Where the Wood-Wide Web Went Wrong

As a heuristic, any study, that is not a large, randomized, double blind, placebo controlled study that is featured in main stream media, especially if it is not a human study, is more likely to be wrong than a study that is not featured in the media.

This is because of Bayesian priors. To be interesting enough to be featured in mainstream media, it needs to be surprising or unexpected in some way. However, that means that the Bayesian prior probability is low, and thus, especially since p = 0.05 is used for publication regardless of how unexpected the result is, the conditional probability is lower compared to a study that was not featured in media (because it was not a surprising result - meaning that the prior probability was higher).

I feel like the author of this article should have brought the economics of both journalism and scientific research into the equation here.

Every academic scientist I know says that grant funding favors sensationalized, spectacular sounding results, and journalists know that carefully reported, nuanced stories don’t get clicks or move ad inventory. The current economic incentives of both endeavors feed less than ideal outcomes in both.

this reads like compulsive, preemptively obedient penance for pretty petty reasons. first of all the idea of cmns as a www is not falsified and still holds as a hypothesis. the only problem is that it's not proven and confidence of its existence has been blown a little out of proportion. but what's this fuss about romanticizing and anthropomorphizing nature? i mean so what? this article reads almost like people are dying, arguing "consequences can be far-reaching, affecting policy decisions that impact real people". what are those consequences? that we treat forest and trees with a little more care? i'd argue that the idea of www is closer to reality than the simplified notions of modern forest industry of how soil works. just look at the state of commercial forests. most trees and plants do need fungi - that's scientifically proven. and now we argue about the dangers of buying into fungi also connecting plants? this seems a little overblown.

> Other widely reported claims — that trees use CMNs to signal danger, to recognize offspring, or to share nutrients with other trees — are based on similarly thin or misinterpreted evidence. How did such a weakly sourced narrative take such a strong grip on the public imagination?

We've made wide reaching human policies on completely debunked outdated research.

I'd be super sympathetic to claims that lack strong evidences but aren't disproven either, nor are reaching for a narrative that is outlandish and heavily politicized.

> The episode underscores how important it is for journalists to seek out a broad range of expert opinions, and to challenge us scientists when our assertions aren’t clearly backed up by rigorous research.

That would require the journalists to be able to evaluate a research study. Most journalists aren't equipped to do that, because they're not scientists. I get the impression that a lot of the "Science Editor" writers are often doing a 2-year stint in that position, after previously working as "International Correspondent" or whatever.

This even seems to be the case when the articles are in popular science collections, like SciAm and phys.org.

From the article -

One of us (Jones) was involved in the first major field study on CMNs, published more than 25 years ago. That study found evidence of net carbon transfer between seedlings of two different species, and it posited that most of the carbon was transported through CMNs, while downplaying other possible explanations. This is what’s known as “confirmation bias,” and it is an easy trap to fall into. As hard as it is to admit, it was only due to our skepticism of the recent extraordinary claims about the wood-wide web that we looked back and saw the bias in our own work.

Over decades, these and other distortions have propagated in the academic literature on CMNs, steering the scientific discourse further and further away from reality, similar to a game of “telephone.” In our review, we found that the results of older, influential field studies of CMNs have been increasingly misrepresented by the newer papers that cite them. Among peer reviewed papers published in 2022, fewer than half the statements made about the original field studies could be considered accurate. A 2009 study that used genetic techniques to map the distribution of mycorrhizal fungi, for instance, is now frequently cited as evidence that trees transfer nutrients to one another through CMNs — even though that study did not actually investigate nutrient transfer. In addition, alternative hypotheses provided by the original authors were typically not mentioned in the newer studies.

As these biases have spilled over into the media, the narrative has caught fire. And no wonder: If scientists themselves could be seduced by potentially sensational findings, it is not surprising that the media could too.

The book that sprang into mind is The Overstory by Richard Powers [0]

Fantastic book but all the CMN communication and nutrient sharing seemed a bit too fantastical there too.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overstory

Yeah, I attempted to read The Hidden Life of Trees and couldn't even finish it, just a bunch of anthropomorphized BS.

this kind of thing propagates through media too, star trek and the last of us come to mind as recent shows with “mycelium networks” and they of course don’t need to be accurate but it doesn’t