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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 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
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
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
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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:
To an extent that's true, but science is science and sooner or later the facts will win out over dogma. Eventually someone is going to do the experiment that incontrovertibly proves that said underdog theory is true. Look at the prion guy. He took all kinds of shit for years, because *nobody* believed you could have an infectious protein, but eventually he won out. He can now send the haters a picture of his Noble prize.
That's sort of the rub, though, isn't it? Only a few new theories which suplant the old model do so with a really compelling single test. We can think of a few of the exceptions: General Relativity and the 1919 eclipse, the Big Bang (which was already pretty widely accepted, but never mind) and the discovery of the CMB, the giant impact theory of the origin of the Moon and the numerical simulations of the 1980s, etc. But these *are* the exceptions. Most theories which will eventually take over do so by slow accumulation of evidence in their favor, not with any slam dunk. As a result, convincing scientists to abondon the older model is difficult and there's no magic cut-off where you can say, "Now the new theory is better than the old one." So are the scientists being bad at science? Sure, it's easy to spin the narrative that way, but I'd say no. They're at worst being conservative and not wanting to leap onto a new model until they see that it's really better. Anyone expecting unbiassed science to come out of that lot is just a misguided idealist. Now I feel like you're being insulting. Individual scientists are human, we have our flaws and our blind-spots. Some of us have real agendas and a few are even downright dishonest. But as a group, we're contradictory, curious, and anti-authority. As a result, science is pretty good at self-correcting. A single scientist can lie to himself or even lie to others. But that always gets caught eventually because someone starts asking questions and we collectively have no vested interest in covering up lies.
(Any time you hear about scientists being involved in a massive conspiracy, like some anti-global warming fanatics will try to tell you, you can bet it's wrong. Any person who could prove evolution or GW conclusively incorrect would have just made a career and world-wide fame for herself.)
The nonsense that is a Ph. D. also turns a lot of people off from a scientific career. It's sort of difficult to explain why unless you're already going (or have gone) through it, but let's just say it's nothing like anyone expects it to be. A lot of what I (and probably most others) thought was a bastion of pure innovation and discovery turns out to be a rather bureaucratic and dishonest system at work - and it wants to use you.
But that's just something that discourages those who are already considering becoming professors or scientists because they like doing research. The bigger challenge is probably encouraging people to choose a scientific career in the first place, as you mentioned.
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.
I'm not so sure this is valid any more (and maybe it never was). Generations of scientist are trained to communicate from the earliest parts of their training -- believe it or not, lots of emphasis is placed on this. What scientists are not good at are sound-bites that fit nicely in on shows like Crossfire or Lou Dobbs where the 'we were attacked!' or 'we're losing jobs' or 'NAFTA!' 10 second catchphrases that feel awfully good but don't stand up to scrutiny generally prevail. But that's ok, science isn't meant to be good at that. It's meant to be able to say 'we're not sure', 'this is our best available knowledge' and, oh yeah, 'our previous best theory was wrong in several respects'. The public isn't good at listening to tempered, well-balanced arguments. And when 'luminous minds' DO speak up -- say, a bunch of nobel laureates put together a one page ad against economic folly (remember that one?) or Jared Diamond writes a book titled 'Collapse' -- who listens? And more importantly, who listens enough to suffer short term financial hardship because those minds tell them they'll lose more in the long run.
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Science -- Sealed, Delivered.
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 "
"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"
That's quite the caricature. I've been employed as a scientist for going on a decade now, and your depiction of John/Jane Q. Scientist works for only a tiny minority of the people I've worked with. I've worked with a hippies, hipsters, single moms, Norman Rockwell-esque family types, religious people, nonreligious people, sports fanatics, geeks, barflies, rednecks, people of all different races, colors, creeds, nationalities, and in general a wide, wide slice of humanity. Maybe you ought to not paint a group of people with a wide brush until you've at least met one or two of them first.
"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.
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!"
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.
Certainly. It's very easy to think everything is covered under science. But, there are many things (mainly, philosophical questional) that some would try to group under science because they believe they can conjecture out an answer.
Perhaps you haven't heard of cosmology and WIMPs vs MACHOs? Seriously, though, people who tend to quickly polarize over Global Warming tend to do so because of the seemingly obvious ramifications of admitting whether Global Warming exists. In short, the issue has more to do with people unwilling, on both sides, to go over the evidence and accept the proof that's available and leave it at that. But, then it's the same issue that came up ages ago when discussing the racial relations (especially, any claimed superiority) of various ethnicities. And *that* issue is still unresolved because dogma can override common sense.
Sorry to break it to you, but universities existed long before there were governments to fund them. And, they will continue to exist long after governments refuse to fund them. Academics, in general, are interested in their work above all else. Now, this may lead to dogma and pet theories without any evidence. But, that doesn't translate into trying to sustain a revenue stream (well, at least, it only does so in the sense of funding their research, not in padding the academic's pocketbook). And sure, there are academics who are in it for the money, just like there are charlatens in any field. But, there isn't any evidence (at least, none I'm aware of) to hint at some sort of inherent academic conspiracy, no matter how good such conjecturing looks good on paper.
Or, people with evidence they think will be helpful are trying to warn people of the potential risks of merrily continuing our current actions. Most, realizing they *don't* know the long-term consequences (at least for humanity) of what happens if we continue, urge those with the most power to effect change (citizens and through them, their nations) to effect change. Of course, they realize they can't do much (at least, not without advocating military force) to push "the poor" countries or dictatorships to do the right thing. So, the tend to focus on "the rich".
We're already engaging in an experiment on a planetary scale (you know, burning all that oil, coal, etc). And it happens that people are constantly making predictions based on those fossil fuels burned and how that affects the global climate. And all those scientists with their measurements of ocean CO2 absorption, temperature stations, measurements of ice sheets, etc all provide the data to confirm or deny those predictions. The only real question, then, is if the people on either side are actually looking at the theories that repeatedly pass and the evidence collected (to verify that it does, in fact, not contradict the theory). And if one side, after seeing the evidence, dismisses it based upon their own beliefs without any proof, then they are being anti-science. But, that says nothing about Global Warming.
I'll try to be more angry next time.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
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.
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.
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.
Yes, but there aren't really two sides in the global warming debate. I don't know of any credible expert who denies that humans are drastically raising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and that it's going to change the climate somehow. The ongoing debate is over what's going to happen next, but that's a very complicated debate with a lot of subtlety and doesn't make for a good right vs. left narrative so it doesn't really get covered properly in the media. Instead what we get is whackjobs saying "Climate change isn't real! Humans aren't doing anything!" getting air time trying to shout down the scientists who devote their careers to studying this subject. Or we get pseudo-science documentaries about the scary "reality" of global warming that only shows a combination of all of the worst case scenarios. Neither of these is acceptable or responsible journalism.