3 ms·
Thank you very much for this summary. Terrible science reporting is really getting out of hand recently. "Chomsky was right, we have a grammar in our head", w
by tmalsburg2 11y ago
Thank you very much for this summary. Terrible science reporting is really getting out of hand recently. "Chomsky was right, we have a grammar in our head", what non-sense is that?! I blame this partly on TED which effectively promotes the misrepresentation of research to increase main stream appeal. Nowadays, science needs to be sexy and I see more and more research that appears to be designed to "go viral" on Twitter and Facebook.
- panglott 11y agoI would say that it's university PR departments, but I suspect that often enough researchers are complicit as well. The researchers hype up their research to university pr copywriters who don't understand it at all, then a journalist who may or may not understand it rewrites it into a story, and then some editor slaps a clickbaity headline on it. And who knows what bearing the actual study has on any of that. And it's hard to disentangle the nonsense along the way. Like, I wrote "processes language in the brain" when it would have been more accurate to say "processes French pseudo-words".