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Don't Dumb Me Down : Bad Science

Dear Readers,

I do believe that you will be greatly interested in this article appearing in The Guardian titled "Don't Dumb Me Down". It discusses science in the media.

The author presents a paper on research he has conducted with some ideas on why science in the media is so often pointless, simplistic, boring, or just plain wrong. He breaks the stories down into three categories: Wacky stories, scare stories, and "breakthrough" stories, and discusses each type.

From the article: "Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn't about something being true or not true: that's a humanities graduate parody. It's about the error bar, statistical significance, it's about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it's about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence."

The only weird thing about this article is that it appears in a non-scientific journal, and there is no author's name. How am I even supposed to know if this analysis is correct? The author also seem to not think highly of humanities students.

An interesting insight, nevertheless.

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