Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

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>Toxoplasmosis in particular seems intuitively like the perfect combination of new research plus massive prestige for whoever publishes papers on the topic

Eh, not really much prestige, but perhaps lots of press.

The big thing is to not take any single paper as "scientific truth" like what you read in a textbook. The scientific literature is not a textbook, it's the place where science's self-correction happens. Things in text books have been battle-tested, and widely accepted usually due to replication. And even then, textbooks have errors and perpetuate some falsehoods! Any individual scientific paper will not even likely be replicated, because it's working on something that did not turn out to be fundamental to the path of science.

Scientific papers in the literature are how scientists share their small steps while exploring the n-dimensional world. That n is very high, so there are lots of directions to explore, and most of them will not be that interesting. If it is, somebody else may decide to take a look too. If it's a hot-topic, then many many people will. Scientists have to operate in a world where they are exploring what is and is not true, and their relationship with uncertainty is strong; it's absolutely essential to embrace uncertainty.

The biggest thing is to distrust news reporting about science. It's correct about 1% of the time. The motivations of a reporter trying to somehow make an interesting article by deadline on a topic they don't understand are far more distorted than the scientists publishing a paper they expect 30-50 people to ever read. And that's if you actually get a real reporter to look at these things; most articles are just press releases that are cut and pasted from a university press lackey into the newspaper's publishing system. Those are usually even worse.

> And that's if you actually get a real reporter to look at these things; most articles are just press releases that are cut and pasted from a university press lackey into the newspaper's publishing system. Those are usually even worse.

Actually if the researchers expect the paper to be high impact they will often provide the press release to the University's press department themselves - these types of press releases are merely a layman directed abstract and tend to be reasonably OK.

This raises two interesting points.

1. Sometimes the lowest quality newspapers have the best quality article on a given publication.

2. Why aren't all research publications required to be accompanied by a second abstract written in plain low jargon language that can be understood at some level by someone with high school science?

I think maybe it depends a little bit on which university it is: perhaps a small university will not have enough money to hire a big dedicated PR office, so they will rely more on materials submitted directly by the scientist and stick closer to reality. But the PR offices of big universities (in particular MIT) put out pure hype which is very precariously connected to reality. A lot of work goes into these press releases (they will send someone from the PR office to interview the researcher and so on), but the work is not really aimed towards providing an accurate summary of the research...

As an MIT graduate I sadly concur with this statement.

To #2, because even putting aside how many scientists would have no interest in doing that, they would also be generally unqualified. Being a good researcher doesn’t make you a good teacher, and you need to be a very good teacher to turn your results into something a high school student could understand, and yet which still communicates your results accurately.

You're absolutely right here. Many journals do #2, and I generally find these to be worthless. For example, the Author Summaries on PLoS articles in a field that I'm not familiar with almost never help me. Often times when I read a paper in detail and journal club it with others, the conclusions that we derive from the data presented in figures has quite different emphasis than what is emphasized in the paper itself.

Sometimes with hindsight one can go back to a paper and say "this is important because of X" but it can be really hard to do that at the beginning, and often times the true value of the data may be different than the hypothesis under which the data was originally generated.

> 2. Why aren't all research publications required to be accompanied by a second abstract written in plain low jargon language that can be understood at some level by someone with high school science?

Because the target audience of research publications is other researchers in the same field; while outreach to nonscientists is fine, it's simply not the goal of a research paper.

Besides, for many papers this is impossible and/or pointless. My research results are incremental results in a specialized subfield of mathematics. I don't know how to explain them in anything but the vaguest terms to anyone without a reasonable background in that subfield, and I also don't know why such a person would care about them.

I can't quite agree, from my (albeit limited) observation, the copy-paste hype from press offices is almost always the source of ridiculous overstatements that make people distrust science. The press office's job is to make the university look as good as possible, and when they play the game of telephone with the researchers, they tend to overhype far more than a disinterested reporter would. MIT press office in particular is terrible at this, as are many lesser-known but aspiring schools.

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