent high school student - and many of them read it. In the 1980's it had degenerated: The first few paragraphs were carefully edited and then it lapsed into jargon.
So, yes, it is possible but it's hard work and it takes a dedicated, skilled editor.
"Either he succeeds in being intelligible by concealing the core of the problem and by offering to the reader only superficial aspects or vague allusions, thus deceiving the reader by arousing in him the deceptive illusion of comprehension; or else he gives an expert account of the problem, but in such a fashion that the untrained reader is unable to follow the exposition and becomes discouraged from reading any further. If these two categories are omitted from today's popular scientific literature, surprisingly little remains."
This was written by Einstein in a forward for Linconln Barnett's popularization of the theory of relativity in 1948.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
There is a lot of blame to go around for the state of scientific journalism. Because I am a scientist, and because I've been involved in a (relatively minor) journalistic "frenzy" concerning one of my papers, I can best speak about the inadequacies that we scientists add to the mix. In fact, most things that get even a minor note in a major city newspaper seem to the average scientist to be a journalistic feeding frenzy. When at work, we usually stay cloistered in our labs and offices working or reading Slashdot. We're not usually used to attention.
The biggest problem is, who wants to read something boring? Nobody. We scientists (and we Slashdotters, etc) may have a different idea of what is interesting and what isn't but we have a pretty good feel for what the "general public" likes. So, whenever a scientist discovers something that merits a high profile publication and media coverage, that person tends to want to make it interesting and exciting. After all, if the scientist spent years of their life doing the work, maybe people just like Mom and Dad might like to read about it for 2 minutes in the paper. And here is a problem. If the scientist is perfectly scrupulous and cautious to the extreme, then when that scientist talks to journalists, the caveats and assumptions overwhelm the discovery, and the result appears to be a boring piece of work and won't get reported. After all, it no longer even seems like a breakthrough. It will be in a journal, so why waste newsprint?
On the other hand, if, when the journalist asks a scientist about the work, the scientists sings the praises of the conclusions, downplays the caveats, and overstates its significance, it certainly sounds fancy. And it has a greater chance of being published. While most scientists wouldn't want their work mischaracterized, in their zeal to make their work interesting and relevant, they easily fall prey to simplifications that are wrought to aid the layman's understanding, but may take on a dimension of their own.
So, from the very beginning, there is a bias in what actually gets reported; the exciting stuff. And I can speak from first hand knowledge, when talking to reporters, trying to make your years of effort on a complex problem that is only completely understandable to a handful of peers is quite difficult. It is no wonder that, even when the scientists who do the work are consulted, that the work is often poorly represented. Of course, when the scientists aren't consulted or when they are more self-serving than average, the results can be disastrous for the quality of the journalism.
Of course, if you come up with the cure for cancer or the structure of DNA, you don't really need "talk up" the results. They speak for themselves. But if this is all that scientific journalism consisted of, then we'd only read two pages a year in the papers.
Or, more accurately, science is our "current closest approximation" to those parts of reality that we think we have an interpretation of. There are observed phenomenoa which we do not have any explanation of (quasars, for example), phenomena which we know we only have parts of the explanation for (evloution of stars has a stage where the surrounding formation cloud is blown away, for which there is no accepted explanation, but I have one, so star evolution is incompletely understood), areas we have currently no way of observing, much less measuring (like the number of dimensions our space is made up of, or their structure) (or like most "metaphysical" phenomena, GOD, etc)
wake up and hold your nose
> Reality is all about the physical state of being
Time is not real? So time is physical? Show me this "thing" called "time".
Are your dreams real? If they are not real, then how did you experience them?
Is consciousness physical? (Having interacted with non-human consciousness, that is a clear no.)
Reality is so much MORE then just the physical, which is the point you completely missed.
> see science as a rival church.
Science sets _itself_ up as a Rival Church; by ignoring the wisdom of the past Religions it has very much become its _own_ Religion.
Science through Quantum Mechanics have discovered most of these:
Awareness - There is no reality until one observes it.
Balance - Everything has an opposite, which brings equilibrium.
Eternity - Now is eternity, since "not Now" doesn't exist.
Faith - The Subjective Experience leads to the Objective Truth, and that it will lead to a more correct understanding of Reality when it has no proof of this.
Holiness - Honesty in searching for Truth which it
Infinity - There are many infinite parallel universes / dimensions.
Oneness - Everything is connected. i.e. Energy is mass, E=mc2
Uncorrupted Religion teaches the same thing at its core, when people aren't busy trying to convert everyone else to their incomplete religion.
I'm not the only one who sees the close minded nature of Science.
* http://amasci.com/weird/wclose.html
Others have written about the problems of Rationalism
* http://michaelprescott.freeservers.com/skeptic.htm
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You are a Spiritual being in a Physical body having a Human Experience.