I feel like typical reporting of research could be improved this way.
I feel like typical reporting of research could be improved this way.
"Forget trying to understand this issue, let us explain how you should feel about it!"
It will immediately be abused. Still, probably better than the current situation.
Well... yeah. Because you stand no chance of understanding the issue, and there is a very high risk that you will develop irrational feelings that will lead you to do dangerous things.
Take for example the flu effectiveness in elders study. The biased journalists summarized it as "flu vaccine is killing elders". It would have been harder to misrepresent it to such a degree if the abstract contained something like this:
"Public health notice: the authors believe existing vaccines are safe and effective and strongly recommend people of all ages to undergo vaccination. This study is a scientific inquiry with the purpose of increasing that effectiveness for elder patients, and our current findings have no imediate clinical application. More specifically, we report no evidence that flu vaccination is a net health risk for the elderly."
A friend of mine wrote a paper and his university's PR department called him up to propose writing a press release, because it looked like it might be of popular interest. And my friend's first thought was to downplay the actual impact of the research, as it was a preliminary study.
It got me thinking that maybe every paper should include a similar thing.