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Proust Wasn’t a Neuroscientist. Neither was Jonah Lehrer
- kiba 14y agoI like to read popular science book. Does that mean that I have to give up reading popular science and read dreary academic papers?
- desireco42 14y agoKind of... that is my conclusion. Imagine :)!
- fghh45sdfhr3 14y agoOnly if you are intellectually ambitious.
- rscale 14y agoIf I see an interesting pop sci story, I'll track down the original research that it's based on. Generally speaking, if the concept was interesting to me in a pop sci context, it's even more interesting to me in depth. If I can't find the original research, I try to treat the information as tainted, because even honest and intelligent writers often oversimplify concepts when presenting them to a lay audience.
- lmm 14y agoOnly if you want the truth. More seriously: you're probably ok with books written by scientists who are respected as scientists, such as Kahneman mentioned in the article. But be very wary of books written by journalists.
- cousin_it 14y agoI've been bitten by this several times. I would hear about an exciting result in psychology or something, tell my friends about it, then double check the original study just to be sure, then call up my friends with apologies and corrections. So my advice is, if you like popular science books, at least don't retell their conclusions to others!
- npsimons 14y agoNo! Not by any means. But don't take them at their word. As with everything you read (or hear, or see . . .) you should question it. It should encourage you to investigate more of the subject at hand, to look up the references (no references is a bad sign). If nothing else, it can provide a valuable lesson in skepticism and the depth required to truly understand these fields; you didn't really think that such complex topics could be properly addressed in a twenty minute TED talk or a single non-reference book, did you? These things are teasers, meant to whet your appetite or let you know that there is a broader world out there.
- nollidge 14y agoThere's plenty of popular science books that are written by respected scientists - Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Stephen Hawking - as well as books that are effective summaries of accepted information by laypeople, such as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (which interweaves the history with first-person narrative of the author's interactions with Lacks's living relatives) or The Big Bang by Simon Singh. There's also lots of blogs written by laypeople or former researchers who carefully distill and contextualize individual scientific papers, such as many of the folks at Discover Magazine blogs (Phil Plait, Ed Yong). Moreover, there's a larger problem of lay journalists, public, and many university PR people treating every bit of research as a groundbreaking answer to a huge question, when the reality is that each paper is merely a bit of dialog in a massive conversation about the nature of our universe. This leads the public to become rightfully distrusting of the massive overstatements, and therefore tragically disinterested in the nuanced conversation behind it all. So perhaps the single best thing to do is become part of the conversation! Follow authors and bloggers on social media, talk to your friends in science, furrow your brow at bombastic university press releases and seek the nuance. This will lead you to the best books, articles, and science communicators out there.
- ArbitraryLimits 14y agoNo, just limit your popular science reading to books written by scientists instead of journalists.
- desireco42 14y agoDid any thought reading this..."Malcolm Gladwell"?
- msrpotus 14y agoHe's specifically mentioned in the article, unsurprisingly.
- GFischer 14y agoIndeed: "Malcolm Gladwell got into hot water in 2005 by telling a story about games he played in the pages of the Washington Post that turned out to be almost entirely untrue. In print, Gladwell is often knocked for reducing social science to easy epiphanies and is occasionally called out for ignoring evidence that contradicts his cozy theories"
- tptacek 14y agoI dispute how much "hot water" Gladwell got into over the Moth story. First, it's hard to listen to that story and take it seriously; it's pretty over-the-top. Second, The Moth is a somewhat informal venue; for instance, Mike Birbiglia's Moth performance is more or less a standup routine. The story was covered in the media because it suggested (playfully) that major publications were sometimes run more by gamesmanship than by a duty to report the facts; true or not, it was obviously catnip to media critics. The latter allegations --- that Gladwell's stories are too pat, and that they exclude contradictory evidence --- amount to Gladwell being "wrong" about things. But being wrong isn't a journalistic crime; journalists, columnists, and essayists are wrong all the time. It's disingenuous to lay that case out in an article about someone who committed real journalistic crimes: fabrication and plagiarism. In the actual NYMag piece, the case against Gladwell consists largely of innuendo: that he gives a lot of high-priced talks, that in marketing himself and The New Yorker, he created a brand that he can milk for his own personal gain. Well, we all milk things for our personal gain; it's called "having a career".
- GFischer 14y ago
- kiba 14y agoIs anybody wondering: What's Jonah Lehrer doing now?
- braid 14y agoHe's writing about his ordeal: “I’m writing something about the mistake and affair myself, if only so I can learn from the failing, and I’d prefer not to talk until my writing is done.” http://www.lamag.com/story.aspx?ID=1771992 http://www.lamag.com/story.aspx?ID=1771992
- fourmii 14y agoIt's pretty disappointing, I love reading these popular science books. I guess they're fun to read because they're entertaining, now I know how some of these authors are making them entertaining... This was a pretty interesting article in itself to read.
- droithomme 14y ago"Self-plagiarizing" isn't a real thing. It's complete nonsense to say you are plagiarizing from yourself. Shocking part is so many people are just falling for this argument without thinking about it. As well as those who think about it, and to join in the thrills of a witch hunt, justify to themselves that this self-plagiarization is not just a real thing, but unethical behavior bordering on criminal. Fabricating quotes and making up facts though is bad and justifies firing and blacklisting. Both practices are unfortunately endemic within contemporary publications, perhaps due to a lack of fact checkers at many publishers.
- colomon 14y agoI'm 100% with you on the nonsense of "self-plagiarizing". But I think making up quotes wholesale in a non-fiction piece ought to be enough by itself to get you drummed out of journalism.
- droithomme 14y agoI agree with you completely. Fabricating stuff in journalism and scientific studies (see "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False") should result in blacklisting, and if the publication is complicit, they should be boycotted. Not that that's what happens, but would be nice if it worked that way.
- shardling 14y agoIt's pretty clearly a real thing -- even if you don't like how the concept is named or think that it's unethical, it's a specific type of behavior/action that can be discussed.
- tptacek 14y agoThe "victim" of plagiarism isn't the original author. It's the reader, who is deceived into thinking they are reading original thoughts when they'd instead be better served by the original source. Nobody in the media is "just falling" for the idea of "self-plagiarizing"; in virtually every place I've seen this issue covered, there's been extensive scrutiny of the idea of "self-plagiarism" and where it ranks in the catalog of literary sins. This post is yet another example of the "middlebrow dismissal": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714217 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714217 It is all well and good to grapple with the idea of whether and how "self-plagiarizing" is a real offense. But to do so in a comment like yours, dismissing it as herd thinking and witch hunting, is lazy and ill-informed. Your comment has as its premise something that is actually the opposite of the truth; ironically, it distracts from the real controversy of how big a deal self-plagiarism is by pretending that there is no such controversy.
- tzs 14y agoOT: that was a good example of a print link that is not obnoxious. Unlike most print links, it did not come up with a freakishly wide columns of diminutive text, and had a clear way to get the non-print version so that one can read the comments and other extras lost on the print version. More sites should implement their print links like that.
- spacemanaki 14y agoI kind of disagree, and think this is a poor implementation. "Print view" is a feature that JavaScript lightbox-style dialogs should not be used to implement. This one for instance, is totally broken on mobile (on Chrome on a Nexus 7 at least, you cannot scroll to read it)
- gruseom 14y agoIt's not surprising that it was Bob Dylan fans who caught Lehrer fabricating. The stuff he was saying about Dylan was obviously off – equally ignorant and glib. I remember listening to Terry Gross interviewing him well before the scandal and being shocked at what bullshit he was peddling. Fabrication and plagiarism are what got him fired, and I suppose it has to be that way, but there's an unpleasant corollary: had he been a more careful or even just a less prolific bullshitter, he would still be a celebrated star of science writing.
- diego 14y agoCan you elaborate on the bullshit part from the interview? I'm curious. I read the book (Imagine) and I enjoyed it. It wasn't particularly deep, but I didn't catch anything that wasn't consistent with what I already knew about the topic.
- gruseom 14y agoIt seems I can't answer your question without ranting. Sorry about that. I was referring to what Lehrer said about Bob Dylan and "Like a Rolling Stone". His narrative about Dylan's biography and his creative process was totally off – not consistent with what even a casual fan like myself has picked up over the years. It wasn't just a little odd here and there, it was screamingly wrong. The idea that Dylan got stuck between "Bringing it all back home" (March 1965) and "Highway 61 Revisited" (Aug 1965) is laughable – that was the middle of the greatest creative rampage of his career, his annus mirabilis. Everybody knows that that manic phase peaked in "Blonde on Blonde" (1966) and the crash happened afterward. Lehrer's fairy tale about how Dylan was going to quit music (!) but it turned out he just needed to take a little rest and then, boom, a creative outpouring and out came "Like a Rolling Stone", was silly. Dylan had been pouring out material in that way for years. Lehrer's thing about how there had been only two kinds of pop song and Dylan finally put them together in "Like a Rolling Stone" is cringeworthy, the kind of thing you would tolerate in a precocious adolescent until you could take him off to one side and tell him to knock it off and learn something. Then there were howlers like claiming that while writing the song Dylan coined the term "juiced" to mean "drunk". That was as ignorant as Gladwell's "igon values" but worse, since it indicates a readiness to make shit up to fit your narrative. My point is that these things weren't just wrong, they were obvious concoctions. And someone who would bullshit that much about one thing would clearly bullshit about anything. If he hadn't fabricated quotes and plagiarized, that would still be the case. And it's not like people didn't call him on it, even before he got caught on the no-nos [1]. What bugs me, and I'm almost done, is that Lehrer's editors and patrons were quite happy for him to propagate this kind of thing. Not in a "sure it's crap but we need material" way, but in a "take a look at this! he's a wunderkind!" way. Had he not gotten grandiosely sloppy, he'd not only still be doing it, he'd still be widely praised for doing it. He'd be in that elite group of repeat guests on Fresh Air, maybe even the super-elite who are allowed to say "thank you" when Terry says "Welcome back to Fresh Air". So to me this was a little like a criminal who eventually got busted on a technicality. [1] http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/103912/bob-dylan-jonah-lehrer-creativity http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/103912/bo.... To say something positive: yay to Isaac Chotiner for being the one who nailed this stuff on its essential crappiness rather than its accidental transgressions. Plus he wrote a good piece about P.G. Wodehouse: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/the-escapist/308989/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/the-esca..., so I'm going to watch for him in the future. Perhaps the New Yorker could hire him :)
- xaa 14y agoIt's interesting how relatively minor fabrications like these earned Lehrer complete ostracism, yet much huger distortions are told in the political arena daily and no one bats an eye. To pick a random example, "there is no evidence for climate change". I wonder why the double standard?
- rprasad 14y agoLehrer chose to distort subjects that are easily objectively verifiable, i.e., what Bob Dylan said or did in a publicly broadcast TV series watched by thousands of hardcore Dylan fans. Climate change is verifiable, but not easily, and most evidence is unfortunately circumstantial. Furthemore, the significance of what this means is not settled, which makes the issue political rather than scientific.
- freshhawk 14y agoThere is no economic incentive motivating a group of people to spend large amounts of money to convince the public that Bob Dylan did say those quotes. Lehrer should have lied about things that have been politicized for economic gain, like climate change, economics or medical science. Then when you get called on it you have well funded groups with media clout ready to support you. I agree the double standard is ridiculous, but I don't find it surprising.