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It's like hearing that science says that fat is bad... and then eggs are bad for you... and alcohol is bad... and then another study says that a glass of wine a

It's like hearing that science says that fat is bad... and then eggs are bad for you... and alcohol is bad... and then another study says that a glass of wine a day is good for your heart... and salt is bad... then sugar is bad... then carbohydrates are bad... and now fat is good as long as you don't overdo carbohydrates... and eggs have good cholesterol and are really good for you... and salt is necessary to balance hydration... and sugar isn't bad as long as it's balanced with fibre. When the studies say so many different things, all contradictory and all purporting to be good and then bad and then good again, people give up trying to understand. Why should I believe that anything I eat today is bad when tomorrow you're just going to tell me that it's good for me again? People are tired of listening to science that appears to ebb and flow like the tides.

mjevans 8y ago
Oversimplification for sound bytes (and headlines/click-bait) is the primary cause for this. News outlets are eager to 'report first' and don't bother correctly framing the science in a proper context of one study //which suggests more research and confirmation is necessary//. Publish or perish, along with the lack of replication rather than trying to find something exciting to publish, or even enshrining the effort of replicating results (repudiating or confirming) to more strongly establish fact and carefully observe to see if there may be other causes/effects; is ruining the integrity of the scientific methods. Finally, a lack of stable funding for maintaining and improving what should be public domain (established facts about nature) and the work of students of all ages to re-study and double check as they learn, is nearly the ultimate root cause. The true root cause being greed and the increasing likelihood that as we as a species approach 'abundance' that capitalism ceases to be a good means for wisely allocating resources. Surely that is the case when we are to the point of automated micro-transaction harvesting HFT and fractions of a second of advantage translating to profits in a financial sector that is a vastly over-sized portion of the GDP.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  Most of the time the news outlets / pulishers don't understand the difference between correlation and causation. Frankly, I'm not even sure if many scientists understand the difference. Get some data. Beat it up until you get something attention grabbing. Publish. Get paid. Worry about any fallout later.
SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
That's not science though - that's a single study or two being blown out of proportion. It's an element of science, a snapshot of knowledge, but the scientific method requires that we continually refine those messages and ideas, and that's not happening - we do an experiment, and then without any more corroboration or reproduction it's released to the public. We are seeing tiny pieces of science, but the problem is we're seeing every step and going "oh look, there's science!" and treating it as absolute truth instead of giving time for things to develop and figure out what it is we're looking at.
- aeternus 8y ago
  Yes, but the scientific community has in-part brought this upon themselves. The actual research is inaccessible to the public, hidden behind paywalls in subscription-only journals, and written in a form that is very difficult if not impossible for the general public to understand. For most of the general public, the output of the scientific community is just a poorly translated and often misleading headline.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    It's also become incredibly complex and utterly alien to even practitioners in the fields - I can't read computer science doctoral dissertations with any degree of understanding. That's not a failing of the language, that's an evolution of it - we're at a point now where we need years and years of education to be able to be able to speak the language required for the research. It absolutely is difficult for the general public, but that's not a failing, that's the state of the art.
    - kian 8y ago
      I’d argue that this is, in fact, a failing of the language of description, and that going back and refactoring terms and systematizing the folk knowledge of a given field would go a long way towards fixing the public attitudes towards that field. We should give more respect to people who make existing concepts easier to understand, or simpler and cheaper to prove or demonstrate. Then maybe we wouldn’t have to spend so much time bemoaning the poor state of education.
joe_the_user 8y ago
The media quoting random science study pushing X claim and then Y claim is a fundamental problem of media (society), not science. The problem of science is that it doesn't have the outlet of, say, high school students learning real science and knowing how it works, that the products of science and technology is wind-up cut-off from the broad processes of experimentation that gave rise to them.

mjevans 8y ago

Oversimplification for sound bytes (and headlines/click-bait) is the primary cause for this. News outlets are eager to 'report first' and don't bother correctly framing the science in a proper context of one study //which suggests more research and confirmation is necessary//. Publish or perish, along with the lack of replication rather than trying to find something exciting to publish, or even enshrining the effort of replicating results (repudiating or confirming) to more strongly establish fact and carefully observe to see if there may be other causes/effects; is ruining the integrity of the scientific methods. Finally, a lack of stable funding for maintaining and improving what should be public domain (established facts about nature) and the work of students of all ages to re-study and double check as they learn, is nearly the ultimate root cause. The true root cause being greed and the increasing likelihood that as we as a species approach 'abundance' that capitalism ceases to be a good means for wisely allocating resources. Surely that is the case when we are to the point of automated micro-transaction harvesting HFT and fractions of a second of advantage translating to profits in a financial sector that is a vastly over-sized portion of the GDP.

chiefalchemist 8y ago
Most of the time the news outlets / pulishers don't understand the difference between correlation and causation. Frankly, I'm not even sure if many scientists understand the difference. Get some data. Beat it up until you get something attention grabbing. Publish. Get paid. Worry about any fallout later.

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago

That's not science though - that's a single study or two being blown out of proportion. It's an element of science, a snapshot of knowledge, but the scientific method requires that we continually refine those messages and ideas, and that's not happening - we do an experiment, and then without any more corroboration or reproduction it's released to the public. We are seeing tiny pieces of science, but the problem is we're seeing every step and going "oh look, there's science!" and treating it as absolute truth instead of giving time for things to develop and figure out what it is we're looking at.

aeternus 8y ago
Yes, but the scientific community has in-part brought this upon themselves. The actual research is inaccessible to the public, hidden behind paywalls in subscription-only journals, and written in a form that is very difficult if not impossible for the general public to understand. For most of the general public, the output of the scientific community is just a poorly translated and often misleading headline.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  It's also become incredibly complex and utterly alien to even practitioners in the fields - I can't read computer science doctoral dissertations with any degree of understanding. That's not a failing of the language, that's an evolution of it - we're at a point now where we need years and years of education to be able to be able to speak the language required for the research. It absolutely is difficult for the general public, but that's not a failing, that's the state of the art.
  - kian 8y ago
    I’d argue that this is, in fact, a failing of the language of description, and that going back and refactoring terms and systematizing the folk knowledge of a given field would go a long way towards fixing the public attitudes towards that field. We should give more respect to people who make existing concepts easier to understand, or simpler and cheaper to prove or demonstrate. Then maybe we wouldn’t have to spend so much time bemoaning the poor state of education.

joe_the_user 8y ago

The media quoting random science study pushing X claim and then Y claim is a fundamental problem of media (society), not science. The problem of science is that it doesn't have the outlet of, say, high school students learning real science and knowing how it works, that the products of science and technology is wind-up cut-off from the broad processes of experimentation that gave rise to them.