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Why Is So Much Reported Science Wrong (berkeley.edu)
An anonymous reader writes: An article from Berkeley's California Magazine explains some of the reasons science reporting is often at odds with actual science. Quoting: "Where journalism favors neat story arcs, science progresses jerkily, with false starts and misdirections in a long, uneven path to the truth—or at least to scientific consensus. The types of stories that reporters choose to pursue can also be a problem, says Peter Aldhous, [lecturer and reporter]. 'As journalists, we tend to gravitate to the counterintuitive, the surprising, the man-bites-dog story,' he explains. 'In science, that can lead us into highlighting stuff that's less likely to be correct.' If a finding is surprising or anomalous, in other words, there's a good chance that it's wrong.
On the flip side, when good findings do get published, they're often not as earth shattering as a writer might hope. ... So journalists and their editors might spice up a study's findings a bit, stick the caveats at the end, and write an eye-catching, snappy headline—not necessarily with the intent to mislead, but making it that much more likely for readers to misinterpret the results." The article also makes suggestions for both journalists and the scientific community to keep science reporting interesting while being more accurate.
On the flip side, when good findings do get published, they're often not as earth shattering as a writer might hope. ... So journalists and their editors might spice up a study's findings a bit, stick the caveats at the end, and write an eye-catching, snappy headline—not necessarily with the intent to mislead, but making it that much more likely for readers to misinterpret the results." The article also makes suggestions for both journalists and the scientific community to keep science reporting interesting while being more accurate.
...our generation has largely given up on science. We all reap the benefits but I find the level of science education to be abysmal. People can't distinguish between fact and fiction in news reporting and our wonderful government (many of them) don't want to believe *actual data* about things like global warming, etc. - because it's not "convenient" for their economic or religious beliefs. And of course some of those people become the reporters that report on these things, and they are ignorant, too.
It's really quite sad. We got to #1 in this world because of science, but we are turning into a society of cultish freaks who don't wan't to believe anything they don't like, regardless of the actual evidence.
Unfortunately science has been caught up in political agendas and media trying to create interesting headlines. People talk about stories fitting the narrative and its clear sometimes science is trying to do the same. Twisting words is a lot easier then twisting numbers. Science is based on facts and figures, not hope and predictions. You cannot simply use numbers you like and ignore numbers you don't like. That's a lot like telling a story based only on some facts and ignoring others. Simple because you create a false narrative when you do not paint the whole picture.
Journalism is a shambles these days. Democracy can't function without ethical journalism and we've got very little, hence the state of things. People terrified in their homes when the US is safer then ever. Obama is a muslim, Trump thinks all mexicans are rapists - this kind of intellectual dishonesty has real and serious consequences.
"Scientific consensus" is an oxymoron. If you don't understand why, then you are not following the scientific method.
Also, journalists have become corrupt little trolls, trolls matching exactly the "throw something out there and see if anyone will bite" definition.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
You guys are wrong. The science is settled. I read that somewhere. Even heard it in Congress once or twice.
That's why they do this to us.
Science reporting is bad because reporters are lazy and rewrite press releases.
If they did simple things, like looked at absolute numbers instead of percentages, or understood absolute and relative risks, or even understood statistics they might do a better job. But that requires math and statistical knowledge, both of which are hard for reporters. If they could do those they wouldn't have been reporters.
Maybe they could apply some critical thinking skills too? Although a reporter with no credentials probably wouldn't get real far down that path.
It is often funny to read about any topic as reported by journalists when you actually know a little about the topic.
The funniest one I can remember is a guy saying on the news that the Oklahoma bomber had just been identified as "John Doe". The poor guy really believed his name was John Doe. That journalist has committed suicide since. Go figure...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
When you chase any story for "ratings", you're doing it wrong. Just report the facts and stop trying to write fiction. All we have today are a bunch of short story writers who base their story on some truth but try to sensationalize the story to sell more papers, commercials, etc.
You write entertainment, not news, which is not the way it used to be. Unfortunately the true news journalists are either dead or retired.
The cynic in me thinks the main purpose of spreading misinformation is to fire up the comments section and rake in those sweet sweet ad revenue bucks as Dongus A tries to fight Dongus B on some non-debatable issue
I mean look at Slashdot, it's basically how it runs
Remember when news was just a dump of facts? Me neither... was it ever like that?
Science reporting is frequently wrong because journalists are usually idiots. I mean, they're smart and all, but they know nothing about science, but are stupid enough to think they do. Almost every story that has the word "kilowatt" and "kilowatt-hour" misstates what those mean. Journalists major in stuff like English and French and "Journalism" or "Communication." They know how to write. As to understanding what they are writing about, well, er, let's get on to the next story.
It is unfortunate that in this day and age, it is necessary to explain how science works, and why it is different from other belief systems.
First science is a belief system. The fundamental axiom of science is that an objective reality exists, is independent of the observer, and that by investigation, truths about that reality can be discovered.
What makes it work is that progress in science depends critically on getting it wrong. A couple hundred years ago, people were looking at fire (Fire's Cool), and wondering how it works. Deep thinkers thought deeply about it, and came up with a hypothesis: There was this stuff, phlogiston, that escaped into the air and that was why fire burned, and why stuff that burned mostly disappeared. Good theory.
Then some pesky scientists - who were trying to put numbers to how much phlogiston was in different things - discovered that if you sealed up stuff, so air couldn't get in or out, and burned something, the weight was exactly the same. Hmm. The scientists first concluded that they had captured phlogiston. Great, let's figure ot what it is. Except that burning different things, led to different kinds of phlogiston. The science was a little wrong.
New experiments brought new results. Burning magnesium led to a weight gain, not a loss, so maybe it captured phlogiston. If that were true, then the ash (calx) should burn, right? More phlogiston! Except that it would not. More problems.
To shorten what could be a very long story, in 1774 or thereabouts, two scientists separately and independently came up with a more correct explanation, something to do with oxygen. In 200 years, their explanation has not yet been found to be fundamentally wrong.
Science moves forward by being wrong. A theory is presented, scientists test it's limits, and if there are things that are wrong, they are made better. The process repeats. Every time a mistake is found, every time science is wrong, it gets better. It's like a fine wine, it improves with age. Also, like a fine wine, it is not democratic. The fact that a whole lot of people seem to prefer that Thunder-stuff wine, does not make it a fine wine. The fact that a lot of people disagree with a scientific principle does not make it wrong, just unpopular.
Why is so much science wrong? Well, Homer, that's how it works.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
I use to have a job editing and translating news pieces from a well-known American newspaper into an Asian language for the local readers. Due to my science background, I was frequently assigned the science news. I didn't need to deal with the journalists directly but I worked with the editors.
Those guys were good and intelligent people to work with, but most of them lacked a science background. I had to do rounds of push and pull with the scientific bits. Translating the English word "space" as in relativistic space-time was not the same as translating it in the context of flying to the earth orbit, and I needed to tell them about it. And while I sometimes added my tiny clarifications to the originally unclear message (read: journalist crap), I had to write much longer notes for them.
Also, they were more concerned with the readers' psychological response than scientific rigor. I might have preferred a technically correct way of saying things, but they pointed out that it didn't fit very nicely into the general tone and style of the whole website (not just the article's, but their "overall" style). Very good points, but at first both of us were surprised by each other. We learned to work it out, taking compromises, and I tried to influence them, with limited success.
The moral was that journalists have vastly different priorities compared with a science/tech writer. They may do a good job of notifying the public, but informing, not so much. They paint an image of what it looks and feels like, in a kinda impressionist way, but reading it for education is like studying Monet's lilyponds for botany. The good ones will provide link to sources so the interested reader can dig deeper and judge by himself. The poor ones sell clickbaits.
fill in the ???? with tech or any other term and viola
we are reading this on /.
Part of the problem is that most scientists are not journalists, and most journalists are not scientists. If a journalist takes enough time to become an expert in the scientific field he is reporting on, it isn't likely that he will ever come to market with his product, the reports, in a timely enough fashion to actually make a living on it.
Part of the problem is that many scientists lack the literary skill to communicate effectively with laypeople, and have to rely too much on journalists who don't have the competence needed to report on the subject material.
Another problem is that the proletariat crave the truth... the conclusions. As a mathematician, I reject the notion that empirical science determines truth. Yes, you can craft an experiment with reproducible results, but your results will still be just empirical observations. If you do a study, and find out that there is approximately a 78% correlation between wearing blue sweaters and getting hives, and that this result was reproduced three times given blah blah , then report that. Don't report that blue sweaters cause hives. Oh wait, the only thing the public cares about is what caused the hives... they have no appreciation for the results being what they are. The public wants to extrapolate conclusions only.
I like mathematics. Assuming a few axioms, prove something. What you then have is truth.
Why is so much reported _anything_ wrong? The media wants to come across as the trusted expert on everything, but the truth is they don't know squat about anything.
If my post were a car, this sig would be its bumper-sticker.
So they believe in heartwarming things proven to be wrong.
Well, at least someone with a loud voice has finally said it.
Journalists need(ed) to fill column-space, and have to get readers' attention. But although it is difficult to get a high-end concept through to them — they won't come back with a galley proof for you to check — the more common result is the journalist "spicing up" the words, without really understanding that they are changing the meaning.
That and flying cars. Everyone wants to believe in flying cars.
Short Answer: Obligatory PHD Comics: The Science New Cycle
Longer Answer: Reporters know "Scientists have found that X is weakly correlated with an increase in Y. More studies will clarify whether this is correlation, causation, or whether the first study was incorrect." won't generate views (or sell papers for the old school newspaper folks in the house). Instead "X found to cause Y" is a much better headline for generating more views. Even better is clickbait like "You won't believe the horrible things X has been found to cause!" So reporters go for the most sensational spin on the scientific study in order to get more views.
The side effect of this is a mistrust of scientists who "can't make up their minds." After all, today it's being reported that "X directly leads to Y, scientists 100% sure." Tomorrow, though, the reporting says "X shown to have no effect on Y!" The actual details of the studies don't matter. It doesn't matter that this is how science works (someone tests a theory, proves or disproves it, and then others try to replicate it). It doesn't matter that science "changing its mind" isn't a weakness, but a strength of science. All that matters is that the headlines changed so scientists must not know what they're doing. Luckily, the local creationist/anti-vax proponent/homeopath/etc says they know what's what and they insist that they would never change their story.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
It's not that science in particular is increasingly wrong, it's that journalism in general is increasingly wrong. It has somehow become acceptable to spin a story into a sensational half-truth. To those over 40, it is painfully clear that a major transition has taken place. The "entertainment value" of a story is now more valuable than the actual truth, and this is clearly evident in the slow but sure rotting away of the principles of journalism. Even NPR is guilty -- you can now hear the personal opinion of the NPR newscaster in nearly every story that runs (not in the words they use, but in their tone of voice). Almost every "objective" news story is effectively a personal opinion piece.
Ironic, given the subject matter of editors mangling science. "Why Is So Much Reported Science Wrong" can be interpreted as perfect editors reporting science that turns out to be wrong.
If it's posted here, and regurgated by one of the lackies on staff then yes it will bear a 90% rating of being incorrect..
way to go DHI
Why pick on science reporting? How much of the media's reporting on other topics is thorough, diligent, balanced, and representative of the real world? I guess lousy science reporting is easier to identify because people who are science literate tend to read it and complain loudly.
Really all reporting suffers from the same problems. Do you think the reporting on, say, ISIS is any less sensationalist or distorted. The mechanisms and incentives are the same.
"When you chase any story for "ratings", you're doing it wrong"
The paycheck I get by the end of the week begs to differ.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you. But if you actually make them think, they'll hate you" --Don Marquis
As to Creationists, well, they are the prototypical pseudoscientists, and much of the anti-science strategy used by the tobacco and fossil fuel industries to attack science is largely lifted from the hard work Creationists put into attacking biology.
Cite please?
The most comprehensive citation would be the book The Merchants of Doubt: http://www.amazon.com/Merchant...
But you could start here: http://scienceblogs.com/denial...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
...is that journalists generally don't know what they are talking about when it comes to science. They live in a world of politics and history, and they often even screw those up. It is generally accepted that, as a journalist, you don't really need to know the details of something, since an expert can explain it to you.
That said, science journalism, as bad as it is now, is still a lot better than in the 1970s. Then, they really didn't know anything. That's why you get stupid articles in Time and Newsweek about "global cooling" and the "coming ice age", even though actual scientists like Carl Sagan are rolling their eyes at the stupidity of journalists.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Every time a man bites a dog, a head is hit on a nail. Every time a MSc educated BBC journalists get their basic science and technology wrong on air, I feel like biting a dog.
Exactly the problem. Research used to be real research done at public universities using public money and it would ultimately benefit many people, then people realized they could make big money from it and now we have big corporations doing research, little of which benefits the masses and mostly only benefits the few.
Journalists, researchers, scientists, etc, nearly all off of which have bias towards the entity paying them. So we get bad research, bad journalism and bad science. There are a few who are truly unbiased, but if you're working for the wrong company, you'll find yourself out of a job if your unbiasedness clashes with the company directive. So would you rather eat and keep doing the work you know or stick to being ethical?
You can boil down nearly all of the problems with the world today to money.
"consensus" is a summarizing word.
What it means is that science does not actually consist of one scientist doing something and announcing a result.
It's science when that scientist convinces other scientists using evidence and clear, step by step reasoning that their theory is right.
Any nut can announce a theory, and tell the world how groundbreaking it is-- and many do. The hard part of science is filling in the details, so that you can show your work to other scientists and have them understand it and believe it. That's science.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Normally Reporters paraphrasing is no big deal, unless it's technical, then they typically murder the story.
Reported science isn't wrong, science reporting is wrong. Big difference.
Most reporting is wrong.
Reporters often don't care about what they are reporting about, don't do research on the subject, don't do fact checking or anything else that sounds like work.
The only difference with science reporting is you can often tell how bad the reporters got the story.
While the author probably is very right about journalists being focused on 'surprising' and 'spectacular' results, there might also be a problem with the science itself. In an effort to reward 'good' researchers, scientists all over the world are caught in a rat-race to produce x papers each year. Now, while the goal is very noble, this is often at odds with the way science works. Sometimes experiments fail. Sometimes they just confirm what everyone already assumed. Sometimes results are not conclusive. Not something that gets you easily published in 'Nature'... but still your job depends on you publishing enough papers, each year again. That leads to situations where researchers themselves massaging their results. Leave out certain 'outliers', or 'forget' to mention something, and suddenly your result does get very significant! Bingo! According to some, up to 75% of all papers have applied some trick to get published. Of course, combining these embellished papers with the bias of journalists does lead to lots of interesting, but nonsense articles. And this comes from someone whose income depends on said research.
Entertainers? That's so 1990's. The real purpose of media, now that six corporations own 90% of it in the USA, is to operate as the PR organ of corporate conglomerates. Why else would some newspaper in Podunk that hasn't turned a profit in a decade get bought up by one of the six? To report what they want it to, so that it gets repeated on Fox or the NY Times, so the AP wire service serves up the day old slop back in Podunk in a perfect circlejerk of journalism.
I don't think you've learned the same history as I did...
Historically, all research was done through private wealthy benefactors (not the government). That never really stopped. What happened is that governments started to fund some specific research. But this research was/is mostly contracts done using semi-private labs.
The real turning point was when governments started funding their own universities and labs in the 19th century. But this is not the modern university research lab that you might be thinking about. Basically a quasi-religious institution that wasn't really open to the general public (elites only). The primary goal of these institutions was to train the bureaucracy. It wasn't until the early 20th century, you see the beginnings of the modern research university in Germany with a more scientific focus. By concentrating the resources of the state, they were able to finally become as influential as the private research labs.
The German R&D model isn't really what you might think of it either. Take for instance the Fraunhofer Society. Although nominally a public institution, it conducts research with the goal of industrialization often on contract as it is primary funded by industry (e.g., using mostly private money, not public money). Perhaps ./-ers might be familiar with the MP3 audio compression development that has come out of Fraunhofer.
Sure there are now also pure research university groups doing good research with pure public money, but it has never (and probably never will be) exclusively that way.
Sturgeon's Law also applies to reporting in general.
Our press is largely based on capitalism, and capitalism tries to maximize customers. This means hype and marketing tricks are used to get and keep customers. Accuracy and balance is secondary.
The only solution is to get rid of capitalistic reporting. However, "socialistic" reporting has its own downsides, such as higher taxes, boring or bad writing, sluggish use of resources, and anti-capitalistic bias.
But I have to say, the BBC is probably better than most commercial news overall. Perhaps because they are balanced by the need to partially compete with commercial news. Maybe the solution is to find a good balance between too much and too little competition.
Table-ized A.I.
Fact checking and editing used to be the core of journalism.
Now editorial staffing is pretty much non-existent in most publications. Even if it does exist, the disproportionate power of the "star" journalist has any rendered editorial oversight limp at best (e.g., Dan Rathers, Jayson Blair).
Journalists used to cut their teeth with fact checking. Fact checkers were the checks-and-balances built into the historical journalism structure. Now with a publication paths that doesn't require them learning how to fact check (e.g., web publishing), budding journalists simultaneously are both inexperienced with fact checking and do not see any value in fact checking. Thus the facts that are reported suffer. That is the crux of the problem.
We are probably simply reliving the days of yellow journalism (from the late 19th century). Some speculated the original outbreak had to do with circulation wars at the time. The more things change, the more they remain the same...
Let's just hope a Pulitzer-Hearst war doesn't lead to a modern day Spanish-American War (if I can dabble in a little yellow journalism myself ;^)
"The chief difference between Creationist pseudo skepticism and corporate interests is that the latter want to preserve business models and profit, while the former wants to preserve a worldview against evidence that destroys it."
- I would say they have the same reasons. The creationists who use peoples beliefs to extort money and power have a business model and are profit-driven.
Real priests and pastors who care about people just shrug and continue about their business.
This article is a troll itself.
They could have just as easily said "most journalists are not physicists, and most physicists are not journalists"
-But then who would have read it?
In some ways, those sensationalist articles are good. They bring science into the discussions of everyday people. Even if they do not have the knowledge to confirm or deny them, it does incite interest. And maybe some will be interested enough to go learn more about it.
.. is that the Earth is Flat!
Compare the IQ ranges for various professions and you will see a clear indicator of why journalists write so much drivel, most of them are idiots catering for idiots.
What was faked was that he "invented" something. He disassembled an off the shelf clock and mounted it into a new case. That is not invention. There was no genius. Maybe curiosity if it wasn't a stunt/prank.
Reporters get science wrong because reporters get everything wrong. You notice it more when the subject is something you know well.
No, the populace isn't much to blame for the poor quality of work done by the media. The members of the media are to blame. The media has largely degenerated into a group that just repeats what others tell them. If they can find two people telling them the same thing they are good to go. Learning the subject matter enough to evaluate these people isn't really important anymore, doing their own investigations isn't really done that much anymore. Just get a couple of people to say the same thing, and if you can find two people to both say something controversial then "bonus points".
And this is not specific to science. It happens with pretty much any topic. Pick any topic that you have some sort of depth of knowledge and experience and you will most likely find that the media is incredibly superficial and ill-informed. Keep this in mind when reading things on topics where you lack knowledge and experience.
And don't try to take this into a political direction. There are plenty of science deniers at both ends of the political spectrum, both ends see things in terms of politics first and science second. Science that supports their politics embraced and science that conflicts with their politics is rejected, both the far left and far right do so.
> So when you, like a full bore retard, go "Where?" IT IS IN THE FRIGGING POST YOU REPLIED DO, FUCKWIT!
What a well thought out, well formed, and influencing argument.
Come on, man!
You know in the post that you were outraged at? Where it talks about the kid who left the USA? He was a different ethnicity from you WASPs. He was hounded out. That's why he's not in the USA any more. You made it abundantly clear that he wasn't trusted and wasn't wanted.
Yeah, all those people calling him brilliant, getting invited to the white house ... yep, that is sure being rejected. All the political correctness decrying him being investigated for a hoax bomb and being released without charges, all those people decrying this investigation as racist/islamophobic despite the fact that little white boys in liberal california have had the same thing happen to them? Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, has shared his story of being detained and questioned about his hoax bomb when he was a kid. A hoax bomb that had a clock and no visible explosives, sound familiar?
Oh? That would be why the guy who came up with the notion of heliocentrism was a Catholic Monk, right? Yes, Copernicus was a Dominican.
You're probably thinking of that Galileo kerfluffle, where Galileo called the Pope an idiot in his book about heliocentrism, and the Pope got in a snit at being called a simpleton? Hint: Galileo got in trouble for calling the Pope an idiot, not for heliocentrism, which idea was developed by that aforementioned Dominican....
Its interesting to note that this same Pope had defended Galileo long before this book was written, when Galileo was first advocating the notion of heliocentrism. The same Pope who at a later date asked him to write a book about heliocentrism.
After some of the damage we have done in the last 15 years, I don't know if that's still the case.
It's not and I was in the US and saw the change firsthand myself since it affected me. I was an RA with a US university and worked part of the time at Fermilab. When I started there in the late 1990's the senior European postdocs who were on the experiment I was on were all looking for faculty positions in the US. 4 years later, after the 11/9 attacks, almost every European postdoc, myself included, was looking to get out of the US at the earliest possible opportunity. I don't know any who were planning to stay.
Actually history shows scientists being part of the church for many centuries. Members of the clergy proposed and advanced heliocentrism, genetics, the big bang theory, the scientific method, etc. As another poster pointed out don't get confused by those who were persecuted mainly for political reasons, for mocking the pope. Also keep in mind that the fact that people within the church rejected various scientific discoveries at first is not something unique to religion. Many scientists are political in that they defend their turf, their field, their pet theories, their friends who have a stake in a competing theory. When many of the leading men of science rejected the Big Bang Theory they did so because it "smelled of creationism", the theory was put forward by a catholic priest at a catholic university, it didn't matter that this man was a world class physicist and astronomer trained at some of the most prestigious universities.
At one time young PhD candidates were being told not to follow their interest and study string theory. That the consensus was against it and you will potentially damage your career.
Men of science have their biases and politics, both men of science who are religious and men of science who are not religious.
without education of course...
I see this "Not Educated" meme all the time. Mostly by nitwits (not accusing you of being one BTW) who think because they are "Well Read/Literate" that means that their "Education" is complete and anyone who is not has "No Education". Nothing could be further from the truth. People who are illiterate are not "Uneducated" for the most part (especially in the past). They had more practical education. Most of the so-called modern, literate, educated populace would quickly starve to death if nearly everything they needed to survive weren't provided to them by seemingly less educated peers. The idea that somehow "Literate Education" is the only meaningful/useful educate is complete nonsense.
I wanted to mod you up "Insightful", but, couldn't as I'd already posted in this thread. As an Atheist (but not anti-religious where "religious" means believing in a set of moral principles and spending my time trying to adhere to them rather than worrying about forcing others to adhere to them), I applaud your analysis of the situation.
They will report any study no matter how flawed or inapplicable. to justify their position.
Plus they are idiots who can't tell a black hole from the hole in their ass.
Ah, so you think the story is he got invited to the whitehouse and that's all.
Really?
Are you REALLY that fucking stupid???
Yes they are. Advertisers pay based on what people watch. Media companies' income depends on advertisers, so they produce what people watch. Companies produce shit because people watch shit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
A funny phenomenon - When some story hits the news (the bigger the better) of which you have either personal knowledge, or you have expertise, it is almost always wrong in significant and important ways. In the worst cases, causality is reversed. In the best, some critical details which fundamentally change the flavor of the story (even if the outcome is correct) are completely screwed up. I have seen it many times in my industry, and I suspect a lot of you have also.
So why do we turn the page (or scroll down) and read a story on the Middle East or the economy and not assume that is just a screwed up? Why do we laugh at the presses incompetence at reporting science and not assume that all their other reporting is equally incompetent?
I approach all news with the mindset that basic facts about what happened are probably correct in a gross sense, but any nuance is probably wrong. I've seen to many stories written with an "angle" that was decided far before the investigation or interviews were started. Any story with an "angle" is almost certainly wrong.
Yes they are. Advertisers pay based on what people watch. Media companies' income depends on advertisers, so they produce what people watch. Companies produce shit because people watch shit.
No. Even if your interpretation were accurate the media would be to blame for maximizing profits rather than maximizing information disseminated. Don't forget that people are ignorant in part because the media chooses profits over all else in your hypothesis.
However contrary to your hypothesis the media is still in the business of disseminating news and information and they take short cuts and do it poorly. They lack journalistic integrity. Whatever fraction of the media is devoted to news and information it can still be done right.
Some "science" is flawed, because the science needs to "fit" the politics of the day, or, rather the $$$$$ that comes from the politicians.
Lettuce Produces More Greenhouse Gas Emissions Than Bacon Does
Bacon lovers of the world, rejoice! Or at the least take solace that your beloved pork belly may be better for the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions than the lettuce that accompanies it on the classic BLT.
This is according to a new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who found that if Americans were to switch their diets to fall in line with the Agriculture Department's 2010 dietary recommendations, it would result in a 38 percent increase in energy use, 10 percent bump in water use and a 6 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lettuce-produces-more-greenhouse-gas-emissions-than-bacon-does/
The problem with Galileo was not heliocentricism which was generally accepted by the church at the time, but by his end run around the pope to publish the work and not going the church bureaucracy route. Also, the big bang was proposed by a Catholic Priest physicist,Georges Lemaître.
Actually history shows scientists being part of the church for many centuries.
History shows scientists being a subgroup of the people who are literate and have free time. In the past, that meant the clergy, rich people, and people sponsored by rich people. Now, everyone is literate and almost everyone has enough free time to do science if they so wished, and can even get jobs doing science. If your implication is that religion is what was good for science, pray tell what is the current correlation between members of the clergy and scientific advance, and how it compares to non-clergy?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Slashdot needs an "Eloquent +1" mod. I'm far too verbose to be articulate. Even my novellas are often whittled down from my original drafts (I do preview - sort of, sometimes) and I can not manage to say much of what I want to say without needing to say many other things.
So, I don't actually use my mod points (I prefer to comment and not to judge), I'll just say that it is posts like your post that are why I visit as frequently as I do. I didn't actually learn anything new, factually-wise, from your post - I did, on the other hand, get to enjoy reading it and appreciate *how* it was composed.
Err... TL;DR: Thanks!
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
"Exactly the problem."
How is it? The paycheck comes from my employer considering my work's worth it. And my employer considers it's worth it because money flows his way more when I chase for ratings than when I go for scientific precision.
How can be a problem following the path the market rewards the most? Unless you consider capitalism itself being the problem, that is.
Given how geeks and nerds like to use science as a McGuffin for their petty squabbles and are the most vocal readers of science news, is it any wonder science journalism panders to intellectual-machismo? Is it that much of a surprise that science journalism is written to titillate, and thereby get it wrong, in order to appease a well-learned audience who just wants to use science to rub into their opponent's face? And it should be noted that quite a few of these like-educated readers do work in the field they're arguing about in the comments sections of such important reportage.
You can take the scientist out of the lab, but you can't take the haughty vainglorious nerd out of the scientist.
The final step: "critical exposure to scrutiny, peer review and assessment" In other words: convince other scientists.
So I'm not sure I'm ready to accept that web page as a definitive authority.
That was an example in reply to your statement "If you look at attempts to formalize the scientific method, you probably won't see a step that is, "convince other people"" That was a site on which the British Science Council "attempted to formalize the scientific method", and it did include the final step.
I'm sorry you don't understand that sharing your work-- and have other people critique it, and possibly even reject it-- actually is part of the scientific method, but nevertheless it is. Science is, to some extant, a series of protocols for checking your work against the real world, and having others look at your work is an essential part of it.
Yes, in fact, science is a human endeavor, done by humans.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
...about "global war..." - sorry - "climate change"???
String theory still has ample potential to be a dead-end, and a career waste. Unless it can find a way to narrow down the 10^500 possible variations it posits there is a serious credibility issue on the table there. Anthropocentric answers won't go down well with most scientists and that includes hard-core string theorists.
Science is in the open, but I pin most of the reporting woes on reporters that really don't understand what they are reporting on. ... Anybody can be a science reporter. Anybody can call them-self a scientist as well.
That's how it seems if you've had science training but have never known any reporters. Reporting is a job. You only have a certain (small) amount of time to deal with a subject so you rely on someone else who knows it better. You know you don't understand it very well, certainly not compared to them, and you know you're filtering it for someone else, in a particular spoon-feeding way. You want to be accurate, you want to help a reader who knows less than you've learned from the expert to learn something from the expert, but you also really want to meet your deadline.
You only have half an hour to write it up. Or you only have a 30-second block between Donald Trump and Miley Cyrus. Because people who watch the news would rather have the sound byte to talk about than to understand the science, and if you talk about something in detail they'll change the channel and the news loses money.
And if a media outlet has a dedicated science reporter, you're very lucky--not anybody can be a science reporter, at least not for anyone reputable. There aren't a lot of science reporter jobs out there.
The reporters are workers in a given system. Blaming them for not fixing it is like blaming the guy who installs your cable for Comcast's business model.
Realistically, nerds (for the most part) shouldn't be getting their news from the reporters who report to the masses. That's a way for you to get news if you don't care about understanding stuff. Nerds want to understand stuff. We should get our news from panels of experts, from lectures by experts, or from studies and reports and abstracts of them.
A good expert panel is absolutely amazing and you learn more from it than you would from watching a year of news. Don't blame reporters for doing their job; realize you're not their target demographic, and encourage others to take their news from sources that favor a far more curious mind.
String theory still has ample potential to be a dead-end, and a career waste.
In science a negative result is not a failure.
If your implication is that religion is what was good for science ...
I make no such claim. All I point out is that members of the clergy have contributed, and continue to contribute, to science. That religion is not inherently incompatible with science. Religion and science explore areas that do not overlap and hence are not in conflict, crudely: the mechanics of the universe (including life) vs god's actions, intentions and expectations.
As for today, the vatican operates an observatory that participates in leading edge cosmological research. Anecdotally my cousin attending a catholic high school probably received a more rigorous and comprehensive science education than I did at my public high school. At my public state university the dean of the chemistry department was a local parish priest for a few years. So yeah, the clergy still seem to be involved in real science from education through to advanced research.
Sure, there exists at least one religious person who contributes to science. But that means nothing. Does being religious, nowadays, correlate positively or negatively with scientific contribution? If, as you say, there's no conflict then surely there wouldn't be a negative correlation, now would there?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
That was an example in reply to your statement "If you look at attempts to formalize the scientific method, you probably won't see a step that is, "convince other people"" That was a site on which the British Science Council "attempted to formalize the scientific method", and it did include the final step.
Ok, so to add a bit of emphasis and interpretation here, "If you look at attempts to formalize the scientific method, you probably won't see a step that is, 'convince other people'." The reason I put that word "probably" in there is that, well... you never know what some idiot is going to put in his attempt to formalize the scientific method. And let's not pretend like there's nobody saying stupid things in political councils.
But that aside, as I pointed out, it doesn't say, "convince other people". It says that you should make your work available for public scrutiny, and I could present a rationale for why that makes sense. One very good reason to put that into the formalized form of the "scientific method" is science is iterative, and the knowledge gained from it is refined over history as it's taken up by new people. In that sense, it's important that the output of the scientific endeavor is shared publicly.
But "convince other people"? That way madness lies. You're basically leaving open the possibility that Creationism might be "better science" than Evolution, depending on which side has convinced the greater number of people.
I have yet to hear the kid's explanation. I'm not giving him a free pass, but after just reading the post on how and why science reporting is so bad. We know he was questioned and detained for what turned out to be a commercial clock board in a pencil box (or something similar.) There are more innocuous explanations. He could have, for instance, gotten a discarded, damaged circuit board working, and put it pencil box for lack of any other available, undamaged enclosure. I'm not proposing this because I think the kid is blameless in the circumstances or their aftermath... but primarily to point out that there are other explanations.
Loren Osborn
The myth of a lone scientist whose work is not understood and is dismissed by mainstream science is exactly that: a myth.
No it isn't. Einstein was such a guy. It took years that his theories got accepted.
It did not. Where the heck does that myth come from? Einstein's work was published, understood, and not merely accepted but extended by mainstream scientists remarkably quickly. Kaufman was already giving lectures calculating relativistic mass increase of electrons using (and crediting) Einstein's formulas the same year that Einstein's Annalen der Physik paper appeared. Max Planck's "Das Prinzip der Relativität und die Grundgleichungen der Mechanik" came out a year after. By 1907, when Minkowski got into the act, pretty much everybody was using Einstein's work.
Einstein's work was emphatically not "dismissed by mainstream science;" it was central to mainstream science. To the contrary, it was Einstein's critics whose work never gained consensus, and was eventually dismissed as crankery.
This is exactly how scientific consensus works.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Simply follow the money. It doesn't matter if it comes from business or government because both have agendas that they need justification for. They pay for a result NOT research. To get around this is and get back to doing real science a double blind system of grants to scientists must be put in place. Neither the scientist nor the funder know who each other is.
Add in the media who make up the editorial headlines and always go for the scariest interpretation of the summary (they NEVER read the actual report) and you have a recipe for hyped headlines and bogus science.
My old friend Bro. Guy Consolmagno (now Director of the Vatican Observatories) used to teach at different Catholic colleges around the US. One of the courses he taught was "Science for Non-Science Majors", and years ago, he gave us the rundown on the majors who used to take that course: next to the bottom were the business majors, who didn't get it, but didn't let that worry them. The very bottom of the food chain, the worst of all, were the communications majors, who didn't get it, and didn't *know* that they didn't get it.
Those are the folks who go into journalism, and PR, and HR... and you wonder why they're all so bad?
mark
Is the Recorded History of Tainted Nature, Language Automation. 2015 year minds in billion year bodies.
I have noticed, through the years, an interesting thing about the mass media: *every* time I read something about a topic in which I'm very knowledgeable, it's inevitably wrong. And I don't mean geeked-out minutae wrong, but fundamentally flawed in some way.
Journalism is a very non-technical (non-scientific, non-statistics) degree program. Furthermore, it yields a very low paying job. It's *highly* competitive- so the salaries suck, especially with the move to news that's more entertainment than not, and all the Homecoming kings and queens types want to be on the TeeVee. Why on Earth would any geek want to put up with that crap? And be paid poorly to boot? I also have a theory that the idiots that pay a bunch of money for a degree with crappy salary prospects are being funded by their parents, who apparently don't know any better either- or have enough money that they don't care. So we wind up with a bunch of people that haven't struggled financially, or worked hard to attain a tough science degree- is it any wonder that we have a generally Leftist media?
I'm sure there's some out there that really care and want to be the next Woodward or Bernstein, but unless you're talking about JAMA or or a trade rag, forget quality science reporting.
Its not me saying anything. Various churches have said that the discoveries of science are not in conflict with faith. So whether a member of such a church contributes to science or not is not a matter of faith but some other factor.
I have noticed, through the years, an interesting thing about the mass media: *every* time I read something about a topic in which I'm very knowledgeable, it's inevitably wrong. And I don't mean geeked-out minutae wrong, but fundamentally flawed in some way.
Journalism is a very non-technical (non-scientific, non-statistics) degree program. Furthermore, it yields a very low paying job. It's *highly* competitive- so the salaries suck, especially with the move to news that's more entertainment than not, and all the Homecoming kings and queens types want to be on the TeeVee. Why on Earth would any geek want to put up with that crap? And be paid poorly to boot? I also have a theory that the idiots that pay a bunch of money for a degree with crappy salary prospects are being funded by their parents, who apparently don't know any better either- or have enough money that they don't care. So we wind up with a bunch of people that haven't struggled financially, or worked hard to attain a tough science degree- is it any wonder that we have a generally Leftist media?
I'm sure there's some out there that really care and want to be the next Woodward or Bernstein, but unless you're talking about JAMA or or a trade rag, forget quality science reporting.
...an education, and a long life of idiocy are not mutually exclusive.
They are rarely held accountable for anything the write.
Reread this para, replacing 'science' with 'reality'. Whether it's science, or politics or business or international affairs, it's the same story.
'Science and journalism seem to be uniquely incompatible: Where journalism favors neat story arcs, science progresses jerkily, with false starts and misdirections... '
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism
A brownish kid with lights and wires sticking out of a back pack. Come on. How fucking stupid do you have to be. We dont want stupid people in this country do we? Science fairs are for messy vocanoes not bomb timers.
I don't know about journalists. I was a Astronomy/Physics major back in the 70's. I remember coming to study at one of the largest and most well funded universities in the nation. It wasn't very long that I learned that the scientists with whom I studied were flawed men. There was a variety of cheating and falsification in the papers being published. I saw one physics professor hold back a peer-review because it was too similar (and ahead of) his own work. In another place, I saw a physicist alter data to fit more closely his theory. Science cannot function without a fanatical adherence to truth. As I think on it, I rather doubt that journalism can either.
The thing I really disagree with is your implication that this sort of stuff is new. When I was younger, journalism looked better because we had nothing to compare it to. There was sort of a consensus news environment, and it was really enlightening in the 1960s to have my mother in a teachers' dispute that was reported in the media, because what she said and what they said were very different. Currently, we have lots of viewpoints easily available. It's not that we have more questionable stuff in the media nowadays, but we have more sources to ask questions about it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I agree that instances of superficiality and being ill-informed are not new, however I think there is a much greater frequency of such instances. Journalists being much less likely to research. Journalists being much less likely to be balanced, the rise of "gonzo journalism" behaviors where objectivity and distance is abandoned.
Follow the money. There are too many people whose lives depend on supposedly discovering something, for it all to be good science, and not enough actual things ready and waiting to be discovered. Universities are machines for producing studies on things that don't need studying and proposing hypothesis that don't need proposing.