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> Educated STEM people usually have a strong devotion to science, but science very often fails at revealing the truth The article criticizes journalism for not

by dkarl 14y ago

> Educated STEM people usually have a strong devotion to science, but science very often fails at revealing the truth The article criticizes journalism for not properly reflecting science and scientific opinion, so it implicitly accepts science as the gold standard. I think the lesson is that there's more demand for scientific novelty and certainty than science itself can satisfy, so science journalism focuses on the conjecture, controversy, preliminary results, and premature conclusions that arise in the practice of science instead of focusing on the emergence of consensus among scientists. The job of a science journalist like Tara Parker-Pope or a pop science author/advocate like Gary Taubes is akin to the job of a prosecuting attorney: to tell a single story as compellingly as possible. The article is about cases where journalists succeed in telling a simple, intuitive, compelling story while science itself is telling a collection of messy, incomplete, counter-intuitive, and/or contradictory stories. I know many "educated STEM people," but I don't know anybody who does any significant reading of scientific literature outside their field. I've read a lot of abstracts (and a few articles, when they're available) while trying to look one layer deeper than the news, but I don't have the background to understand a lot of what I read, and I've never gone to the library and reviewed dozens of related papers to get context for the paper I'm reading, like a real scientist would. Virtually every vote and consumer choice influenced by science is influenced through news media, science journalism, or classroom education, not by direct exposure to the work of practicing scientists.

svachalek 14y ago
I think you missed the second half of the article.
- dkarl 14y ago
  The article is about "How personal-health journalism ignores the fundamental pitfalls baked into all scientific research." The second half of the article is about biases that influence individual scientists and journals. Scientists acknowledge such factors and do their best, within the limits of their own bias, to take all limiting factors into account when evaluating research. Where the influence of the scientific community coincides, you can expect to see bias shared by all scientists, and where powerful institutions can unduly sway community opinion, bias will bubble up into the community consensus, but scientific consensus is still much more reliable than the results of individual papers or the opinions of individual scientists, because the interests of individual scientists vary and often compete. The article makes the point that journalism should take skepticism within the scientific community about specific claims more seriously and could serve as an outside critical perspective on science, but in fact reads the scientific literature more naively than scientists themselves do.

by dkarl 14y ago

svachalek 14y ago

I think you missed the second half of the article.

dkarl 14y ago
The article is about "How personal-health journalism ignores the fundamental pitfalls baked into all scientific research." The second half of the article is about biases that influence individual scientists and journals. Scientists acknowledge such factors and do their best, within the limits of their own bias, to take all limiting factors into account when evaluating research. Where the influence of the scientific community coincides, you can expect to see bias shared by all scientists, and where powerful institutions can unduly sway community opinion, bias will bubble up into the community consensus, but scientific consensus is still much more reliable than the results of individual papers or the opinions of individual scientists, because the interests of individual scientists vary and often compete. The article makes the point that journalism should take skepticism within the scientific community about specific claims more seriously and could serve as an outside critical perspective on science, but in fact reads the scientific literature more naively than scientists themselves do.