Comments on Existence is Wonderful: Data vs. Interpretation

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be abl...

2010-08-28T11:35:55.632-07:00

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
-Aristotle

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Science_woo

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
-Einstein

Hi Jim, your comment triple-posted somehow so I de...

2010-08-26T22:54:34.066-07:00

Hi Jim, your comment triple-posted somehow so I deleted two of the duplicates. Figured you'd be okay with that.

I agree with your points on "journalism" but at the same time I've seen plenty of examples of "over-interpretation" at, say, the "press release" level (which is journalism I guess, but more telegram-ish) and even at the study paper/abstract level itself. A particularly egregious example of this is the "autism = broken mirror neurons" phenomenon...it was just sort of decided, somehow, for a while, that "mirror neurons" objectively existed as some sort of specialized brain structure when really "mirror neuron" itself was kind of an interpretation. So it's a pervasive problem, with popular journalism just showcasing the worst/most obvious examples.

That said, I don't agree that over-interpretation is generally optimistic (though maybe I just haven't seen enough examples). It seems to depend on the subject matter. Like I've seen plenty of articles spouting gloom-and-doom about vaccines.

I can also relate a lot to this: "When I was a kid, I **loved** newsstand popular science stuff. Now, it makes me feel vaguely ill. Though I'll still occasionally buy some of it (Scientific American Mind -- What Makes You **You**?) if I'm absolutely desperate for something undemanding to read on the bus home, though I feel somewhat the same way about it as I'd feel about eating a Reese's peanut butter cup on the bus on the way home. Junk nutrition, junk reading."

I remember poring over old issues of "Discover" and "Omni" (which I thought had the coolest covers...) as a kid growing up in the 1980s, and part of me still wonders vaguely if articles were "better" back then. But I kind of doubt it at this point.

> Basically one thing I've noticed in > ...

2010-08-26T21:32:42.761-07:00

> Basically one thing I've noticed in
> whatever passes for "science journalism"...
> blurs the distinction between what
> researchers observed and/or recorded (i.e.,
> data), and what this data means. . .

Yes, well, that is a problem, isn't it? Journalism being journalism, and not scholarship -- a branch of the entertainment industry, basically. So there's one source of bias right off the bat -- articles in the mass media need to attract casual readers (to make the advertisers, who are keeping the journalists and their publishers employed, happy) and that means primarily that they need to be gee-whiz-worthy, with perhaps the irritatingly supercilious -- "so you were dumb enough to buy the glossy rag you're holding for **this**, huh?" -- cautionary paragraph at the end to take some of the gee-whiz out of the cover blurb). And they've gotta be short and simple (middle-school-level English), and upbeat, upbeat, upbeat. Optimistic. Life, particularly life here in the U.S. of A. must be shown to be getting better and better, every day in every way. Then there are the political and ideological biases to squint through. Nature (if you're a Republican) vs. Nurture (if you're a Democrat), that sort of thing (reversed, of course, when it comes to the causes of homosexuality ;-> ).

When I was a kid, I **loved** newsstand popular science stuff. Now, it makes me feel vaguely ill. Though I'll still occasionally buy some of it (Scientific American Mind -- What Makes You **You**?) if I'm absolutely desperate for something undemanding to read on the bus home, though I feel somewhat the same way about it as I'd feel about eating a Reese's peanut butter cup on the bus on the way home. Junk nutrition, junk reading.

And, of course, sometimes what passes for serious science turns out in the end to be completely off-the-wall. I was browsing in Barnes & Noble last weekend in a book entitled _The Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love_
http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Sex-William-Virginia-Johnson/dp/0465020402
which contains a chapter about Bill Masters' (and it was really Masters' book, the author of the biography claims; Virginia Johnson considered insisting that her name be removed as co-author, but in the end she didn't want to provoke the boss) 1979 _Homosexuality in Perspective_, which made claims about what is today known as "reparative therapy" that are still trotted out by conservative Christians and reparative therapists themselves, but which are not taken seriously by most of the psychiatric and psychological community. The "observations", the bio's author claims, were pretty scarce in that book, while the "interpretation" came entirely out of Bill Masters' imagination. Or so the bio's author claims; I certainly haven't read _Homosexuality in Perspective_, nor do I intend to. So who the hell knows? (I think I can guess, based on the Zeitgeist of Masters' generation and even of the time the book was written and published in, but that's meta-meta-meta interpretation. Which is pretty much the best most people can do, most of the time.)