> This is pretty weak and unscientific evidence. The author, directly or indirectly, lumps politicians like Bill Clinton and for-profit business like Scripps in

> This is pretty weak and unscientific evidence. The author, directly or indirectly, lumps politicians like Bill Clinton and for-profit business like Scripps into the “science” boat, which in my opinion, is bad reporting. Those are not evidence of the academic field gone awry. A small list of gaffs by institutions doesn’t say anything about the magnitude, and completely ignores how much is going right with science. Hold on, you are omitting Craig Venter in that statement, also importantly it was a science initiative. And to quote wikipedia: "Scripps Research, previously known as The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI),[1] is a nonprofit American medical research facility" On top of that the section you referring to is a quotation from another article. > There’s no question that some academic institutions and people get it wrong and/or succumb to dramatic and wrong science, that has always been true. The pressures in science might even be getting worse over time because it’s more crowded and most low-hanging fruit has been picked, so publishing is getting more difficult. (BTW if you haven’t seen BobbyBroccoli’s “The Rise of Jan Hendrik Schön” on YouTube, it’s fantastic and worth watching!) That's the issue though. As someone on the inside of academia, the pressures to do "publicity" have gone up significantly. > Even that isn’t evidence of academics getting it wrong in this case, and it doesn’t compare in magnitude to how bad science reporting in the media is. Reporters don’t generally understand the science they report, they are under space and time constraints, and they have every incentive to drop subtlety and magnify drama. There’s not even a question about why science reporting is bad: because almost all reporting is bad for the same reason. You're absolving academics of responsibility to easily. Just reading the claims in journal articles (and particularly high impact ones like Nature), makes me want to roll my eyes. The impact is typically strongly exaggerated. I understand the reasons, i.e. the journals want to see this high impact, otherwise they don't publish you. Considering that a Nature article can be career defining, it's understandable why academics play the game. > Academic Science isn’t crap Bill Clinton or Scripps says, it’s a process that assumes nothing is true and seeks truth by testing. There has been nothing better in human history, and nothing that has brought the world further faster, than science. Yes people sometimes corrupt it, because that’s what people do to everything, but the only choice we have is to keep on top of corrupting influences and keep doing science. I don't think the article claims that science is crap. The argument as I read it is that academics can just only blame others for the bad reporting if they often make the bold claims themselves, approve university press releases which grossly exaggerate impact and are the ones reviewing grants and giving bad marks if there aren't the exaggerated impact statements.