Let’s Start Tracking Misleading Press Releases About Scientific Findings | Hacker News Reader

Let’s Start Tracking Misleading Press Releases About Scientific Findings

nymag.com

84 pointstokenadult19 comments

In the UK, the NHS (National Health Service) website has an excellent section called Behind the headlines that "provides an unbiased and evidence-based analysis of health stories that make the news".

Their articles are well-written and thorough, but unfortunately much less widely-read than the misleading newspaper reports they often debunk.

http://www.nhs.uk/News/Pages/NewsIndex.aspx

Not exactly on the subject of science, but the European Commission runs a similar blog debunking news stories about the EU:

http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/

Thanks for that link. Interesting reading.

For Cancer Research, I usually check Cancer Research UK [1] to put things straight.

[1] http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/

> Why isn’t anyone holding universities accountable for their press releases?

It's about time. Maybe in the future, universities will adopt ethics guidelines that will oblige them to say, "Here's another social science study of dubious provenance, one that, based on a now-famous survey of similar past studies [1], is more likely to be false than true."

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-f...

Problem is: the people who care already know, and the majority of people don't care. They care enough to "share" a headline on Facebook, not to actually read the conclusions. "Scientists link coffee drinking to smart gene!"--how many people would read further than just sharing with their friends, regardless of, say, the New York Times' rebuttal of such an argument. It's not about accuracy, it's about virality.

"Research shows sharing links on social networks prevents cancer"

A common part of many cons is to not just get the mark to accept the offer that looks to benefit them, but to make them feel they are doing something good at the same time. There are people who will resist doing the moral thing when it doesn't benefit them, there are people who will resist doing the thing that benefits them if it's not moral, but there's very few that will resist something that offers both. It's a double whammy, right to our reward centers.

> ... "Scientists link coffee drinking to smart gene!"

Complete agreement, especially with respect to the word "link", which seems ideally suited to exploit public ignorance of the fact that a link means a correlation, not a cause-effect relationship.

This is particularly bad in certain fields. "Nanotechnology" (which, for PR purposes, means surface chemistry, not molecular assemblers.) seems to be the worst.

Fortunately, that specific hype train appears to have left the station. The worst for me at the peak were nanotechnology articles where the structure in question was somewhere in the submicron (or rarely, micron!) range.

I think that evolutionary psychology might be worse, but perhaps that's because serious scientists actually care about nanotechnology and its related fields.

And then Nymag has a Taboola ad section which has titles like "This drug could cure cancer, find out how"... this doesn't help the problem.

Yes, a thousand times. I've long since learned to treat Stanford University's press office, to name a specific example, as nothing but noise.

More generally, this is a problem of press and media generally, which as much of this moves to an online / technical component, intersects with what many HN readers are actively involved with at their day jobs. Advertising-supported media are only one part of the overall failure, though a large part, and much of the low-value and/or low truth valence of online information can be traced to this.

More generally, as with so many other areas of abuse, corruption, and malfunction, the problem is one of impunity. Those who misbehave aren't called to account and made to pay.

That said, the support for a truth-telling system seems to be very, very difficult to come by. I've got thoughts but no clear answers.

I think there is in one site a problem with the press business model. People do not pay most of the time for the information they read, so journals are not considered anymore exactly a public service but an investment for funds or controlled by debt and governments. In the other side there is the politics of gross investment in R&D for economic growth and a new diplomacy of rankings about everything education, transparency, business friendly policies to attract investors. The problem as I see it is not in the excesses of the system but in the system of knowledge economy, as we know it. As long as you convert intangible assets in into a patent of so you can speculate with it in the financial economy. Anyway, an interesting approach I've seen lately is sites like theconversation where real experts write about their field, besides every post includes a release statement about their personal involvement, and conflicting interests on the subject. Also this link about the technology of measurement is interesting https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-10-20/rank-has-...

Does anyone think we can all agree on which social science headlines are misleading, and which ones are unbiased summaries of the facts?

I hope by tracking you mean tying it back to who initiated the misleading article. Not just who wrote it but who paid for it and to what gain. Then once a year publish a chart showing the top ten sources ,and their most published topics/titles of misleading articles, from source to publication.

Though universities carry a lot of blame science journalists who dont read or comprehend the actual science content before writing an article should find a different career!

Studies show that such press releases are then further twisted by the media, experts say.

"The basis of framing theory is that the media focuses attention on certain events and then places them within a field of meaning." source: http://masscommtheory.com/theory-overviews/framing-theory/ Media twists these findings to frame them either in their own interest or to have more visits with polemic titles. But rankings based in scientific measurements might also make use of that to get their results published in the media. I don't mean to undervalue scientific work at all. But the instrumentation of it not for purposes other than scientific.

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