Covering Science at Dangerous Speeds
cjr.org
cjr.org
In principle, I'm a believer that the cure for misinformation is more information. If people don't realize that, prepublication study websites are exactly that, you fix it by telling them. Not by omitting reporting on them completely.
What's missing is the assessment of probability. What does the scientific process look like, where in it is this piece of information, and based on that, how likely is it to be accurate and impactful?
We cover sports in a way that allows educated and casual observers to enjoy them and learn extreme amount of nuance. How do we apply the same lessons here?
The idealist in me agrees with this wholeheartedly. I think it's true for people with a certain discipline in their thinking(i.e. scientists, academics and the like), who will always keep their convictions open to new information. But the vast majority of people don't operate that way. People get a certain narrative stuck in their head, and then they filter information to fit that.
Plus, we have access to more information right now than any humans in history, yet the state of human knowledge is still dominated by rumors, myths, tall tales, and mystery. We have all this quasi-religious cognitive machinery and thousands of years of oral culture behind the evolution of our brains. Maybe rational scientific decisonmaking is an anomaly in human history, or even worse, just another myth?
>We cover sports in a way that allows educated and casual observers to enjoy them and learn extreme amount of nuance. How do we apply the same lessons here?
This is an interesting thought. The average American can watch a football play and break down incredibly complex concepts of what just happened. Arguments over what constitutes a "catch" during instant replay often spiral into downright philosophical territory. The difference is that sports happen really fast - and you can watch them live while drinking beer. Maybe we should turn science into a team sport and have them do it in an arena in front of 80,000 people. Bring out some cheerleaders, air all the pickup truck commercials, and Shakira can perform at halftime. The winner gets a big trophy.
Or maybe, we've made tremendous progress over the past thousands of years, and will continue to do so. Give it time. Extend your time horizon. In a few more millennia, we may be much more enlightened than we are today.
Many of the problematic developments regarding SARS-CoV-2 were corrected fairly rapidly. In this regard I see a lot of recent research and its coverage as being typical, but sped up, and with more attention.
What I think has been happening is people -- citizens, journalists, scientists -- just seeing what actually happens in science, and not being able to turn away or sweep things under the rug because of the urgency of things. So when claims start being made on shoddy research motivated by questionable motives, and then enshrined in policy with weak justification, everyone notices instead of it just being ignored like it usually is.
My sense is that the problem isn't necessarily with preprints or anything -- I suspect outlets like that will only increase in use and significance over time -- it's in the way everything is interpreted. There's a tendency to interpret something peer-reviewed as "The Truth" by many journalists, scientists, and clinicians, whereas in reality science is much more messy, gradual, and variable. It's more of a directed stochastic walk than a straight line.
What I'd like to see is everyone treat papers, even peer-reviewed ones, as potentially very fallible minute bits of information, and to recognize the distorted incentive structures that exist in academics today. University press releases should be looked at with as much skepticism as press releases from businesses, for similar reasons.