Science journalism excoriated
Sep. 10th, 2005 10:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinVia Clifford: Ben Goldacre writes a mostly great Guardian column about the sorry state of science journalism.
Almost everything he complains about in Britain also goes for America, though I'm not familiar with the quaint subgenre of "scientists have found the formula for..." stories, which must be a British thing. American papers would have a deep horror of printing the formula for anything, no matter how flippant.
The core problem he describes is that it's extremely difficult to convey a quantitative notion of uncertainty if the audience is assumed to know nothing of mathematics, and the idea of science as the self-correcting pursuit of qualified knowledge gets largely lost as a result. He also touches on the problem of bad organizational press releases, which particularly infuriate me: if the PR office of the scientist's own institution can't get the description of the work right, what chance does an outside journalist have?
I do think Goldacre's attack on the humanities toward the end is unnecessarily smug, based in part on a parody vision of his own, and the knock on "cultural relativism" is mistargeted. Cultural relativism is, as far as I know, a term of art in anthropology, and its introduction in the mid-20th century by Franz Boas and others was a genuine step forward that, at least initially, was not an antiscientific reaction at all but an attempt to work around observer biases when figuring out somebody else's culture. That sterile forms of extreme ontological relativism were extrapolated from it later and exploited in romantic attacks on science shouldn't blind us to that.
Almost everything he complains about in Britain also goes for America, though I'm not familiar with the quaint subgenre of "scientists have found the formula for..." stories, which must be a British thing. American papers would have a deep horror of printing the formula for anything, no matter how flippant.
The core problem he describes is that it's extremely difficult to convey a quantitative notion of uncertainty if the audience is assumed to know nothing of mathematics, and the idea of science as the self-correcting pursuit of qualified knowledge gets largely lost as a result. He also touches on the problem of bad organizational press releases, which particularly infuriate me: if the PR office of the scientist's own institution can't get the description of the work right, what chance does an outside journalist have?
I do think Goldacre's attack on the humanities toward the end is unnecessarily smug, based in part on a parody vision of his own, and the knock on "cultural relativism" is mistargeted. Cultural relativism is, as far as I know, a term of art in anthropology, and its introduction in the mid-20th century by Franz Boas and others was a genuine step forward that, at least initially, was not an antiscientific reaction at all but an attempt to work around observer biases when figuring out somebody else's culture. That sterile forms of extreme ontological relativism were extrapolated from it later and exploited in romantic attacks on science shouldn't blind us to that.