“The only (veteran) science journo I know says that he and his fellows:

(i) take publication in a peer-reviewed journal as a badge of “soundness”; and

(ii) assume Univ press office folk (who are largely ex-journos or part-time journos) have done the “translating” to plain language for them, AND the checking w the scientists for accuracy of message.

One can debate whether this is good practice, but it is the way the current system works.”

I realise that this is the way the current system works, but the current system is what’s giving us situations in which newspapers and other media outlets publish things that just aren’t true.

Just because it’s the current system doesn’t mean it’s the right system.

To reiterate:

If journalists are not responsible for the content of a newspaper, then who on earth is?

Is it really too much to ask for a journalist to actually read a paper before writing about it?

scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/04/how_wrong_is_it_to_use_a_kitte.php

Sell your papers based on the actual news and not on a bunch of made up, twisted to fit rubbish.

after all they are called News papers…not lie papers

The difference is that in the financial section you get things like company A bought a 20% stake in company B thus bringing their holdings in company C to 51% etc Nice easy factual stuff where they can’t really make up a scare story.

The science section on the other hand… seems largly to consist of a journalist with no qualifications in the subject taking a study with minor fairly unremarkable results and telling you it’ll cause cancer…or cure it…or possibly both in the daily mails case.

Newspapers should by law be made to put a disclaimer within each publication. It can be in small print but MUST be placed at the bottom of the FRONT page.

DISCLAIMER:
Although every effort has been made to verify the facts in this publication due to time constraints, potential misinformation from our sources and the personal opinions of parties involved or that of the writer. It must be assumed that any article within this publication is wholly or in part a work of fiction. The Daily Bob takes no responsibility for any harm or offence that an article published herein may cause.

When people are made aware that the articles they read are of low quality and demand better. Then and only then will they improve. We don’t see this sort of thing nearly as often in for example the financial section.

What I said was treat the results and predictions as being a lot more uncertain and be prepared for them to be wrong… What I see though is politicians, journalist and all sorts of other interest groups essentially pretending (or even believing) higher degrees of certainty than is warranted.

It seems to me that here you’re saying that we have a scientifically illiterate public sphere – and here I agree with you. My point is that it’s better to lay the blame there – and attempt to rectify things by contributing to the discussion – than to dismiss social sciences as inobjective. (Which you did.)

Seriously, if we can’t even get consensus for something as relatively straightforward to analyse as gun control, then just what can we be reasonably certain about?

Frankly, I think this sentence is bizarre. I’d have said there’s a pretty clear consensus on gun control everywhere except the US, and there the lack of consensus is mostly down to an anti-scientific and indeed irrational streak in public discourse. Are you American, by any chance? (I presume not from your spelling of “analyse”, but you never know.)

I don’t find that it distracts me, and I’m not offended by it any more than I am by sloppy grammar. I just think it’s lazy and uncreative. (I agree that it’s not blasphemous and therefore not a “swear” word.)

I may have laboured the point of correlation and causation, but that’s because it is the absolute crux of the issue. “Hard” science subjects are distinguished from “soft” sciences essentially because the former have a very well developed causation model with a gradual building of complexity. That reductionist model has its limits though. Several sciences (like medical science) have changed radically in the last 60 years as they have been able to develop such models, but even they hit considerable limits at the moment. It is that causation model gap which I think is really what makes social sciences different.

I didn’t mean to ignore Darwin – he didn’t really have strong politics as far as I can tell. No doubt he had the social norms of his class, and originally some sort of conventional religious faith, but as far as we can tell that didn’t stop his analysis. Of course many Christians believed that there could be no contradiction between their faith and science would just reveal God’s work.

I’d certainly agree that Lysenko drove his science through because of the politics and power structure of the Soviet Union at the time. But that’s precisely why science and politics (or any faith structure for that matter) make very poor bedfellows when trying to arrive at some attempt at objective truth (whatever that is). It’s just subjects that involve the humanities are much more difficult to entangle.

Finally, where on earth did I say give up? What I said was treat the results and predictions as being a lot more uncertain and be prepared for them to be wrong – or accept that we might never know. If Godel demonstrated that this was so for some parts of mathematics, then surely how much more so for these more complex subjects. What I see though is politicians, journalist and all sorts of other interest groups essentially pretending (or even believing) higher degrees of certainty than is warranted. Seriously, if we can’t even get consensus for something as relatively straightforward to analyse as gun control, then just what can we be reasonably certain about?

‘Seriously, Ben, you clearly have a decently developed vocabulary, and English has, by far, the largest set of words in the history of human language, with dozens of choices that could have worked in that sentence. It would be fun to see more of them, instead of the same old lazy scatological choices.’

Which would be fine except that there isn’t a more suitable, accurate or appropriate word in the English language than ‘bullshit’ in this case.

If the use of a single word (even if that word really was a proper* swear word) distracts you from an entire argument, then it is you that needs to grow up my friend.

*which was my originally planned one-word answer but I didn’t think it would get past the moderators or be appreciated by the recipient with the humour with which it was intended…

Well, thanks for the lecture on the difference between causation and correlation. I’m not an idiot, you know.

Heisenberg and Oppenheimer were extreme examples, intended to point out that there are obviously moments when even a “hard” scientist’s politics can be important, sometimes even to the theories that they develop.

The examples of Lysenko and Darwin are more pertinent. Your reply ignored Darwin, and missed my point about Lysenko. Let me spell it out. Lysenko was a bad scientist, and perhaps that was because of his politics. But it doesn’t matter. Lots of people are bad scientists, for all sorts of reasons. Lysenko’s theories had disastrous consequences not because his politics were bad, but because the sphere in which he operated didn’t allow his ideas to be criticized.

It’s very like MMR and Andrew Wakefield. The MMR scare wasn’t caused by Wakefield but by the UK media, ie the public sphere in which he operated. Wakefield was a bad scientist, perhaps even a fraudulent one, but we have to allow people to do science badly if we want them to do it at all. The flipside gives you Darwin, since it’s possible that his politics helped him to do good science. This is why, ultimately, you can’t divorce science from politics. A scientist’s politics and her personality are deeply bound up, and her science is a product of her personality.

In fact, agronomy is a hopeful example. In the wrong country Lysenko’s ideas led to disaster, but over the course of the twentieth century, in countries with a healthier attitude to scientific debate, crop yields have increased manyfold. (Of course there are various ethical concerns, but that’s another matter.)

I agree with you that it can be extremely hard to interpret evidence about social policy accurately. But we differ in the conclusions that we draw from this. Your think we should give up, I think it’s too important an enterprise. The best way to do good science is to do it in a public sphere that can provide intelligent criticism. Now, that may not be the public sphere that we have, but it’s a worthwhile aim, don’t you think?