Assignment 6

Francis Bacon believed that the senses deceived us in two distinct ways. They either alter our perception of what is actually occurring or they completely fail us. When he wrote the New Organon, which is the foundation of modern science, he wanted us to abandon our dependency on the senses and instead use experimentation to acquire knowledge. Basically, he started the argument between trusting our instincts and disregarding them.
A lot of conventional wisdom revolves around going with our gut feeling. It is said that on a multiple-choice test the first answer you circle is typically the right one. And when it comes to taking a risk we are supposed to "not think about it; just do it." But is all this gut-trusting really something we should welcome into the scientific community? Yes and no. Basing an experiment on a hunch is what science is all about. We think that maybe X is true so we test it, but instinct should never make it into the laboratory. When we are in the lab and a suddenly gas Y is seen evaporating off the reaction we should not just assume it is hydrogen and move on. Maybe it's nitrogen and that could change everything.
Instinct also has a place after we perform the experiment. That's basically what a theory is. We have all this data and our gut says, "This data seems to insinuate that X causes Y." Granted, we have something to back up our gut with, i.e. scientific data, but even with numbers our idea may not be true. Just because one guy figured something out does not mean it is correct.
Which brings me to the science writer. Is it their place to use their gut when writing a story? No. Not at all. First of all, as a journalist they should not be reporting on anything except what is factual or what is stated in interviews. Secondly, to include educated guesses or gut feelings from you, the writer, is not accurate. You are not an expert and have no place to be making such an assessment.
Things become a little less clear when we are quoting our sources. If a doctor lays out three possible theories for why X causes Y then all three should be included. Even though all three possibilities are based on the gut feeling of a scientist, they are educated proposals.
What if the whole subject matter is based on a gut-feeling, though? Is it fair to write about it? Is it fair to call it science journalism? To talk about something that we are not sure is true is to propagate falsehoods and animosity towards science. Take the bees for instance. It seems there are millions of different reasons why people seem to think that the bees are disappearing from their hives. It's global warming, pesticides, diseases, parasites, loss of habitat, genetically modified pollen, cell phone towers, industrialization of the bee industry, and so on and so on. Some of these allegations seem to have more merit than others, but every time we see an article about the bees it is hard to tell if this is an article based on a hunch or research.
As discussed in my last post, the propagation of misinformation is awful for the public. It is damaging to our perception of truth and science. It is possible that a hunch is correct, but a science writer should never state a hunch as fact. If they do want to include an expert's speculation the comment should be labelled as such.
And it is easy to understand why a science writer wants to write a sensationalist piece about a hunch. For one, if it is a really juicy story then that means they can get their name out there. Also, it is understandable that maybe we feel obligated to publish a gut-feeling before the research has moved forward because if people believe it and the gut-feeling turns out to be correct then you saved a lot of people from a lot of trouble.
But it is still important to wait for the data and to only report on data. It is also important to label all speculation as such. When writing about science it feels right to stay grounded in research because you are being honest with the reader. So when writing an article, just go with your gut: stick to the facts.

Assignment 5

People like patterns. This is a simple part of our cognitive process that made living as hunter-gatherers easier. We eat a mushroom. We have an upset stomach. We throw-up. That means the mushroom caused our stomach problems so we should avoided it in the future. Learning through correlation is what makes living possible, but unfortunately, correlation- as the saying goes- does not mean causation. Maybe there was a bacteria on the fungus that made us sick. The mushroom may be perfectly edible if we just wash it. In order to find causation science takes our impulse to jump to conclusions and throws it out the window.
We have a very particular method in science that aims to remove as much human bias as possible, but unfortunately some methods designed by scientists are inadequate and fail to do this. In 1998, Wakefield et al famously published a paper that was ethically and methodologically flawed. They determined vaccines may cause autism in toddlers. Their conclusions were unfounded and the paper was retracted 12 years later. But the damage was done. There is a large portion of our population that still believes vaccines cause autism.
Does this mean that these people are scientifically illiterate? Yes. Just as people who refuse to acknowledge climate change ignore the majority of evidence supporting its existence, people believing in the autism-vaccine link latch on to one or two pieces of evidence contrary to the overwhelming majority of research findings. Science is based on consensus. If one study says A and twenty thousand studies say B it is typically the case that B is correct. Now this is not always so. Copernicus said the earth revolved around the sun and he was outnumbered. But people tested his theory and found he was correct. Reproducibility of results is key to science's claim to being declared as truth. Denial of the majority of evidence directly contradicts science's foundations.
That is not to say it is unacceptable to question results. We must always double check findings in science because verification is also important to the scientific process.
So what does the above information mean for the writer of science. First of all, basing your writing on one study is a mistake. Always check to see if others agree with the results of the particular paper you are studying. Also, the previous information tells us that debunking theories (whether true or false) is very difficult. People like to take what makes sense because of correlation and accept it as true. In fact, we do more than accept these correlations. We become married to ideas and emotionally invested in what we believe is true. Challenging peoples perceptions of truth can often be an construed as an attack on them, personally. When writing for science it is important to carefully lay out why one theory is incorrect and why another is true. Instead, of bulldozing someone's perception of reality, it is better to deconstruct it carefully and then rebuild it.
Correlation and causation are at the heart of this argument  As scientists and science writers we must be very careful to differentiate between the two and base our research on the latter, because basing it on the former can be devastating for the public's perception of truth.

Assignment 4

The science journalist is certainly in the best position to "give science away." Giving science to the public is easy when you have a large audience, access to top scientists, and good writing technique. It is the torch that the science writer carries. The scientist can be thought of as the fire giver. These Promethean figures have this knowledge and light, but their ways of disseminating to the public are poor. They publish papers that are intensely boring to anyone not already interested in the subject matter you study. The public is left in the dark about most science. It is the job of the science journalist to get that information out. When we think of a world with no science reporting most people in this country would know nothing beyond what they can remember from high school biology.

But there is still this issue of scientific illiteracy. Our biggest issue as science writers is the distribution problem. How on earth do we get people to read an article in a section of the paper they simply skip over? I think one way is to insert science into articles in other sections of the paper or online newspaper. By adding science into stories related to other topics of news we can expose a larger audience to the wonderful field of science. For example,  If an article on water wars is printed in the international section then a section of the writing should consider why there are water shortages and how we can resolve these issues scientifically, as well as politically.

What about the people who do not read the news? Television media does not seem to be a great substitute. There is some science reporting, but on television you cannot enter the kind of depth you can in text. To reach the non-news reading public it is not necessary to abandon science writing as a tool. I tutor K-5 children and part of my job is to teach science lessons. When I do this I use science writing as a way of getting predigested information, images, and ideas. Science writing can still be useful even when it is not being read. It is possible to take the torch from science writers and carry it yourself for a little while.

So, written above are several ways to give science away to the public, but does this dissemination of information have a large impact on the common good. Yes, it does. A more informed scientific public may lead to more scientists. My chief concern is not to increase scientific literacy, but rather inspire some children (or maybe even adults) to work in the sciences. If we can inspire some people to get into science then we have done a good job as the torch carriers.

Assignment 3

Why do people lose interest in science? I think the answer to that is pretty easy: math. When I learned science in second grade I learned about birds and mammals and dinosaurs and planets and oceans and other incredible concepts. They are concepts that captured my imagination and feed into my imagination. I loved planes and trains as a little kid. I still do. They are massive hunks of metal that can carry thousands of tons of cargo or break the sound barrier or drop bombs on targets the size of a 55-gallon drum from several thousand feet. What isn't incredible about those things?

The answer lies in how we learn science. By the time we reach high school the magic is taken away from science and broken down into meaningless numbers. Yes, sound travels at 340 m/s, but when in physics class do we discuss how absolutely incredible it is that a sound traveling through a fluid can reach our ears and be distinguishable as a syllable or word? Sure, a strong acid has a pH of 1, but can we discuss what that kind of acid can do to metal or your hand? That's what people want to hear. Nobody cares about numbers unless they are given context (except mathematicians, which is good for them, but not the point I am trying to make here).

Once kids struggle through high school chemistry it is no wonder they have an aversion to the sciences. In five years from graduation all they will remember from that class is they received a C+ and their teacher was a real jerk. They won't be able to describe a molecule or the ideal gas law because those concepts were broken down and spoon-fed to them as definitions and numbers. It's a shame. Numbers can be interesting when we take the time to understand what they mean.

As science writers it is our job to get people re-interested in science. We can't just bring science to people. They need incredible science; the kind of science that makes you take a moment and say, "Holy shit, they can do that?" In my opinion nobody does this better than Radio Lab on NPR. They take cutting edge science and make an hour of easily-understood, yet shocking, break through science. We need to make it clear as science writers that sea floor spreading is not just a calculable rate of rock movement across the ocean floor. No, we need to tell them that the very living rock of this planet is not stationary. Even the earth, our most solid and unmoving of objects, is not static. That's amazing.

So as a writer of science we cannot report on boring crap, nor can we report on exciting things and turn them into boring crap. It is our job as writers of science to take the unfathomable world of science and make it enthralling. We need to make it great, make it fun, and make it interesting. Our education system and textbooks have done enough damage to science so we must take great caution to not cause any further aversions to the incredible discoveries that our scientists make. Our job is to make science interesting by removing the numbers and formulas and, instead, illuminate the incredible discoveries of our scientific discoveries.