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Scientists and academic institutions add to the confusion with the way they promote their work. Nobody puts language like "I did this, here is the result I saw
by panic 10y ago
Scientists and academic institutions add to the confusion with the way they promote their work. Nobody puts language like "I did this, here is the result I saw. I think it might mean this" in a press release. It's always "Breakthrough research! Is the end of cancer in sight??"
- epistasis 10y agoAbsolutely true, though I know of very few scientists that have been able to tamp down the game of telephone that the university's press office starts. http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1174 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1174
- nostrademons 10y agoA lot of this is because of the incentives that result from grant-based funding of science. Your ability to continue to do science is contingent on your ability to find someone to pay for it; it's much easier to convince someone to pay for it if you can point to headlines that say "Breakthrough research! Is the end of cancer in sight?" The old system of "gentleman science" (where only independently-wealthy heirs did science, as a hobby) had a lot of problems and wouldn't really be workable today, but one thing it had going for it was that the scientist could count on the funding being there tomorrow, and so had much less of an incentive to overstate their work.
- averagewall 10y agoIt doesn't help when teachers tell their students they can reference academic papers from peer reviewed journals but can't reference Wikipedia. The former is tentative and the latter is established knowledge from text books, more or less.