3 ms·

> It's an airport pop science book for goodness sake, it's not like fabricating results to get an article in Nature. An article in Nature may be read by a fe

> It's an airport pop science book for goodness sake, it's not like fabricating results to get an article in Nature. An article in Nature may be read by a few thousand people. An airport pop book will influence tens or hundreds of millions. Especially for health related subjects it's standard of truth ought to be a lot higher.

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
As a scientist, I haven't written any airport pop book, but I often interact with the general public through journalistic interviews and articles, public dissemination talks, panels, short pieces for media outlets, etc. In any of these contexts, if you want to be rigorous, journalists typically won't even allow you to. Any nuanced take will be dismissed as "too long", "too complicated", "the public won't understand this, we need to simplify", "we cannot discuss this in so much detail because we need to engage the reader", "yes, I know this isn't 100% accurate but we need a catchy headline", etc. So when we go out of the scientific bubble, the standard of truth drops enormously. Not sure how it works with pop books but I suppose there is some non-scientist editor telling you how to "reach" the public, so I wouldn't expect it to be too different.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  Yes that's a really unfortunate tension and one I'm familiar with writing computer science pieces for popular media. That pressure to "dumb down" nuanced, complex issues is infuriating. Part of the problem is the editor/publisher having a low view of readers. We always seem to be pandering to the lowest common denominator, rather than the average mind. But I believe that if one is a fairly good writer a lot of nuance can be cut without sacrificing substantial truth. What I noticed during Covid19 was the public bypassing those "think-walls" and going straight to the source papers/data. When necessary, ordinary folks can digest raw stuff without having it mashed and the crusts cut off. Of course citizen science-journalism created it's own problems when everyone became an armchair epidemiologist.

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago

As a scientist, I haven't written any airport pop book, but I often interact with the general public through journalistic interviews and articles, public dissemination talks, panels, short pieces for media outlets, etc. In any of these contexts, if you want to be rigorous, journalists typically won't even allow you to. Any nuanced take will be dismissed as "too long", "too complicated", "the public won't understand this, we need to simplify", "we cannot discuss this in so much detail because we need to engage the reader", "yes, I know this isn't 100% accurate but we need a catchy headline", etc. So when we go out of the scientific bubble, the standard of truth drops enormously. Not sure how it works with pop books but I suppose there is some non-scientist editor telling you how to "reach" the public, so I wouldn't expect it to be too different.

nonrandomstring 3y ago
Yes that's a really unfortunate tension and one I'm familiar with writing computer science pieces for popular media. That pressure to "dumb down" nuanced, complex issues is infuriating. Part of the problem is the editor/publisher having a low view of readers. We always seem to be pandering to the lowest common denominator, rather than the average mind. But I believe that if one is a fairly good writer a lot of nuance can be cut without sacrificing substantial truth. What I noticed during Covid19 was the public bypassing those "think-walls" and going straight to the source papers/data. When necessary, ordinary folks can digest raw stuff without having it mashed and the crusts cut off. Of course citizen science-journalism created it's own problems when everyone became an armchair epidemiologist.