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."

Comments

Par for the course

[TheMeuge]

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.

Re:Par for the course

[jay-za]

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.

Not having explored this more than looking at my own willingness to believe some things, what I've found is that in many instances the establishment (or more specifically, doctors and scientists) are responsible for pushing people down this road.

That above statement needs some qualification, so here's what I've come up with (for myself). People who work in the scientific field (for convenience I'll refer to them as scientists, even through I'm referring to doctors, dentists, ...) often (and I'm going to generalise because it's been something I've noticed in general. Tihs does not apply to everyone) seem to be very scared of saying "I don't know", or admitting that another (alternative) field of study may have got it right, or at least more right than mainstream science. This leads to a situation where the scientists (doctors, physicists, etc...) will slam things they don't believe in as being wrong simply because they don't like the field of study that produced the result.

Add to that the fact that science is not absolute, and ,especially in medicine, breakthroughs happen fairly frequently that move the field forward and at the same time prove previous theories to be untrue (or at least substantially imcomplete). When scientists (who slam people who disagree with them) claim this week that X=2Y, and then next week that X=2Y + 1/Z, the lay person loses confidence in them.

It's this lack of confidence that leads people to trust pretty much anytihng that is fed to them, as long as it fits the following criteria:

1) Sounds believable
2) The person presenting the evidence seems trustworthy
3) The evidence being presented is convincing enough to the lay person
4) The new theory ("fact") is something they want to believe

Additionally, scientists often see themselves (or at least, well known members of their community) as being infallible (to a degree), and expect the average lay person to believe everything they say without proof (and here I mean proof that the lay person understands). This is an unrealistic expectation. Scientists themselves will not believe experts in other conflicting areas of study (who often are hucksters and frauds, but not always) because they don't understand the evidence presented. What I'm saying here is that people in general don't like being forced to accept as proof something they don't understand, whether ot not it is true.

Exacerbating the problem is the entire issue of religion and faith. I believe in God. I also believe in science (and believe those who hide behind religion are idiots). The two are not mutually exclusive, in fact, to me they compliment each other perfectly. Yet many scientists (and here I'm talking less about doctors and other "soft" scientists, and perhaps only a vocal minority of the rest) are critical of me and others like me who believe in God. This adds to the lack of credibility in their eyes. (Please bear in mind that we are talking perspectives here, perhaps helping to explain a perception. This is not a war of God Vs. Science).

I think the only solution here is for scientists to be more open about what they do and don't know, as well as developing a more measured approach to dealing with things they are unfamiliar with. It definitely won't make the problem go away, but it will help.

And finally, don't forget that there are many, many thousands and millions of idiots out there.

Re:Complaints about writing

[zappepcs]

Poor writing is one thing. The talk that there is not enough people going into science and math fields of endeavor after college might simply be a symptom of something more distasteful indicated in the article. Of course, there is the financial to consider, but there is also something else. If you thought all your work would be politicized and you left as a pawn in someone's politics, would you be happy about it? Would that inspire you to study hard to work in that field?

When there is general distrust of a group of people, all that is left to motivate others to follow their footsteps is pure greed. Lets face it, scientists are not in the top 500 richest people in the world, now are they?

The reverse side of that coin is that there is no positive image of such groups, and this is just another look at the negative. Psychology at work. It takes real dedication to commit to some field of employment that everyone thinks is corrupt or devoid of reward. Much easier to imagine yourself as a WWE wrestler than an astrophysicist when you are young. What is pointed out in a backhand way is that we are discouraging the young by no smacking down the bad ones now.

Well, that was my take

Politically Correct bias?

[grassy_knoll]

Given the example in the article, and this quote:

What gets lost is the scientific method, the idea that novel proposals need to be thoroughly vetted and tested, no matter how intuitively attractive they are.

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:

In recent years, Putnam has been engaged in a comprehensive study of the relationship between trust within communities and their ethnic diversity. His conclusion based on over 40 cases and 30 000 people within the United States is that, other things being equal, more diversity in a community has a correlation [expressed as a beta equal to 0.04 in a multiple regression analysis (see Putnam, 2007)], to less trust both between and within ethnic groups. Although only a single study, limited to American data, and the Census tract Herfindahl Index of Ethnic Homogeneity only explaining 0.16 % of the variance in trust in neighbours in the regression model presented (Putnam, 2007) it claims to put into question both contact theory and conflict theory in inter-ethnic relations. According to conflict theory, distrust between the ethnic groups will rise with diversity, but not within a group. According to contact theory, distrust will decline as members of different ethnic groups get to know and interact with each other. Putnam describes people of all races, sex and ages as "hunkering down" and going into their shells like a turtle. For example, he did not find any significant difference between 90 year olds and 30 year olds.

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.

Biased journalism may lead to biased science

[Btarlinian]

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.

Re:obvious != right

[Rei]

And yet, you see it all the time. For example, the article about the cook/tax dodger/inventor who came up with a perpetual motion machine which was posted on Slashdot a month or so ago. Or Pimentel's annual widely publicized reports on ethanol being energy negative, despite everyone else's studies coming up with numbers of about 30% positive. Or pretty much every article about anyone who challenges anything about global warming. It's always the plucky renegade scientist who discovered some brilliant notion that everyone in the scientific community had missed but the other scientists are too jealous/blinded by hubris in their ivory towers to see and accept what should be so obviously true to everyone else.

I expect the opposite....

[Joce640k]

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.

Can you cite these?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you cite these thousands of studies over one hundred of years? I am truly interested in them.