Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Themselves Play Large Role In Bad Reporting
Hugh Pickens writes "A lot of science reporting is sensationalized nonsense, but are journalists, as a whole, really that bad at their jobs? Christie Wilcox reports that a team of French scientists have examined the language used in press releases for medical studies and found it was the scientists and their press offices that were largely to blame. As expected, they found that the media's portrayal of results was often sensationalistic. More than half of the news items they examined contained spin. But, while the researchers found a lot of over-reporting, they concluded that most of it was 'probably related to the presence of ''spin'' in conclusions of the scientific article's abstract.' It turns out that 47% of the press releases contained spin. Even more importantly, of the studies they examined, 40% of the study abstracts or conclusions did, too. When the study itself didn't contain spin to begin with, only 17% of the news items were sensationalistic, and of those, 3/4 got their hype from the press release. 'In the journal articles themselves, they found that authors spun their own results a variety of ways,' writes Wilcox. 'Most didn't acknowledge that their results were not significant or chose to focus on smaller, significant findings instead of overall non-significant ones in their abstracts and conclusions, though some contained outright inappropriate interpretations of their data.'"
The article was on quantum mechanics fer chrissakes!
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Whereas the mundane gets nothing. For every person murdered, or in a car accident, there are thousands in the area who had a humdrum day. For every house that burns down, thousands don't.
People who hear about these bad things and think the world is going to heck, are forgetting that nobody cares to hear about nothing happening.
Fund science like you fund business, and it becomes an exercise in marketing and hot topic buzzwords.
OK, it might take more energy to make a solar panel than we'll ever get back from it, but look at the economies of scale that we're leveraging!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
So basically, most reporters just regurgitate press releases rather than doing any of that actual journalism stuff. That's not unique to science/medical reporting. It happens in political reporting, business reporting, hell even sports reporting. The bad science reporting is just more obvious because it's easier to debunk.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I remember writing a post about this phenomena about a year ago. The short version of the story is that over the last 30-40 years, universities and research institutes have increasingly recruited "scientist" with strong tendencies towards showmanship, fraud, lying and bullshitting. This change is largely due to changing nature of incentives as well as methods of evaluation and promotion in these institutions. Peer reviewed research and grants are probably the biggest culprit. Here is the link: http://dissention.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/why-all-publicised-breakthroughs-are-lies/
1. Science is quite boring. By nature it's supposed to be, objective, logical, and devoid of feelings. But Scientists themselves are not typically boring people, they're humans, and humans are emotional beings.
2. Scientists aren't communications experts and suck at making dry discipline accessible to the public. Never was this more obvious than when I was in college. How many brilliant researchers really sucked at teaching? Pretty much most of them.
3. Scientists want to think their work matters, and therefore are inclined to extrapolate applications of their science to the public. When those applications get reported as a sure thing, then an exaggeration is bound to happen.
4. And of course, Science that can be show to be of great public benefit gets funding. Cha-ching!
http://www.beanleafpress.com
To be fair, university press releases are not written by the scientists who did the research, and in my experience the scientist often doesn't even get the chance to proof and correct them. I myself had my 15 minutes of international fame several years ago (the phone literally didn't stop ringing, interview requests from around the world, etc), all on account of a shockingly inaccurate press release from the university about some interesting but not earth-shattering research that I did.
The question is not "are are journals, as a whole, really that bad" ... the question is...
IS OUR CHILDREN LEARNING YET?!!
Support my political activism on Patreon.
They define spin as: "“spin” (specific reporting strategies, intentional or unintentional, emphasizing the beneficial effect of the experimental treatment)" They also mention: "We considered “spin” as being a focus on statistically significant results ... an interpretation of statistically nonsignificant results for the primary outcomes as showing treatment equivalence or comparable effectiveness; or any inadequate claim of safety or emphasis of the beneficial effect of the treatment." (emphasis added)
I understand the last two, but the first point doesn't make any sense at all. You can't really make conclusions (you can, but scientists will not believe it) about statistically insignificant results. "Spin" can be good in some cases (maybe not at all in clinical research): a research group that studies DNA repair might state, "Our findings on the function of the yeast homolog of SLHDT in dsDNA break recognition may represent a novel target for cancer therapeutics." In this case, the research group doesn't study cancer at all and have no business at all (from their results) mentioning it, but this might convince a cancer researcher to consider reading the paper and possibly looking into doing a quick/cheap experiment targeting SLHDT and testing this claim.
Surprising xkcd link
Is that "surprising" in the sense of "not an"?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.