Saving science from "Unscientific America" | Hacker News Reader

Saving science from "Unscientific America"

arstechnica.com

17 pointsedw51912 comments

This book appears to be pretty poor: their main argument is that we need more PR people to 'inform' the public about science.

Given that ridiculously exaggerated press releases, written by PR people - which become the basis for overblown media stories with titles like 'cure for cancer discovered' or 'scientists find fat gene' - are probably a large factor responsible for the skepticism that a lot of people have for science, I'd say we actually need less PR people.

Or maybe we just need better PR people.

A world with a few more Carl Sagans, Richard Dawkinses and others who are seriously scientifically literate but spend a great deal of their time working on explaining things to the public at large could hardly be a bad thing.

I have read and enjoyed much of Sagan's later work, unfortunately I ignored him for a long time, largely because of his participation in the bogus and thoroughly politicized TTAPS study that invented "nuclear winter". If you want to be taken seriously as a scientist don't let your political beliefs run away with your brain, even temporarily. Stephen Jay Gould is worthless, I won't waste any time any more reading any of his work.

Perhaps not quite in the same league as those mentioned, but have a look at Dr Karl ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Kruszelnicki ) He does exactly that - and while not completely a household name, he is reasonably well known.

Yes, I'm familiar with him -- his office used to be two floors down from mine, in fact!

And yes, I kinda had him in mind too, when writing my comment. More Kruszelnickis as well as more Dawkinses would make the world a better place.

I would not consider Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins "PR people". While they do educate the public, "PR people" tends to refer to someone who has an active interest in a particular side of an issue, rather than a general interest in educating the public.

One way the general public is kept scientifically illiterate is from locking up scientific journal articles behind subscription walls.

When peer-reviewed science articles are on lock down, and pseudoscience webpages can freely proliferate on the Internet, pseudoscience wins.

Of all the people who currently believe in wacky pseudoscience, how many do you think would be convinced otherwise if only they had free access to original scientific papers?

None, they're mostly a lost cause. On the other hand, the locking down of actual research makes it that much easier to make wild claims:

Turns out there is a cure for Cancer. They did a paper in XXXXXX about it, called "BioFlavin shows recession of cancer cells in multi-celluar automotons".

Being able to easily check up on that would make the argument a lot less convincing as a "Cure for Cancer". As an anecdote, there was recently a discussion at my workplace about alternative cars, specifically alternative storage mediums. Due to some quoting of a research paper done that had shown some amount of energy could be stored in water, and be returned to electrical energy at a later point, everyone was eventually convinced that Big Oil just stifled the story. If that paper was readily available (and probably read "very small amounts of energy can be stored in water"), we all could have taken a look at it.

All these observations are true, but the reason behind them isn’t that we’re an unscientific society. It's because we're a capitalistic society; money makes all the difference.

Or rather, we are a society made up of people who's goals aren't always identical to proper explication of scientific principles. Science is hard; people are flawed; why should be expect any different?

The title makes an incorrect claim. Science does not need to be saved, and America is no more unscientific than any society has ever been. It is also not capitalism that hinders a scientific society, as the author claims. A simple examination of the current world would allow the author to see this. Germany has a cultural fascination with psychics and esp, Russia has long had institutional studies of supernatural powers, and throughout Asia participation in acupuncture and astrology is considered normal.

Science is hard. It is a process which requires work and time. People don't want, and don't need, to spend every second of their day researching claims and questing beliefs. After all, it is far easier to believe in the unsubstantiated claims of acupuncture, astrology, chiropractice, or traditional medicine than it is to do the footwork to see that these are based upon incorrect hypothesis which are easily falsified. And belief in such baloney has very little effect upon anyone's everyday life.

A good UK take on this is in "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre, which tries to explain why the media is so bad at covering science. He also claims that they've already won.

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