Online comments hurt science understanding, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Online comments hurt science understanding, study finds

jsonline.com

19 pointsmolf16 comments

Does someone have read the original article ? I am curious about how the reader evaluation of potential risk was assessed. Was there a control group which didn't see any comment to compare variance amongst this group to the other groups variances ? How was the sampling done ? Were people with knowledge of science equitably balanced amongst groups ? How many of them was there ? At which level is the variance difference amongst groups significant ? 2000 subjects can lead to average results depending of the sampling.

The jsonline article does quite a lousy job with details.

The title of the original article is "Science, new media, and the public" published in the Science Magazine. https://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6115/40. If you google the title you can find the full text.

Here is a detailed article on the same topic > http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-around-the-clock/...

Interesting.

The fact that people get (strongly) influenced by comments by non-experts is not new and definitely not limited to science. The same holds true (though to a smaller extent) with TV.

Here in France, news shows will typically interview random people on the street on whatever subject they are discussing (politics, science, culture...) and air the 15-20 sec answers to millions of viewers. These people have no particular knowledge but their reaction/opinion is shown at the same level as that of a field expert. Thus conveying far too much weight to their opinion and hurting viewers' understanding.

Not only in France. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI (2min English language satire)

I remember him saying on the same programme (NewsWipe) that people on the street used to be more serious in their responses, perhaps because they thought the News should be serious and factual.

This is called Vox Populi, and I think it's done throughout the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_populi

I wonder how this translates to peoples understanding of medicine, and alternative medicine in particular. Those discussions tend to get very heated.

Diet specifically, even on HN.

Not much worse than being influenced by the articles themselves. Science reporting is just awful, universally as far as I can tell.

Youre absolutely right and its not helped by the fact that many scientists are incredibly poor communicators. Its a shame because there is some really interesting work happening in the scientific world which lay people are missing out on.

I just think about the laboratory I work in and professors above me who fail to recognise that non scientific people arnt stupid, they just havent undergone 12 years of tertiary education training to allow them to understand the language of science without a translator.

What you say is true. However the often overlooked issue with science reporting is that it is watered down to a point that even basic facts are conveyed wrong

"read a balanced news report about nanotechnology"

I would enjoy being able to read the article. If its any good, it would not accurately reflect typical journalist science reporting where viewers are better off reading the comments. If the article is garbage, then it would not accurately reflect nanotechnology, in which case viewers are better off reading the comments. I think this is a pretty big hole in the study, unless the conclusion was determined before the study, in which case they did a pretty good job of manufacturing the selected result.

Oh the comments here from readers commenting the comments on the linked description of scientific research that has researched how comments on description of scientific research influences the readers understanding of the sciende in question is gon b gud.

I stopped reading comments a long time ago. There's a slim chance they add something to an article, but it's not worth wading through all that garbage to find the one nugget of wisdom. Perhaps they contain some feedback useful to the original author, although personally I've turned them off on my blog long ago.

Edit: Of course HN is special :)

I often find myself in the comments looking for sources indicate some mistakes in the article. Can be quite helpful sometimes.

And yet, here I am on the comments page.

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