4 ms·

Because science is reaaaally hard to generalise for the public, and Universities love to put out press releases. Finding someone qualified to go to for comment

Because science is reaaaally hard to generalise for the public, and Universities love to put out press releases. Finding someone qualified to go to for comment is not straightforward. They’re not necessarily even going to be in your country. I’m a physicist by background and even when active in academia it was hard for me to understand some papers in closely related sub fields, and that was with working experience in that area. I did theoretical and computational physics research and understanding leaps forward in for e.g. experimental hardware would have got blank stares from me. For a journalist, who may have been out of academia for some time, a large amount just gets taken on trust from what the academics themselves say, because you haven’t got a hope of understanding the fine points of the research.

freework 4y ago
> it was hard for me to understand some papers in closely related sub fields, and that was with working experience in that area. I've noticed this too. The reason why I think this happens is because if you're an employed scientist, then the system is set up in such a way that you HAVE to publish, or else you lose your job. If someone criticizes your paper, and it gets pulled from publication, then thats the same as having never published anything in the first place. Therefore, the technique to survival is to write your paper in such a way that repels criticism as much as possible. The easiest way to do this is to write it in such a way that makes it hard to read, but not in such a way that makes it obvious it's gibberish.
- vapemaster 4y ago
  > If someone criticizes your paper, and it gets pulled from publication, then thats the same as having never published anything in the first place. Therefore, the technique to survival is to write your paper in such a way that repels criticism as much as possible. Not trying to be snarky, but that's not how publishing works.. you don't get a paper retracted for criticism, you get it retracted if there was scientific malfeasance. And retractions are actually exceedingly rare. In fact having criticism / debate around your paper is a great way to get more citations, the real publication currency in academia...
  - freework 4y ago
    > you don't get a paper retracted for criticism, you get it retracted if there was scientific malfeasance. Why would somebody criticize a scientific paper for something other than to point out some kind of scientific malfeasance? If the paper is written in such a hard to understand manner, then its not possible to make any response at all. That's the point.
    - timr 4y ago
      > Why would somebody criticize a scientific paper for something other than to point out some kind of scientific malfeasance? Because most papers are not actively deceptive, they're just wrong. Or if not just wrong, they've got some critical error. Even great papers. Most people don't seem to get this. Out of every paper I've read in my life (easily in the thousands now), the number that I think are/were unquestionable I can count on one hand, and have fingers left over. Case in point: once I made the mistake of pulling the "source paper" on Okazaki fragments (a Nobel-caliber discovery on a core part of DNA replication) for a seminar I was teaching in biochemistry. I thought it would be neat to go back to the source material for such an important discovery. What I didn't realize is that the original paper was...let's just say that it wasn't really conclusive. It didn't take long for my students to rip it apart, and I was chastened. I should have gone into it with the attitude that I was going to show them how hard and messy real science is. Instead, I feel like I made them believe that their textbook was wrong! Science is Hard. Even stuff that is considered Nobel-worthy after years of post-hoc examination is rarely definitive when it first gets published. These "reporters" who rush out and breathlessly write a fawning/sensational/scary article about something after they half-read an abstract on arXiv, but question nothing within the article itself, are tremendous hacks.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  > The easiest way to do this is to write it in such a way that makes it hard to read, but not in such a way that makes it obvious it's gibberish. I am not sure where these weird beliefs come from. Scientific papers are difficult to understand because it's incredibly difficult to explain things that have never been explained before [1]. I encourage anyone who has the above view to spend two years solving a difficult scientific problem, and then do a comprehensive summary in 10ish pages. A more direct criticism of the above comment is that publication pressure is a very post-world war 2 thing. But you can pull random papers from earlier and find many of them extremely difficult to understand. Here is the 2nd most cited paper by Pauli from 1939 [2]. Try understanding what it truly says. This is one of the smartest humans to ever exist. [1] To your knowledge at least. People who write bad papers, or do stuff similar to what has been done before often do it because they don't understand the work of others fully. [2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.1939.0140 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.1939...
- wolverine876 4y ago
  I don't find them hard to understand, at least to a certain depth of understanding - but deep enough that I get a lot of value out of them, far more than news articles. On the other hand, Avicenna claimed to have read Aristotle's Metaphysics 40 times before Avicenna could understand it. So it's not a new problem!
robonerd 4y ago
> Finding someone qualified to go to for comment is not straightforward. Not straightforward for the university press department? What could be more straightforward? Tell the university press writers to go talk to the university researchers they're writing about. If the researchers refuse to cooperate, then don't write the press release!
- physicsguy 4y ago
  No, as in - even if you don’t want to take the scientist’s word for it, finding someone who is able to make an informed comment about whether the work is actually any good or not is really hard.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    Heh - ask another faculty member.
    - physicsguy 4y ago
      ... they're not independent from the researcher in that case.
      - wrycoder 4y ago
        Yeah, they may be competitors in the department :=/
jelliclesfarm 4y ago
I agree..especially with your first sentence. I still read encyclopedias and DK publications meant to explain science for kids. I learnt a lot of science concepts from encyclopedias as a child. I find that today children’s education of scientific concepts is cartoonised and made into ‘fun’. These kids grow up to write about science as entertainment. Any form of education should be challenging. Not fun. I am very taken aback and strongly disapprove of the American tendency to inject ‘fun’ into everything. Example: learning Math should bring joy..not fun. If learning science and math is about ‘fun’, when the next fun thing comes along..learning would be abandoned. I also believe that learning should keep one hungry and wanting more. In that.. it has to be a goal that is always a tad difficult to reach. America fails badly here. I can’t speak for other countries. India and Europe where I have spent time do a better job in this regard, but my opinion about these places are dated.
- pvaldes 4y ago
  You have a point. Replacing the stupid message "science is fun, (thus scientists are here to entertain us)" by "science is important (so scientists are here to solve our problems)" would be a drastic improvement. If we don't have better science news is direct consequence of the disrespect or even deliberate mocking shown for science in the last decades by prominent politicians. Deliberate dehumanization or mocking of scientists by journalists is also a really old problem; A piece of news titled: "'politicians' say that X is true" would be redone immediately and replaced with the name of the politicians saying that. For science, not having the right of linking your name to your hard work until the four paragraph is the norm. And this if you have luck, I know the case of a scientist that was asked to be interviewed for a newspaper about their career. She thanked him for their patience, time and free advice, calling him egghead in the newspaper. Another problem is the infamous formatting all scientific news to pulp format with variants of "scientists are perplexed!" at the end (just to tickle your audience with the implicit message that "they are not smarter than us"). When people is bombed constantly with "science can't explain it", "researchers are puzzled", etc, the trust in science is seriously damaged. And then we have people acting irrationally in the middle of a pandemic, just to make a point.
Ekaros 4y ago
I'm also starting to think that most of the low hanging simple ideas are done already, so what is left is exceedingly technical and field specific ideas. Either these aren't very interesting for general public or explaining them is difficult. Not to forget push for media by most institutions on anything that could garner positive press.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  That’s what Lord Kelvin thought. Then Roentgen discovered X-rays.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    So how many such findings per year we are currently producing?
    - ben_w 4y ago
      Judging by the output of the scientists I follow on YouTube because they also explain things for outsiders (and that I only subscribe to a few specific domains of science), at least dozens.
    - throwaway14356 4y ago
      there is a lot of space between fields as it is hard enough to do one.
    - wrycoder 4y ago
      About once a century is all you need.
      - Ekaros 4y ago
        So, we only need science news one time in century. Kinda hard to develop proficiency at that rate.
        4y ago
wolverine876 4y ago
I have no problem reading most scientific papers I encounter, at least to a certain level. I almost never check the numbers, and can skim over things that I just don't understand - a luxury of not needing to understand every detail professionally. I'm not trying to one-up you; I'm sure you have far more capacity to understand papers in adjacent subfields to yours, and probably in other fields. I'm wondering what the difference is between our experiences. I find scientific papers easier to read than most news articles - much more clear, informed (of course), they ask and address much better questions - and generally don't skip the obvious ones that I think of. The graphics in papers are so much better than in news articles, I wonder where scientists get such good training in visual presentation. Mostly I read papers in Nature, Science, or more highly-cited ones I find through Google Scholar. Maybe that population skews toward better writing.

freework 4y ago

> it was hard for me to understand some papers in closely related sub fields, and that was with working experience in that area. I've noticed this too. The reason why I think this happens is because if you're an employed scientist, then the system is set up in such a way that you HAVE to publish, or else you lose your job. If someone criticizes your paper, and it gets pulled from publication, then thats the same as having never published anything in the first place. Therefore, the technique to survival is to write your paper in such a way that repels criticism as much as possible. The easiest way to do this is to write it in such a way that makes it hard to read, but not in such a way that makes it obvious it's gibberish.

vapemaster 4y ago
> If someone criticizes your paper, and it gets pulled from publication, then thats the same as having never published anything in the first place. Therefore, the technique to survival is to write your paper in such a way that repels criticism as much as possible. Not trying to be snarky, but that's not how publishing works.. you don't get a paper retracted for criticism, you get it retracted if there was scientific malfeasance. And retractions are actually exceedingly rare. In fact having criticism / debate around your paper is a great way to get more citations, the real publication currency in academia...
- freework 4y ago
  > you don't get a paper retracted for criticism, you get it retracted if there was scientific malfeasance. Why would somebody criticize a scientific paper for something other than to point out some kind of scientific malfeasance? If the paper is written in such a hard to understand manner, then its not possible to make any response at all. That's the point.
  - timr 4y ago
    > Why would somebody criticize a scientific paper for something other than to point out some kind of scientific malfeasance? Because most papers are not actively deceptive, they're just wrong. Or if not just wrong, they've got some critical error. Even great papers. Most people don't seem to get this. Out of every paper I've read in my life (easily in the thousands now), the number that I think are/were unquestionable I can count on one hand, and have fingers left over. Case in point: once I made the mistake of pulling the "source paper" on Okazaki fragments (a Nobel-caliber discovery on a core part of DNA replication) for a seminar I was teaching in biochemistry. I thought it would be neat to go back to the source material for such an important discovery. What I didn't realize is that the original paper was...let's just say that it wasn't really conclusive. It didn't take long for my students to rip it apart, and I was chastened. I should have gone into it with the attitude that I was going to show them how hard and messy real science is. Instead, I feel like I made them believe that their textbook was wrong! Science is Hard. Even stuff that is considered Nobel-worthy after years of post-hoc examination is rarely definitive when it first gets published. These "reporters" who rush out and breathlessly write a fawning/sensational/scary article about something after they half-read an abstract on arXiv, but question nothing within the article itself, are tremendous hacks.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
abdullahkhalids 4y ago
> The easiest way to do this is to write it in such a way that makes it hard to read, but not in such a way that makes it obvious it's gibberish. I am not sure where these weird beliefs come from. Scientific papers are difficult to understand because it's incredibly difficult to explain things that have never been explained before [1]. I encourage anyone who has the above view to spend two years solving a difficult scientific problem, and then do a comprehensive summary in 10ish pages. A more direct criticism of the above comment is that publication pressure is a very post-world war 2 thing. But you can pull random papers from earlier and find many of them extremely difficult to understand. Here is the 2nd most cited paper by Pauli from 1939 [2]. Try understanding what it truly says. This is one of the smartest humans to ever exist. [1] To your knowledge at least. People who write bad papers, or do stuff similar to what has been done before often do it because they don't understand the work of others fully. [2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.1939.0140 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.1939...
wolverine876 4y ago
I don't find them hard to understand, at least to a certain depth of understanding - but deep enough that I get a lot of value out of them, far more than news articles. On the other hand, Avicenna claimed to have read Aristotle's Metaphysics 40 times before Avicenna could understand it. So it's not a new problem!

robonerd 4y ago

> Finding someone qualified to go to for comment is not straightforward. Not straightforward for the university press department? What could be more straightforward? Tell the university press writers to go talk to the university researchers they're writing about. If the researchers refuse to cooperate, then don't write the press release!

physicsguy 4y ago
No, as in - even if you don’t want to take the scientist’s word for it, finding someone who is able to make an informed comment about whether the work is actually any good or not is really hard.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  Heh - ask another faculty member.
  - physicsguy 4y ago
    ... they're not independent from the researcher in that case.
    - wrycoder 4y ago
      Yeah, they may be competitors in the department :=/

jelliclesfarm 4y ago

I agree..especially with your first sentence. I still read encyclopedias and DK publications meant to explain science for kids. I learnt a lot of science concepts from encyclopedias as a child. I find that today children’s education of scientific concepts is cartoonised and made into ‘fun’. These kids grow up to write about science as entertainment. Any form of education should be challenging. Not fun. I am very taken aback and strongly disapprove of the American tendency to inject ‘fun’ into everything. Example: learning Math should bring joy..not fun. If learning science and math is about ‘fun’, when the next fun thing comes along..learning would be abandoned. I also believe that learning should keep one hungry and wanting more. In that.. it has to be a goal that is always a tad difficult to reach. America fails badly here. I can’t speak for other countries. India and Europe where I have spent time do a better job in this regard, but my opinion about these places are dated.

pvaldes 4y ago
You have a point. Replacing the stupid message "science is fun, (thus scientists are here to entertain us)" by "science is important (so scientists are here to solve our problems)" would be a drastic improvement. If we don't have better science news is direct consequence of the disrespect or even deliberate mocking shown for science in the last decades by prominent politicians. Deliberate dehumanization or mocking of scientists by journalists is also a really old problem; A piece of news titled: "'politicians' say that X is true" would be redone immediately and replaced with the name of the politicians saying that. For science, not having the right of linking your name to your hard work until the four paragraph is the norm. And this if you have luck, I know the case of a scientist that was asked to be interviewed for a newspaper about their career. She thanked him for their patience, time and free advice, calling him egghead in the newspaper. Another problem is the infamous formatting all scientific news to pulp format with variants of "scientists are perplexed!" at the end (just to tickle your audience with the implicit message that "they are not smarter than us"). When people is bombed constantly with "science can't explain it", "researchers are puzzled", etc, the trust in science is seriously damaged. And then we have people acting irrationally in the middle of a pandemic, just to make a point.

Ekaros 4y ago

I'm also starting to think that most of the low hanging simple ideas are done already, so what is left is exceedingly technical and field specific ideas. Either these aren't very interesting for general public or explaining them is difficult. Not to forget push for media by most institutions on anything that could garner positive press.

wrycoder 4y ago
That’s what Lord Kelvin thought. Then Roentgen discovered X-rays.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  So how many such findings per year we are currently producing?
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Judging by the output of the scientists I follow on YouTube because they also explain things for outsiders (and that I only subscribe to a few specific domains of science), at least dozens.
  - throwaway14356 4y ago
    there is a lot of space between fields as it is hard enough to do one.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    About once a century is all you need.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      So, we only need science news one time in century. Kinda hard to develop proficiency at that rate.
      - 4y ago

wolverine876 4y ago

I have no problem reading most scientific papers I encounter, at least to a certain level. I almost never check the numbers, and can skim over things that I just don't understand - a luxury of not needing to understand every detail professionally. I'm not trying to one-up you; I'm sure you have far more capacity to understand papers in adjacent subfields to yours, and probably in other fields. I'm wondering what the difference is between our experiences. I find scientific papers easier to read than most news articles - much more clear, informed (of course), they ask and address much better questions - and generally don't skip the obvious ones that I think of. The graphics in papers are so much better than in news articles, I wonder where scientists get such good training in visual presentation. Mostly I read papers in Nature, Science, or more highly-cited ones I find through Google Scholar. Maybe that population skews toward better writing.