Seems to be a common theme. I’m studying quantum information, and practically none of the popular news articles I’ve seen have enough information for me to figure out what the heck new “breakthrough” they’ve come up with this time. Usually I can at least guess which paper they’re basing the story off of, but one time I couldn’t even figure out who had done the work in question.

Health news often strikes me as akin to an ever-shifting maze, in which every few steps a new obstacle springs into place: yet another article urging me to PANIC! about this or that disease or condition or social phenomenon, none of them ever placed into context or even described adequately, and rarely providing any genuinely useful information. I used to read the NYT’s health section fairly regularly, and most of the time finished up feeling as though I’d been smacked from pillar to post to no purpose whatsoever.

And all this, all this feeds into our distorted perception of what constitutes wellness, not as simple good health but as an ever-retreating golden ring at the end of a race in which diseases chase after us like so many hell-hounds, zombies and bug-eyed monsters from outer space.

I’d just like to jump in here to mention that the shit they do to findings in bacteriology and epidemiology are utterly astounding as well. You know CA-MRSA is going to kill us all, right? Because it’s, like, immune to all antibiotics! Everyone panic!!

Well, you know, except for the part where it’s still susceptible to vancomycin and a couple of other newer antimicrobials, and it’s not actually any worse than 15 other bacteria I could think of off the top of my head, and your chances of contracting any of them are actually pretty slim. But still, PANIC!

When will we see, “Obesity linked to sweet, sweet lovin’.” Oh wait, that one is true.

http://jezebel.com/5072249/study-shows-overweight-women-have-the-most-sex

However we are all also human and the majority of the population will be more interested in fanatical scientific evidence, then what science truly found out. Again, a shame.

What I think we need to do is just remember that science is an evolving ever changing thing and just because its scientific doesn’t mean it’s, true, a good idea, or from a reputable source. Wasn’t shock therapy a fantastic scientific breakthrough?

So I love the fact this wasn’t blindingly revered as new science, that it was called into question. I don’t think journalism will ever be 100% honest, honesty doesn’t sell papers as well as a fantastic story.

So thank you, thank you for reminding people to stop, and think about what they are reading.

I actually don’t think it’s just searching for money through more interesting headlines, either. I think journalists are searching for something that will connect with the reader and that leads to misrepresentations of the scope of that connection.

Science writing can be particularly difficult because the technical words don’t always sound like “coefficient of performance” — sometimes they are words like “work” or “stress,” where you think you know what it means but there’s a specific technical meaning that most people don’t grasp. The different but overlapping vocabularies of “technical lingo” and “normal speech” mean that an apparently innocuous rephrasing into lay language can actually drastically change the claim being made, for instance by using words that are synonyms in normal English but not at all the same in science, or by assuming that words with different specific scientific meanings are actually synonyms because they might be in regular speech.

My own contention too is that almost anything can be made to be ’sexy’ – it’s all in how well it’s written. Case in point: back when I made my living as a data and word processor operator, a paper on the history of shotcrete passed over my desk. And it made what might well have been a snooze fest into such entertaining material, that 25 years later I remember it with tremendous fondness. I just wish I’d kept a copy!