I am a scientist. I essentially agree with the post that said âoeitâ(TM)s not the scientists who are surprised but the reportersâoe, but on reflection I realized that there is an aspect of surprise in the wider scientific community vs the scientists conducting the research themselves that can be genuine. i think the practice is somewhat incidental and not of any nefarious intent. The practice is not specifically to get grants but to write an interesting story, and it may have more to do with science writers than scientists.
The proof of it unfortunately requires access to the scientific literature, but if you search for âoesurprisingâ in Google Scholar, that word is unlikely to appear very often â" much less is it likely to appear in the scientific article itself that corresponds to a press release that includes the word âoesurprisingâ. The reason is because those of us who write scientific articles wouldnt describe our results as surprising (most of the time), but those who turn our research results into narratives for press releases do â" possibly as a gimmick, or possibly because the way we explain it to them emphasizes different possible outcomes that could have been possible, and that âoesome peopleâ might have expected it to go a different way.
Another reason it gets translated as surprise may be just related to how convoluted some scientific decision-making can get it, as a result of trying one thing, having it not work but noticing something âoestrangeâ, following up on that strange thing, and realizing that what seemed like an outlier ended up being related to something very specific and reproducible that no one previously knew about. Again, surprising at some level, but not at a low level to the scientist â" eg a scientist probably felt surprise at the first result with âoestrangeâ findings, but having followed it up to its logical conclusion, confirmation that something systematically strange is going on in a reproducible way that suggests a real phenomenon is no longer surprising bc at this point the scientist probably had a hunch he or she was on to something, or else he or she wouldnt have been pursuing those additional experiments â" and yet that is probably the result that a science writer would call surprising.
I think the reason is partly related to the need to construct a narrative but often the âoesurpriseâ really does capture the reaction of other scientists not directly involved with the work. Eg, the reaction to any âoescientifically unexpectedâ result that in theory was possible but perhaps had never been tested and a random sample of scientists might be mixed on what the expected outcome should be, or might actually have predicted the opposite. If a portion of the scientific community could find your result unexpected, then the press release will usually get written up as saying that we ourselves were surprised.
It is a âoecollectiveâ or a figurative surprise, that gets used maybe as a way to acknowledge to the readers that from a 30,000 foot view of established science prior to the investigations in question, the results would be surprising, and we are taking a step back from the results to join them there.
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I dont know why the formatting turned out bad. No no one will read it without paragraphs haha ðY
I am a scientist. I essentially agree with the post that said âoeitâ(TM)s not the scientists who are surprised but the reportersâoe, but on reflection I realized that there is an aspect of surprise in the wider scientific community vs the scientists conducting the research themselves that can be genuine. i think the practice is somewhat incidental and not of any nefarious intent. The practice is not specifically to get grants but to write an interesting story, and it may have more to do with science writers than scientists. The proof of it unfortunately requires access to the scientific literature, but if you search for âoesurprisingâ in Google Scholar, that word is unlikely to appear very often â" much less is it likely to appear in the scientific article itself that corresponds to a press release that includes the word âoesurprisingâ. The reason is because those of us who write scientific articles wouldnt describe our results as surprising (most of the time), but those who turn our research results into narratives for press releases do â" possibly as a gimmick, or possibly because the way we explain it to them emphasizes different possible outcomes that could have been possible, and that âoesome peopleâ might have expected it to go a different way. Another reason it gets translated as surprise may be just related to how convoluted some scientific decision-making can get it, as a result of trying one thing, having it not work but noticing something âoestrangeâ, following up on that strange thing, and realizing that what seemed like an outlier ended up being related to something very specific and reproducible that no one previously knew about. Again, surprising at some level, but not at a low level to the scientist â" eg a scientist probably felt surprise at the first result with âoestrangeâ findings, but having followed it up to its logical conclusion, confirmation that something systematically strange is going on in a reproducible way that suggests a real phenomenon is no longer surprising bc at this point the scientist probably had a hunch he or she was on to something, or else he or she wouldnt have been pursuing those additional experiments â" and yet that is probably the result that a science writer would call surprising. I think the reason is partly related to the need to construct a narrative but often the âoesurpriseâ really does capture the reaction of other scientists not directly involved with the work. Eg, the reaction to any âoescientifically unexpectedâ result that in theory was possible but perhaps had never been tested and a random sample of scientists might be mixed on what the expected outcome should be, or might actually have predicted the opposite. If a portion of the scientific community could find your result unexpected, then the press release will usually get written up as saying that we ourselves were surprised. It is a âoecollectiveâ or a figurative surprise, that gets used maybe as a way to acknowledge to the readers that from a 30,000 foot view of established science prior to the investigations in question, the results would be surprising, and we are taking a step back from the results to join them there.