Slashdot Mirror
Bad Science Journalism Gets Schooled
TaeKwonDood writes "Biology post-doc Dr. Michael White takes a look at the '2007 Best American Science and Nature Writing' and doesn't like what he finds in an article called Bad Science Journalism and the Myth of the Oppressed Underdog. Turns out it's not just political writers who pick a position they want to advocate and then write stories to confirm it. Science journalism gets a scolding and it's been a long time coming."
This NEVER comes into play with controversial subjects like evolution or global warmimg. (cough)
This is quite logical, as it's human nature to do so, and not a direct result of one's career field.
Even simple background research on the authors of articles in many different fields reveal that yes, the majority of writers are biased, either consciously, or otherwise.
The Mothership
That's why Max Planck said: "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
On top of personal professional bias we must now add those extra pressureses exerted on scientists to toe some line so that their funding/department/ access to publishing/whatever does not get cut. Gotta say the right stuff to keep the backers happy.
Anyone expecting unbiassed science to come out of that lot is just a misguided idealist.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This is merely par for the course... and the observations made in the TFA are not new either. I encounter them every day on Slashdot!
HIV not causing AIDS conspiracy, Fluoride in the water conspiracy, Cancer being cured but evil corporations in league with all scientists not releasing the cure... I have to endure this every single day.
I think the more interesting subject to explore, is the psychology of why people are so eager to believe the improbable, and far more likely to accept an outrageous exaggeration, a halftruth, or an outright lie, merely to spite the establishment. As a scientist, that's a subject that interests me the most, because I would like to locate the part of the brain that will believe that the herbs in "Airborne" will miraculously prevent you from getting a disease, but will refuse to accept scientific principles and facts that have held firm under scrutiny for decades.
Science journalism would perhaps be the one area where you would expect the author to concisely go out of their way to be unbiased.
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
Perhaps the bias in reporting is due to the "intuitive attractiveness" of the conclusion?
The opposite might be true as well. For instance, I didn't hear much about this study:
You'd think a Harvard professor saying in effect that diversity has a down side might be news worthy, unless that idea isn't attractive to the majority of the news media.
A Human Right
For an example for the second point, remember the "gravity-powered lamp" concept that was advertized last month? I saw several independent write-ups in newspapers all repeating the canard of "this will work if only we have better LED technology" when an elementary calculation shows that even with 100% efficient lighting elements the lamp will need to weigh about a ton.
Kuhn is very very explicit about the normal state of science being the evolutionary expansion of the paradigm/work within the paradigm. It's only when the extremely rare paradigm shift occurs that there is an overturning of the established order. Even there Kuhn seems to think these shifts often occur because the strain on the previous paradigm grows too great to sustain, i.e., a wide variety of experiments taken together require such unsatisfying explanations that the paradigm is overthrown for a new one.
I think it would be more appropriate to say that Kuhn is mostly rejecting the idea of science proceding via revolutions. The sort of view that preceded Kuhn was that science proceeds by formulating hypothesises which in turn are overthrown should they be contradicted by experiment. Thus Kuhn is actually arguing against the idea that science primarily progresses via the disproof of the prevailing view.
In fact I think it's a fair interpretation to say that Kuhn does not even believe there is an objective fact of the matter of which paradigm is better. It's quite clear that Kuhn holds out evolutionary expansion of the paradigm to be the stereotypical example of progress in science.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
... welcome our new underdog overlords.
there are some luminous exceptions. carl sagan. stephen jay gould
but most are, frankly, asocial. they would rather exercise their minds in the pursuit of science. actually explaining what they do to other people is a drag and a waste of time. not that you can blame them. this ability to tune out the rest of the world and engage their mind in silence is actually a very valuable skill for a scientist, and it is a mindset that probably led them to science in the first place as a life pursuit
the result is that those with a malicious antiscience agenda or those who simply mean well but are woefully misinformed are the ones who represent science. because the information that gets out there in general circulation is not the information that is most true, but the information that is most communicated. the antidote to this unfortunate status quo is to get some scientists out of the ivory tower and up on a soap box
the monklike state of existence of many scientists, to investigate and research in silence, and then the looking down disdainfully upon the common man and his mispercetions: this is part of the problem. this anti-populist attitude of many scientists is part of the problem. an arrogance, a classism, an us-versus-them way of looking at the world. it is the lack of communication efforts of scientists themselves that leads to the dangerous and stupid ideas many common people swallow in the first place
so who do i blame for bad science journalism? scientists themselves. for generally not making themselves available. the ultimate antidote would be for some of you brilliant but silent minds to clear your throat for once, and finally speak up
stephen jay gould and carl sagan have left us. some luminous mind out there: please open your mouth and fill their shoes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It is unfortunate that this tendency plays right into the hands of global warming deniers. When applied to that controversy, the whole debate becomes a he-said-she-said that takes place in the absence of any evidence (or, to be precise, in the absence of reporting of evidence). That is to say, most deniers' arguments fall apart at even cursory comparison with actual evidence, but by then, the story is already published.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Certain things, although treated as science, are not really open to an experiment... And while disagreements over, say, some aspect of Cosmogony can be discussed in a friendly manner, issues like Global Warming tend to polarize people along their political persuasions...
Since academics' income depends greatly on the taxpayers' money, they tend to be Statist and/or rather Illiberal. Hence the dominant "scientific" opinions about Global Warming predicting gloomy scenarios and demanding drastic actions — mostly from "the rich" (citizens and nations), of course. Anybody disagreeing (or even questioning) is "anti-science" (even if burning at a stake is no longer practiced) — even though no experiment could possibly be conducted on a planetary scale.
Watch angry responses to this posting for more :-)
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Scientists are fond of coming up with things that need to be researched to create work. Sometimes it is bogus stuff.
The researcher of course, if he discovers a cure, is out of a job, so they are always looking for that cure just around the corner. The truth is we already have it but it is not that profitable, rather we need a pill they can pop and we can patent.
Quite often the so called scientific bodies and organizations are funded by industry and they tend to reflect the bias of the funding entities. Like the cereal companies that funded the determination of the RDA or MDR. We can see the problem of pseudo science in that the RDA for Vitamin C for laboratory monkeys is much higher than the one for humans. Because sick monkeys are not profitable the reverse of what is found with sick humans.
"an infinite player that has lost his finite mind" ~Infinite Play the Movie (it blends with reality)
I'm pretty sure it's the people funding the science journalists that need a boot to the head. For instance, in our new world of energy efficient political correctness, I recently read an article about a study that was done to prove that laptops use less power when they are in sleep mode. Ummm.... really, isn't that what sleep mode was designed for? You needed a study to prove that? So we're all supposed to keep our laptops in sleep mode instead of doing something productive? How about we fund a study to prove that your laptop accomplishes far less when it's in sleep mode. Better yet, how about a study to show how much taxpayer money gets wasted on frivolous studies that prove facts we already know. Then maybe these scientific journalists will have to start proving things that aren't useless, well-known facts.
Nearly every journalist is biased in some way or another. While journalists may not necessarily inject the bias directly into their story like the example given in the article, the very choice of topic may be indicative of bias. Take for example the Reuters science articles on Yahoo! News. Nearly all the articles consist of biology stories or NASA/space related stories. In fact, when was the last time you read a news story in mainstream media on physics or chemistry? It was probably about the LHC or the "Exceptionally Simple Theory". This might be because it is harder to put the same spin on these types of stories. In fact, Garret Lisi's theory is so well known because he's been cast as a brilliant young surfer dude railing against the establishment. (Admittedly, the guy is no where as pig headed and arrogant as the biologist quoted in the article). Even Slashdot seems to be home to plenty of anti-establishment "scientific thinkers" who attempt to claim that nearly every other scientist has got it wrong and dark matter was simply invented to fit into an existing theory*, or our calculations of the age of the universe are complete BS. While I don't claim that the established theories are always right, they are considered to be "established" for a reason: they have a good deal of evidence in their favor.
To get back to my original point however, I would argue that this sort of selective reporting shapes the public view of science negatively. If you only hear about how scientists are wrong, then you might never even believe that they are right. Perhaps of more direct impact to scientists, the fact that the prevalence of this sort of scientific reporting seems to favor biology, can shift the spending of public money. After all, it seems like biologists are making breakthroughs every day and overturning established and outdated ways of thinking while physicists build expensive machines (even condensed matter physics research is expensive) and twiddle their thumbs. There's no excitement in a story that says "BaBar confirms that CP-violation in B-mesons fits within the parameters of the Standard Model" or "Researchers at (insert university/national lab of your choice) discover a method of sub-wavelength optical transmission". But without stories like that, the public sees almost nothing getting done in physical sciences.
Before a bunch of biologists start to flame me, I'd like to note that I don't think that biology is meaningless, or that biologists are pretentious pricks. It's just that journalists seems to draw an excessively large amounts of attention to biology, at the expense of other fields, almost always through no fault of the scientists.
*Dark matter does in fact have plenty of evidence for it. See the earlier Slashdot story of galaxies that don't have dark matter and gravitational lensing in the Bullet Cluster. Dark Energy, however, may in fact be a purely theoretical construct.
Microsoft causes cancer!!!1!
posted by kdawson
from the see-they're-eeeeevil dept.
A new study shows that Microsoft products cause cancer. If you add up all the people with cancer who use M$ products and all the people who use Mac OS X, you notice a startling trend: There are more people who use Windows and have cancer than those who use Mac!!! That's right, this must mean that M$ causes cancer, and we have reason to believe that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are doing it on purpose. You know, the man throws chairs at little old ladies and kittens.
In fact, another independent study shows the exact same trend for AIDS! And for multiple sclerosis! Really, Microsoft and multiple sclerosis have the exact same initials. Coincidence? Not a freaking chance, they're directly linked.
And you know what else? Global warming. Thats right. The more Windows running machines there are, the warmer the planet gets. As more Windows machines are built, you know what else is happening? Species are going extinct. Windows machines and rain forests/endangered species are inversely proportional. Just look at the numbers yourself, its all true! It's all part of M$'s evil plan to be...evil!
In other news, Linus Torvalds is working on a new Linux distro that will end world hunger, and Steve Jobs's new OS will make you live forever.
Once a week I have to explain the speed of light barrier was not broken. Anyone remember this story?
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
- Journalistic writing style is supposed to be written at about the 5th to 8th grade reading and comprehension level (any journalism student will tell you that.)
- It's fair to say that most science is more complex than that, you know, to understate the case.
- Most journalists aren't exactly rocket scientists.
- Journalists are going to write stories that translate easily to the medium. They're also going to write about what they understand, well, pretend to understand, and even then they often butcher it.
- The "bias" of science journalism is inherent in the format and its production.
- Stories are going to be biased towards choices that can be paired with a rainbow-colored graph with clip art and headlines like, "Cool new ways to beat the summer heat! / Awesome inventions!" or a gloss over of the topic with some side reference to "Star Trek."
Scientific writing is probably best done by scientists who are also gifted writers -- but that's getting off track. Science journalism is going to give you what's catchy, what "pops", what helps sell copies and what sells advertising space -- but also to low intellectual standards, well, it's all related. Of course.
Factual newspaper articles on science are boring as hell. That doesn't draw readers, so journalists dig up (or invent) intrigue. I'm shocked no one has mentioned this yet.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
It's a pity so few will see this article. It reminds me of something I saw briefly on the discovery channel about discovering Atlantis or something. The point was brought up to the effect "We don't have a lot in the way of resources because the scientists are too afraid what we will find will shatter everything they believe." Now, I know that you can't take too much on TV seriously, even the so called educational channels, but this was downright absurd. Wouldn't any scientist with the slightest bit of passion about his work be -thrilled- to take part, or help a peer with work that would have that sort of impact? It's just sad to see the Discovery Channel airing these sorts of things that completly misrepresent what science is. It's not even the MythBusters sorts of shows that bother me, it's exactly these sort of underdog stories the author is talking about that I think does a huge amount of harm to the education of people watching. It's those sorts of shows that lead people so far astray on what science is that lets the "Intelligent Design" nonsense take
root.
Someone else summed it up much better, though:
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
- Carl Sagan "
"Question is, is there another way to tell the stories that isn't so formulaic and that doesn't give such an incorrect impression?"
Actually, there is a way: just stick to reporting, don't turn it into an entertaining story. We're talking science, FFS, not the Hero's Journey archetype. It's not about the everyman who discovers his calling and ends up single-handedly fighting the super-villain, it's about a more mundane process where basically they're all on the same side.
But science is boring for most people. There's really two kinds of stories that you can make out of it, that anyone outside that profession will read. (And those inside that profession already have the relevant peer-reviewed journals instead.)
A) It's a BREAKTHROUGH!!!
B) The Hero's Journey in disguise. The lone maverick who slays the dragon. (Except sometimes the climactic confrontation hasn't happened yet, so you're left to infer it.)
And unfortunately both end up used by the journos as ammo against the real science. TFA already thrashes B, so let's just say that bogus A is what PR carpet-bombs the media with.
So other than banning science completely from the non-peer-reviewed media, I can't see how that's solvable.
Or if you were merely asking if it's possible to make it entertaining without being a case of lone heroes versus tyrannical super-villains... well, maybe. But consider this: the current generation of storytellers can't even tell any story except the Hero's Journey. We could live without it very well until, IIRC, the 60's, but then all of a sudden everyone had to obey the monomyth to the letter. And if two movies are the same length, they have to have their first turning point in exactly the same minute.
So incidentally for whole classes of movies, once you figured out who's protagonist, who's antagonist, etc, you can know in advance what will happen... and in exactly what minute of the movie.
Unfortunately, ever since, that structure has been hammered into the heads of every single story teller or screenplay writer. There are course, workshops, and the knowledge that Hollywood will chuck your manuscript in the garbage bin if it doesn't fit the mold to the letter. Not many people still know how to write any other kinds of stories any more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I know this isn't specifically about scientific journalism, but I think it must be said. People will always be biased, no matter how much they claim to provide a balanced view. In the end, the writer has an opinion, and this will appear in the writing.
In some cases, the bias is deliberate. The news reporting that you receive on television and in the papers is the best example of materials that are biased. This is done in a rather sophisticated manner. Information isn't necessarily modified to favor one viewpoint over another; rather information is selectively omitted and other information is selectively made more prominent. Anybody who is involved in writing on a regular basis should be well aware that you can state exactly the same thing in different ways, each way favoring one viewpoint over another. This is precisely what takes place in the news reporting, and since its distribution is so widespread, it actually affects the thing upon which it reports. In this manner, the media actually has control over the outcome.
Why misrepresent the facts? For a simple reason that will become apparent very quickly: Take the so-called Mid East Peace Process for example. What peace process? Things blow up everywhere, and have been for decades, and there's a peace process going on? That's news to me! Stop and ask yourself why the problems of the middle east will never get solved, and why so much misinformation circulates about the problem. The answer is obvious: An endless middle east peace problem makes for an endless supply of news, bad news specifically, and good ratings. People tune in to hear about the latest thing that exploded, and watch the commercials in between.
The same logic applies to any sort of reporting, whether the issue is war, social security, illegal immigration, the legality of abortion, or any other issue that seems to perpetuate itself forever with no solution in sight. Once again, the outcome of the reporting causes the problem to perpetuate itself, which makes for job security and good future ratings.
That's the way it seems to go. If it's science for entertainment you have to leave out the math, over-simplify every idea so that an illiterate red-neck could follow the argument, and preferably have something explode spectacularly. In lieu of exploding chemicals you can occassionally subsitute a story about someone brilliant being oppressed by those pesky scientists that don't understand a thing.
If you want good science at a popular level you do fair better leaving out the popular press. There are some good books out there. Some of them even let math in the door. Take for example http://www.gravityfromthegroundup.org/
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The scientists who make the most noise are the ones with the biggest personal agendas and the ones most likely to appear in the popular press (because they're the ones constantly calling them and submitting articles).
The real problem is that the public want science to be wrong. Look at global warming, it's been known for over a hundred years, there's tens of thousands of studies which back it up but you publish one article or make one documentary which says it's wrong (eg. the Channel 4 one) and you'll have an army of followers. It's human nature.
No sig today...
Not a single obvious spelling mistake.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
TFA is about the myth of the oppressed underdog upsetting the establishment, not bias in scientific writing. It's not "the man keeping new science down" it's just how the scientific review process works. If you come up with a new theory you have to defend it, just like the guy who established the current dominant theory. The entire point of journal review is to try and find holes in a new theory to see if it's a solid model or just a special case.
The "friendly article" is about a specific narrative, "the establishment and the underdog", not about bias. The submitter got (as always on /.) it wrong. I have no idea whether the submission is an example of stupidity, bias, or maybe a different narrative. The "they are biased" narrative is very popular on /. for some reason.
And while journalists of course have bias as everybody else, what characterize the profession is not bias (in fact, they are probably better than average at hiding it), but the search for narratives. Without a narrative, news stories will get boring, and they will lose readers (or viewers, or listeners). The term they themselves uses for a narrative is "an angle". Unlike with bias, journalists just want an angle (or narrative) in order to tell their story, they do not (in general) particularly care about what the angle is.
I'm an amateur science journalist, writing for my university's newspaper. I don't claim to know anything about journalism (just science), but one thing that I continually hear from experienced journalists is that every article needs to have a story. It's not enough to say that a theory that has undergone rigorous testing has now been extended in an esoterically exciting way. As much as the discovery is truly newsworthy, the effort to convince the audience that something is newsworthy in a non-technical forum is usually not worth the effort. However, if there is a narrative behind the story -- a conflict -- then perhaps people will keep reading and be compelled to research the science underlaying the story.
The author has a good point: mainstream media outlets focus far too much on the story and not the science, so much so that they will lie and equivocate to generate conflict. Yet, I would rather see a light science articles that are interesting and easy to read than none at all, as long as the science is actually correct.
"Science is interesting, and if you don't think so, you can fuck off." This Dawkins quote sums up the other side of the argument. It bothers me that people would be so protective and elitist about having science portrayed perfectly in the media that they would rather it not be written about at all. We need to be criticizing the accuracy of science journalism, not its glamorization.
If you read the blog rather than the (as always) misleading summary, it is a very good match to global warming denial. There is the underdog with some alternate explanation (volcanic activity, cosmic radiation, whatever) against the huge global climate change establishment.
It is a good story, that merely ignores how science works.
Not sure if this is entirely on topic, so I'll AC it, and not actually quote it. It's by Asimov, so enjoy :)
http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Well, ironically, a large part of that can be blamed on the press too. There's this whole bombardment of stories telling Joe Sixpack that science is a clique of self-appointed arse clowns. In no particular order:
1. The lone researcher vs the evil establisment stories, like in TFA. Invariably the establishment is evil, you know. Well, these stories are just ammo then for the quacks, who are invariably all too eager to present themselves as that oppressed underdog.
2. PR-sponsored and -wrote "breakthrough" stories, the sillier and more contradictory the better. "Chocolate is good for you! Cocoa beans have valuable enzymes!" (Yes, but they're no longer present in chocolate.) "Wine is even better!" "No it's not!" "Scientists prove: Beer is better than both!!!" Etc. If you can't distinguish those from real science, and Joe Sixpack can't, it looks like "science" is just a bunch of guys saying contradictory things and telling you one day that X is good, and the next that Y is bad. That what passes for bulletproof science one day, is disproved the next day, so you might as well ignore the whole clown posse.
3. Probably the most damaging: the fucked-up idea of journalistic impartiality. See, the idea is that impartiality means presenting two conflicting views as equals, without taking sides. So if you run a story about, say, why vaccines are good, you have to also find a quack or two to go, "no they're not!!! They cause autism!!! They kill your immune system!!! Buy our 100% natural and hollistic snake oil instead!!!" And present the two as equal. It's not that one of them is bogus, it's that it's a "controversy", see. Taking sides and telling people which one is backed by solid evidence, well, that would violate that impartiality.
This creates a false image of, well, everything being equal and equally unproved and dubious. Everything is a controversy. The Nobel prize winner in that corner of the ring is just about as likely to be right or wrong, as the quack with the fake diploma bought on the internet in the other corner. So you can take your own pick. If you want to believe the earth is flat, go ahead, even that is probably a controversy.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A significant percentage of Americans have a deep, fundamental mistrust of intelligent people. Scientists learn early not to trust the media, who almost infallibly have to dumb down a complex subject to the point where even an idiot can grasp the bare essentials.
Inevitably, a line is crossed and the real science is distorted to the point of inaccuracy. And the idiot whose attention is being sought inevitably just asks his pastor what he should believe in any case. Where else in the world except the United States is the Theory of Relativity accepted without question, but evolution is "just a theory"?
As long as cracker barrel philosophers with a gift of gab and a few good one-liners are given more credibility than a terminally shy genius with a stutter, science journalism will remain a place where a few stars shine brightly over a vast sea of mediocrity and sensationalism.
By the way...I've worked as a science writer, so I'm not entirely ignorant on this subject.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Try Science News. Short, clear articles on new scientific developments and some review articles, and when they do write about sociological or historical meta-issues in science, it's usually done so in a relatively unbiased manner and confined to separate articles.
It would help if (more of) the peer reviewed media was accessible to the public.
Somebody has to pay, though.
Can you cite these thousands of studies over one hundred of years? I am truly interested in them.
He didn't like what he found in the article, or he wrote this article to express his dislike for what he found? TFA and some common sense make it the latter, of course, but that sentence could be clearer.
Ben Goldacre, who writes a regular column on bad science for the Guardian on bad science wrote a great column about this once, in which he pointed out the obvious-in-retrospect: science journalists don't have science backgrounds. He regularly takes on both bad science and bad science reporting, and his blog/column is a lot of fun to read. Fun in a deeply disturbing way.
The one startling regularity I have noticed across all science reporting is that the more I know about the subject area, the more misleading the article seems. It seems clear this pattern can't be completely limited to science reporting. I cut popular media a lot of slack in terms of glossing over details and simplifying for a popular audience. But the distortions I see are more often fundamentally misleading about the nature of the work and the details that are relevant to the story. Disturbingly, I'm still tempted to believe some of what I read in areas about which I know little. Even more disturbing, I find this mode of reporting seeping into the scientific articles I read and review. I guess this saves the reporters the trouble, but points out one of the many problems with science reporting done by people who have no ability to read science critically.
The one time I was interviewed about my work, I had the sense the reporter already had a story outlined, based on a science-fiction-y reading of the press release, and was basically fishing for quotes to add meat to the story.
From what I read, while Newtonian mechanic can predict light bending for a small weighted photon, it don't predict light bending for zero mass photon.
QUOTE
However, there is a problematical aspect to this "Newtonian" prediction, because it's based on the assumption that particles of light can be accelerated and decelerated just like ordinary matter, and yet if this were the case, it would be difficult to explain why (in non-relativistic absolute space and time) all the light that we observe is traveling at a single characteristic speed. Admittedly if we posit that the rest mass of a particle of light is extremely small, it might be impossible to interact with such a particle without imparting to it a very high velocity, but this doesn't explain why all light seems to have precisely the same velocity, as if this particular speed is somehow a characteristic property of light. As a result of these concerns, especially as the wave conception of light began to supersede the corpuscular theory, the idea that gravity might bend light rays was largely discounted in Newtonian physics. (The same fate befell the idea of black holes, originally proposed by Mitchell based on the Newtonian escape velocity for light. Laplace also mentioned the idea in his Celestial Mechanics, but deleted it in the third edition, possibly because of the conceptual difficulties discussed here.)
light bending in newtonian physic
But then again I could misread the paragraph, the light bending prediction from newtonian physic was based on false premise.
The rest of the text give you 100% reason, on the difficulty of measurement, up to the funny details that Einstein made an error initially and had a bending prediction identical as newtonian physic, and that really the measurement verification were more confirmed in 2004.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I detailed my personal experience regarding sensationalism in science journalism here : http://nachiket.wordpress.com/2008/01/26/sensationalism/
This is a serious issue in terms of the effects it has on the public opinion of science.
Essentia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Speaking as someone who has to read the peer-reviewed media, I seriously doubt more than the tiniest of fractions of the population would read scientific papers if they had access. It's only by sheer force of will that *I* slog though papers, and I have an intrinsic motivation as a fellow scientist.
Basically, I'm saying that most of us are really boring writers.
I wish the author had used nearly *any* other topic to highlight the problem so that I provide a well-written rebuttal to the concept of the "maverick scientist" to those who most need it, but I fear it would fall on deaf ears. Oh well.
I just try to be aware of the authors biased and extract facts accordingingly.
I was expecting another article beating the zombie-horse that is Creationism apologetics junk science. While I take guilty pleasure in reading those articles too (nothing like having relabelled creationism nonsense masquerading as science get debunked, it's just annoying that some outlets portray them as outspoken underdogs when they're only outspoken because they're bad at science), this article discusses the greater peer-reviewed scientific process in greater detail. Not only that, but its impact is greater since it uses a relatively neutral example that isn't so prone to the circular arguments and intellectual dishonesty that gets introduced whenever origin theories are discussed. I guess it's only appropriate that science journalism is also subject to peer review just as the field it reports on.
Ie, stories about the evidence that eating cabbage causes cancer, followed the next month that not having enough cabbage causes heart disease, followed the next month by cabbage flatulence leading to the greenhouse effect, and so forth.
Just searching the NY Times, for the dates between 1970 and 1989, there are almost two hundred hits on "Carbon dioxide AND Global Warming", such as this, from the October 18, 1983 issue entitled: "E.P.A. REPORT SAYS EARTH WILL HEAT UP BEGINNING IN 1990'S"
Hmm. Looks like the EPA was right.
Of course, having lived through that period married to an Earth scientist, I know first hand this was a hot topic even at the start of the 1980s, but you can see it's not hard to find citations in the popular press. There are over seven hundred newswire articles found by Lexis Nexis over this period for "global warming" plus "carbon dioxide".
If you don't have access to online abstract databases, you could try Google Scholar, which finds cited literature; it finds papers on CO2 induced global warming as far back as 1961. Once you pull out one article article from the 1980s, it cites earlier and earlier ones. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the greenhouse effect and anthropogenic climate change was a hotly contested research topic in the 1980s, and papers had been snowballing for the prior two decades.
Of course, in planetary science it certainly has been known that CO2 traps heat, probably for over a century. In fact it was known in the 1950s that CO2 is what makes Venus so hot; it was space science that prompted planetary scientists to compare Venus and Earth, and wonder whether CO2 on Earth was increasing as a result of human activities.
Let me suggest that if you tried really hard, and found NO pre 1990 references, then there is something very wrong with the way you are doing the search. I suppose if your wife was cheating on you and you didn't want to believe it, you could look thousands of places for evidence where you'd never find it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Read it or burn it at your leisure.
-- Stephen.
Scientists are just as biased and emotion driven as anyone else. Just look at the Slashdot community who claim to be scientists. They are one of the most hateful groups on the internet.
I was actually thinking of that as part of 'access'.
Rewriting by competent writers wouldn't make open access journals cheaper would it. :-)
They would have to understand what they're writing about, too, ruling out journalists. ;-)
Well, some journalists. I know science journalists with advanced degrees in their fields. If the need of such people were to rise, I don't doubt that we'd see more get trained.
It's not entirely clear that even a non-boring paper (and I've read some of those, too) would be accessible to all but the most keen person outside the immediate field. Apart from reading the abstract and conclusions, that is. (Which is all a lot of scientists typically read, come to it...)
I just have to say that in my personal opinion I'm not surprised that MS didn't do well, but last? How does a browser last this long that doesn't support the majority of web standards?
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Do you even realize how absurd that sounds? The researcher who cures any famous incurable disease not only will be famous and probably set for life from that alone, but their career will no know bounds. Who wouldn't want to hire the guy who cured a rare form of leukemia? He can easily rest on his laurels for the rest of his life or if he likes working, move on to new incurable disease. There will always be new diseases to cure.
We've all seen this definition of "obvious" play out with road ragers on busy highways. From the road rage perspective isn't it "obvious" that if I cut past that car ahead of me, I'll get there just a little bit sooner? Why is it I can still many of the cars that dangerously cut me off ten miles later, still struggling to gain every foot with the valiant effectiveness of trench combatants in WWI? When you actually study traffic flow on a highway, what you discover is that this kind of aggressively self-serving behaviour produces standing waves which reduce the net capacity of the highway as a whole. But still, somehow, it seems obvious to many that this driving strategy constitutes a good way to gain personal advantage.
Third, he's using *Darwin* here in an anecdote about over-reaching scientific orthodoxy undermined. Unbelievable. No, don't use Freud, Chomsky, Pauling, Schottky, or the Leaky family as an example of a scientist possibly prone to overreaching. No, use Darwin, Marie Curie, or Michael Farrady.
Dr. Richard Preston, the editor of "2007 Best American Science and Nature Writing", has a Ph.D. in English rather than any branch of science. Can it be surprising if the "best" scientific "writing", in his opinion is whatever tells the best story, rather than that which does the best job of explaining science? Keep in mind that we are talking about a branch of journalism here (hence the title: "Bad Science Journalism ...", not about something that is a part of science, itself.
Many of the same problems occur in school textbooks, unfortunately. There is considerable effort to make the material seem interesting and relevant, but unfortunately the science is not presented as clearly when they do that. One of the worst examples that I have seen was a middle school textbook that introduced genetics by talking about hippogriffs. Undoubtedly, this was an effort to capitalize on the popularity of a recent Harry Potter book that had featured hippogriffs as characters. Unfortunately the way the textbook used hippogriffs made little sense at all and only confused the explanation of genetics.
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. (Ambrose Bierce)
If you really want to talk about someone that made it as an underdog, remember the guy that discovered H. Pylori-- he was belittled and berated, ridiculed left and right for saying that there was even a possibility that those stomach ulcers may be due to bacteria.