> less of the "science tells us" stuff
Such as? Seems to me that good science does tell us stuff, and also admits when it doesn't know.
Such as? Seems to me that good science does tell us stuff, and also admits when it doesn't know.
sometime later...
"Scientists say eating one or more eggs per day cures X, Y and Z"
sometime later...
"Scientists say people who eat one or more eggs per day are more likely to exhibit A, B or C"
What frequently occurs is one person or a group of people say or publish something, and then all the media broadcasts it like everyone is in complete agreement.
In real science, there is very little complete agreement. Even things most of us assume are 100% true, do not always have unanimous consensus within the scientific community.
Laymen might think that's a bad thing. But it's not... it's exactly how science is supposed to work. The problem is, people need to be told an absolute, but science can't do that for the most part.
What even is a scientist? Is it anyone that works for a lab? What about people who graduated with "Science" in their degree title? Does that mean Computer Scientists are the fabled "Scientists"? How do we know?
The word "Science" has become a sort of pseudo-religion these days. Nobody can disagree with "The Science". Which is quite an oxymoron in itself.
That is pure science - accept something until better data comes along and changes the way we think about the topic.
We lose people there though, unfortunately. People like to "know" something absolute, and the media does a horrible job of communicating disagreements or opposing data.
So, while we now know that Newtonian physics breaks down in some circumstances, where relativity and quantum mechanics are needed Newtonian is still good enough for most everyday and a lot of not so everyday applications (like sending probes to Mars).
It doesn't flip / flop like the "eating eggs was good yesterday and is now bad".
In general an element of both is present, but on one end tou have, say Newton, and on the other you have some study that says electromagnetic waves are bad for you because of some statistical health outcome but proposes no causal mechanism.
The problem seems to be that the further towards the latter part of the spectrum someone's research is, the more likely they are to be adamant that they're "doing science" and promote all the BS about consensus and peer review that gives a pretend version of how science happens.
Presumably due to insecurity. When your work rests on a foundation of p-hacking, you're more likely to be pounding "the science" as justification, vs if you're a physistics that's traced a result back to basic axioms of your field, your work speaks for itself and you don't need to yell how the science is settled
This way, we ensure that our meta-analysis firepower (whatever/whoever that actually is), can be directed at studies that actually have a potential to uncover some real knowledge.
“Science says” is a statement of belief in a knowledge mafia.
“Scientists asked this question and here’s what they discovered and here is what they think” is how science news should be reported. More like entertainment tonight and less like a Sunday school sermon.
The word "Scientist" has become a word without meaning. It's applied to anything we think we want to convince others of or use as argument of authority. When people say "Scientists", they often mean statisticians or other number/data crunching careers.
Instead, that statement could be rewritten as: "The Eggs-For-Health Institute, Department of Eggs-Every-Day asked this question and here’s what they discovered and here is what they think".
This rewritten statement now informs the reader of all the basics - who, what, where, when and why. It's unsurprising the Eggs-For-Health Institute (for a made up scenario) says eating eggs is a good thing.
Unfortunately it gets murkier when it's highly regarded institutions publishing ideas, such as the FDA, CDC, etc. These folks aren't any more certain of things as the rest of the community either. We saw variations of this during the pandemic - the CDC would release some preliminary aggregated data and suddenly headlines ran with "Scientists from the CDC say do X to stop Y" etc... which led to a lot of perceived flip-flopping along the way (because all of this was new territory at the time, ie. the scientific process was playing out in real time.
Scientists have my full support to stumble around in the dark and figure things out. But it's not the laymen who desperately need certainty. It's the scientists themselves when they deign to make policy demands based these half-baked theories de jour.
Truth is a probability and not a binary, but politics is still a casino pretending to be a church.
"When someone says ‘science teaches such and such’, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it." - Feynman
- Science
If it were up to me popular science reporting always would include that disclaimer.
Almost every news article that uses Betteridge's law of headlines. Usually, it's not the scientists fault and the linked articles are very clear of their reach and limits.
Which is to say, it suffers from the same fallacy as when people complain about Hacker News' collective opinion as though a collective anything with voluntary participation is going to be in anyway consistent.
It might not be consistent but even Ray Charles can tell you where the bell curve roughly centers for any given topic.