Does Popular Science = Pseudoscience?

i just bough "genome" by matt ridley (it was dirt cheap). will let you know...

Also another question which came out is that popluar science books written by scientists are outside of the realm of peer review.

the real problem is the ongoing collapse of the peer review system (through sheer volume as much as anything), and the worry that good stylists (viz stephen jay gould i guess) get a leg-up into scientific significance thru belle-lettrism rather than actual science, viz they are unfairly end-running a system which has BIG problems it is somewhat taboo to discuss (cf sokal and bricmont, who had a wacky larf at the expense of a journal which was explicitly NOT peer reviewed, but do not address the issue of a. cliquey log-rolling and b. industry-funded prestigious peer-review journals distorting results...)

Also, I'm pretty sure the Sokal essay was peer reviewed (in so far as those sort of periodicals can do so), and that that was part of the worry. it passed for publication despite being meaningless arse.

i want toby to explain the peer review problem, cuz he's in the thick of it and can do it bettah than me => yes yr right abt belle lettrism getting a hard ride (and by extension bad writing getting a soft ride) but i'm suggesting this is (partly) a response to a deeper panic, not yet much discussed, abt the system of peer review itself => which is that it is beginning to crack at the seams and this is not being addressed

eg if peer review was working WELL there wd be a lot less suspicion of good writing as a threat (because it wouldn't be)

(a big probem in social sciences is that value judgements of quality of STYLE are not allowed as part of peer review, IN A VAIN BID TO MAKE THEMSELVES MORE SCIENTIFIC!!)

actually there's a book just come out about this "two cultures" malarkey, a series of really high-level papers on both sides, which looked good (cuz it got some way past the "as mathematicians we are logical beings who cannot be wrong" stage of the "science is a social activity" debate) -> but sadly i forget what it's called

I always found that science fiction does a far better job of getting the brain going by actually distorting known truths and theories and fitting them to a good story.

I'm glad this term was brought up -- a couple of history professors keep putting a bunch of books on reserve regarding 'subaltern studies,' and for some reason they all seem to have to do with India. Can a Kind Soul give me more context? I thank you.

But lets face it: It doesn't make for a great read. Especially if you are not involved in science.

I haven't read the whole thread (so maybe I'm missing the point of this) but I'll read it later: a meeting to go to.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0464.html?m%3D10

(This would be how I rendered myself unemployable, then.)

(incidentally john baez rocks - or at least his weekly theoretical physics column does, anyway).

is it ok to be a science / engineering snob?

is it wrong that i get "urge to kill" when i hear people say stuff like "yeah, i read in popular mechanics that they're preparing studies on using a gigantic orbital mirror to deflect the sun's rays to stop global warming"?

Yes. No - can I help?

I had to restrain myself from violence last week when someone was puzzling over why he couldn't substitute tangent for arc-cotangent. Since, ya know, cotangent is the inverse of tangent and arc-cotangent is the inverse of cotangent.

Well, y'know, the enemy of my enemy is math.

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/cool_stuff/cool_earth_sm.gif
what me worry lolol

i think it's okay to be a snob as long as you're willing to at least try to explain certain things to certain people in accessible ways - but that can be hard

i am a snob re: science and medical half-assed hot-story reporting and the cult of research that caters to popularity rather than rigourous science (i'm not a scientist obv, so my concern is really more abt the communication of scientific research, though the more i research science research processes themselves the more skeptical i become). i also kind of can't stand popular science magazines.

Popular science is often fuel for conspiracy theories, but I suppose that isn't its own fault (also Popular Mechanics did do credible job of facing down the "9/11 Truth" movement).

I'm no scientist, but I took enough of an interest in evolution in college to realize that the way it's popularly presented, even by its proponents is massively flawed. I suppose it's the inevitable result of the need to narrativize everything in order to make it easier to digest.

so what're some good popular science books? i just bought john gribbin's "in search of schrodinger's cat," which looked pretty decent.

funny you mention that hurting, i'm reading stephen jay gould's book on the burgess shale right now.

i'm more interested in the "a study published yesterday proves..." approach to science of the press, which runs totally against the grain of the peer-review process!

I only get asked about theoretical physics, cosmology, astrophysics, etc. at parties when I'm really drunk. I always do a bad job of explaining it, which makes me sad, which makes me even worse at explaining it.

J.D., John Gribbin is not a great writer or explainer, and certainly not a good physicist. It's not quantum mechanics (I've never read a satisfactory popular introduction to that, with the possible exception of Philip Pullman's novels), but I really liked Our Cosmic Haibtat by Martin Ress. Highly recommended.

Martin Rees, even.

Actually, for a staggeringly clear and readable (if slightly unorthodox) introduction to quantum mechanics, try QED by Feynman. He avoids the trap a lot of people fall into when writing about QM, which is to overemphasize the poorly understood, counter-intuitive bits in an effort to make it seem more amazing/mind-blowing to college-age stoners.

I like Brian Greene. He had a really good PBS programme about string theory which they also showed on Channel 4. "The Elegant Universe", I think it might have been called? Anyway, I ran my understanding of it past someone I know who did his PhD on the subject, and he confirmed that I had not been misled.

Also my mind was shattered as a result of watching it and, later, reading the book.

I know nothing about science.

Although, he did say "he's left a lot of stuff out", but of course he would have to leave a lot of stuff out, wouldn't he? To try to explain things to non-science types.

Feynman is able to explain complex ideas to the layperson. As was Einstein, for that matter. Why should popular science be pesudoscience? In principle, one can ramp down the level of explanation without violating the theory. One might be less detailed and less technical, but that is not the same as being inaccurate. An expert chess master might say to the layperson, 'white lost because he failed to protect his king with his pawns, so exposing his king to attack from black's knight and queen'. To another expert, he might say, 'white lost because g4 left a weak square at f4, and black was able to exploit this with Nf4, leading to Qg2 and mate'. Think of your own examples from gardening, cooking, IT, music criticism, pornography, mathematics, fashion design, or wherever you happen to be an expert.

In my darkest hour, I think that scientists must grasp the nettle of popular science or cede society to the the religious fundamentalists, who are simple, sure, but at the expense of accuracy. This is more than an academic question, obviously. True genius is the capacity to ramp the level of explanation up, or down, depending on the audience. That's probably what really understanding a scientific theory is all about. Those who propose theories understand that better than their epigones who explore, elaborate or expound those theories.

whats an epigone?

SJG is MArk S's fave= must be ok

re genome, S Rose is disingenuous + glib but I have a soft spot for EO Wilson. Theoretical physics gets a bad press but Im certain a dreary existence is good for the nerves so reveaL more of the COSMOS to the masses. More caek more.

funny you mention that hurting, i'm reading stephen jay gould's book on the burgess shale right now.

Moonship, I LOVE that book, even though I understand it's obsolete in parts these days. But Gould (whose style, though pompous, really works for me - I think I write a bit like that :)) expresses these amazing things with such passion that the details and repetition expands the wonder rather than boring the reader.

Brian Greene is really good.

i'm more interested in the "a study published yesterday proves..." approach to science of the press, which runs totally against the grain of the peer-review process!

This is fairly irrelevent to me because the general public doesn't have a clue how (or by who) science is funded, performed, or reviewed. The problem is what the press bothers to report. Except for alarmist health-related stuff (i.e. "scientists claim that X can cause cancer"), science stories tend toward flashiness and sensationalism. It's never science just for science's sake. It's kind of like how you never hear any news about, say, Mongolia unless it's "Mongolian boy born with two heads". In the same way, popular biology and physics stories are almost never what's been reported in the most important journals, unless the headline is "physicists propose theories of new alternate universes".

It's also notable that this isn't the case everywhere ... in Germany, for instance, science gets a lot more respect from the popular press. Same for newspapers like the New York Times.

well, yeah, that part too, barry.

then again we get our political discourse from like alan sharpton vs david duke debates so why not a boy with two heads as our science lead?

"you don't believe in torture? what if there was one hour to go and there was an atomic bomb hidden in a subway car hurtling towards the special olympics?? you don't believe in the death penalty? oh yeah? well what if hitler was raping your mom with a fiery sword?"

^^ the country that has political discussions like this deserves the two headed boy, i fear

this is exactly what i'm interested in - the spectacle of science presented by popular media vs the actualities of scientific research - how to communicate the latter to a broader audience - because it *is* interesting and is a significant part of our culture, shouldn't be only the realm of experts (i feel the same way about most seemingly impenetrable depths of academia really)

xpost

New Scientist tends to do a good job of using analogies and giving sufficient background to explain a lot of the stuff they write about in-depth, and is consistently pushing the concept of the scientific method and rational approaches on practically every page. The last time I looked at Popular Science it was still just pretty pictures on top of sub-Slashdot article submission material and didn't push any particular concept besides "WOW...BIG" similar to the way the discovery networks sometimes seem to only be interested in highly proficient predators and things that explode. Though Mythbusters seems to pull off a decent combination of rational approaches and blowing things up (as payoff to the hard work of designing and carrying out experiments with control groups etc).

I also think a lot of the discussion here vis a vis the "general public" concept is drawing on a stereotype of the lowest common denominator in america - remember that the news is anecdotal evidence, people

didn't push any particular concept besides "WOW...BIG"

The search for the Higgs Boson *is* an important issue, though.

Maybe not as important as Momus made it out to be.

But you got my joek, right? ;_;

no :-( pls to explain even if doing so sucks all the humour out of it

like v4h1d sez, "popular science" mostly shows its face as newspaper articles or tv news packages interviewing people about some recently published "study" [NB not sure how that runs against the grain of peer review since vast majority of these studies are peer-reviewed and are seeing the light of day some months after the initial research was conducted] and i agree these segments are, for the most part, totally bone-headed (although given the laughably foreshortened time constraints that TV news has in the US, could it be otherwise?)

am remembering ca. 2003-4, a big hoo-ha about a study that suggested people only consume something like 4 servings of scottish salmon PER YEAR due to the pollution that builds up in the smaller sea life eaten by said salmon, which becomes concentrated as it goes up the food chain; there was a wimpy follow-up a week or so later that vaguely suggested the study was somewhat overstated and then it all went away and everyone forgot about it and sales of scottish salmon went back up

"didn't push any particular concept" but read "particular" as the adjective pertaining to a particle, then combine with BIG = higgs boson, big particle and source of all mass!

Sigh.

oh my.

haha joeks

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/06/greening_your_c_1.php