If you peruse your Facebook feed or your Twitter stream on a daily basis, you see a variety of articles proclaiming that science has made a dramatic new discovery.
“Thing X causes cancer;” “Thing X prevents cancer;” or “Thing Y will kill you, unless it doesn’t; who the fuck knows”.
The problem is that what we know as science has changed a lot. It used to be that science was something that required rigorous review and testing, peer scrutiny, and usually ended up getting you beheaded or burned at the stake by the Catholic church. That was the old school, when science was a calling, and when a discovery was truly something that changed the world.
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That kind of science still endures today, but it’s overwhelmed by an avalanche of junk that erodes our faith in real science. I had a facepalm moment the other day when I saw this article from TIME, 10 Things Most Parents Are Dead Wrong About: Backed By Research. First off, when did TIME, a magazine that used to a cultural and generational touchstone, become a list-making, linkbait factory? But I digress. If you read the article, which is really just a list of links to other sites, it’s clearly designed to piss people off enough to click. Among the things the article appears to support are: talking back, spanking, peer pressure, oh, and if you think you’re a great parent for reading to your kid, you’re probably doing that wrong too.
Here’s the problem, any researcher can publish a paper on a blog these days with little to no peer review, and virtually no need to back up their findings or even provide a reference back to their work. The first link in the article, the one about kids talking back to their parents, links to another blog post that is only 139 words long (which credits another blog post with a dead link) and doesn’t contain a single number to back up the findings. No indication of sample size, no numbers to show how definitive the findings were, and most importantly, nothing to indicate the background of the researchers, who paid them, what their motives were, nothing.
The problem is that most people won’t bother to look into the details, most people will just feel fear and anxiety that they are somehow being a horrible parent, they are doing something wrong.
The biggest problem with this junk science, research done with all the precision and care of a fast food drive-thru window, is that it devalues our trust in real science.
The thing about science is that everything is really just a theory. Even the things you and I think to be settled are really just highly probable theories. The Theory of Gravity isn’t just a turn of phrase, it’s actually what the thing is called. That’s because science is only our best interpretation of the world as we know it right now. That doesn’t mean everyone should go out tomorrow and jump off a cliff trying to disprove gravity, it means that our understanding of nature, matter, and energy is always evolving. Something like gravity, though still a theory, has a 99.9999 percent probability rate–we’re pretty damn sure we have it right. This is why trust is so important in science. We must trust that what we are being told is legitimately the best guess, based on empirical evidence, that the scientific community can muster at this point in our evolution as a species.
This all sounds highly abstract, “what’s your fucking point, Spencer?” Well, the point is that as trust is eroded we replace trust with celebrity, we replace evidence with volume, and we replace credibility with who has the biggest audience. Which is why a mind-boggling number of people think a former Playboy bunny is an expert on vaccination. The scientific consensus on vaccines is pretty overwhelming. It may not have not gravity-level confidence, but it has enough empirical evidence, backed by decades of peer-reviewed research, that we’re pretty damn certain it saves lives. So why do so many people not trust science? I think it’s because we’ve allowed our lives to be filled with the mindless psuedo-science that changes week to week.
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It’s the same reason so many of us don’t believe in climate change, because we’ve grown so used to science changing its mind, getting it wrong, and flip-flopping that we’re holding out hope that they might have fucked this one up too.
And hey, scientists, you’re not off the hook here either. When you publish papers based on tiny sample sizes to get headlines, when you cover up evidence that doesn’t support your theories, and when you sell your souls to the highest bidder, you are helping erode the trust in science.
Scientists used to be rockstars, they didn’t care about what people thought, didn’t care about the mainstream, they cared about the science. Now, like an aging rock band touring long past their prime to pay for their divorce settlement, science has forgotten what they were supposed to be in it for.
The good news is, I see some hope. Neil deGrasse Tyson is becoming a minor celebrity, movies about scientists are dominating the Oscars, and kids are starting to get interested in science again.
When I was a kid, Pluto was a planet, and now it isn’t. That’s the power of science, not the cancer scare du jour, but the real power that comes with using evidence and data to shape our understanding of the world. Anything else is just linkbait designed to generate outrage. And really, doesn’t reality TV give us enough to be outraged about?
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