2 ms·

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.