**Note, this is kind of a “venting” post; don’t say I didn’t warn you!**
Good science reporting is not only a good idea, it is something absolutely fantastic.
You see, good science reporting provides an essential service to humanity. I have discussed elsewhere the importance of an educated public. We are fortunate that we are living in times when at least in our country, education (not just in the sciences) is relatively easy to obtain. Even when in some cases formal education may not be an option because of financial or other difficulties, you can educate yourself by being an avid reader. In order to do this, you can go to a series of ancient, sacred institutions called Public Libraries where they store many of the most mysterious objects, usually made out of dead plant tissue.
These objects are called books.
Of course, nowadays we have many more resources available. Knowledge is as close as a wherever the next keyboard or tablet are, and that is a great thing. However, we must be aware that we have to be very, very careful with the information that we obtain online. Furthermore, we must develop the ability to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff, as there is a lot of misinformation out there (this last sentence wins the “Best Understatement of the Last Half-Decade Award”).
Remember when in the prehistoric 1980s we said things like “…it’s true, I saw it on TV!”? Nowadays, the most common version of this expression is “…it’s true, I saw it online!”
I hope that you realize that this is potentially dangerous, especially if you get your medical, health & wellness or self-help/mental health information from unreliable sources. Anybody, literally anybody can post whatever they feel like online. And that, as with everything in life, can be a good or a bad thing.
This is not to say that books are completely reliable. There are a lot, and I mean A LOT of “nonfiction ” books with unreliable, misleading or even horribly wrong information (sometimes all three). The thing about it is that the process of publishing a book is much slower than to post anything online. Also, reputable publishers in the sciences usually send book submissions to reviewers, similarly to the process of peer review of scientific papers.
The two things above ideally and in theory act as buffers or filters of bad information.
This is where good science journalism shines. In many cases, the only type of scientific information that some people ever read are popular science articles. Obviously, this is one of the reasons why good science journalism is important. There are a lot of simply stellar science journalists, who actually love and (even better) understand science. Others, well, not so much.
You probably know examples of each.
I have two main pet peeves that really drive me up the wall when I see examples of in my opinion, “not optimal” journalism: provocative headlines and bite-size science.
Beware: I’m about to go Walter on you!
Picture credit: doblu.com.
Ok, ok, I understand the need of headlines in journalism, I really do. But sometimes provocative headlines can be misleading even if the article itself has the right information; for example, it’s human nature to just remember a headline like:
“Do blackberries cause baldness?”
If you only read this headline and nothing else, you should know better, but I can’t blame you for thinking that blackberries do cause baldness (I happen to be a bald guy who loves blackberries, but one thing has little to do with the other).
The next thing that will surely happen is that you mention this “fact” in a conversation. Since you are an honest person, the friend that you are talking to has every reason to think that this specific “fact” is well, a fact. Then your friend talks to another friend, and it just snowballs from there.
Give me a break! Science is wonderful enough, awesome enough if you will; we do not have to embellish it to make it more interesting.
Picture credit: smbc-comics.com.
A second pet peeve that really gets me going (as in $%#%%%$%#@) is when everything is left at the headline level. No explanation, no reference at all to the source of information, nothing. Things like “Mention 5 scientific news this week in 30 seconds.” or “Our brains are 14 billion neurons short.” and that-is-it. Nothing more, no context, zip, nada, niente…
Literal bite-size science.
($%#%%%$%#@)
Bite-size science gives a very wrong impression of what science is and how it works. Essentially it dismisses the hard work that makes science possible… For example:
From the original observation that gives you the initial spark of an idea, to the initial “quick and dirty” experiments that will give you a better idea of the direction of the research, usually with more experiments, the analysis of the data, the crafting of a manuscript, the submission of said manuscript, the peer review of a manuscript, the revision and resubmission of your paper and (finally) its publication; then comes the possible applications of that knowledge, as translated into useful technologies, etc…
(I wrote the previous sentence awfully long on purpose to impress upon you a little bit of how elaborate the discovery process is).
You surely get the picture.
There is little doubt in my mind that bite-size science gives young minds the wrong idea about what science is (and the true meaning of hard work in general). I do not quite know why, and I am sure that many knowledgeable people are thinking about this, but lately, we are being conditioned to expect quick results with minimal effort, with no patience to pay attention to detail or no patience to read something longer than a couple of phrases. It’s happening to all of us and will ultimately affect our ability to do things (I think).
What was I saying? Right…
What we sometimes see as science based on sound-bites is just the tip of the iceberg. We do not see the rest of it, what makes the headlines possible. Because of that, we are missing the opportunity of seeing a whole series of noble human activities for what they truly are.
By the way, Bah! Humbug!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Have you heard about The Baldscientist Podcast?
*Want to see what my blog is about? Please go here for some other posts.
*You can also subscribe to my blog. Just go to the “Home” page, right hand side.
*I am a published author. Please check out my Amazon’s page…
*Please comment here or send me a message if you have any questions! My email is: orpagan@yahoo.com.
*My Twitter handle is @Baldscientist.
*For the customary disclaimers please go to my “About” page.