>>> Posting number 1754, dated 17 Feb 1997 20:06:30 Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1997 20:06:30 -0500 Reply-To: Discussion of Fraud in Science Sender: Discussion of Fraud in Science Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Al Higgins Organization: Sociology Department UAlbany Subject: (Fwd) Re: Intemperate comments by scientists MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Here, after a short delay, is a posting to Scifraud from Jon Marks. Al ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1997 15:53:37 -0500 (EST) From: jmarks@REDACTED.ycc.yale.edu (Jon Marks) Subject: Re: Intemperate comments by scientists To: Discussion of Fraud in Science >Now is it just me, or is that not a remarkaby intemperate comment for a >scientist? As a science writer I have at times been frustrated by the way >scientists like to hedge their opinions with phrases like "It appears that' >or "To the best of our knowledge", but I understood their caution; at the >cutting edge of science it's extremely rare to be 100% sure of anything. >Lately, however, I've been noticing more and more statements like the one >above from Norris. It may not be fraud, but it does appear to be stretching >the truth a bit. I'm wondering what's behind this tend. Have media >consultants been doing the rounds, training researchers on how to give juicy >quotes? I agree with Shawn Blore's observation. I'm a bit old-fashioned, perhaps, but my scientific training involved the value of understating one's case. On the one hand, it strengthens your case to show that you have considered and rejected other explanations, and therefore your "enemies" have nothing more to contribute; but from a purely pragmatic standpoint, it's just that much more difficult to show you up. Lately, certainly in my field (human evolution/variation/genetics) there is now a very strong tendency to take a little bit of data, over-interpret it wildly, and leave it to skeptics to refute your interpretation. I teach that that is a trademark of quackery; for the burden of proof is not on the skeptic to prove the work is wrong, but on the scientist to prove it's right. (That's why we do controls, after all.) But more and more of the scientific literature seems to be in just that vein. I see two forces at work. The first is the abrogation of the responsibility formerly incurred by scientists to disseminate their work to the public; that is now almost entirely taken over by journalists, who are generally less interested in the details or methodology (which is boring, but which is really what defines the work as competent or not) than they are in the conclusions. About 5 years ago I was called by a journalist for *Science* and asked to comment on the work of So-and-so, who had definitively shown such-and-such, which was counter to my understandng of the extant data. I asked where it had been published, and I'd be happy to comment on it. The journalist replied that it had not been published, but was going to come out in a few months, and had been presented at meetings. I told her that a lot of shit gets said at meetings that doesn't make it into print, and how the hell can I be expected to comment on something I haven't read, anyway? I further told her I didn't like the idea of writing up as news an unpublished paper; but she just persisted in asking me what I though of the conclusion. She wrote the story anyway (helping Dr. So-and-so's career, like getting mentioned in Hedda Hopper's Hollywood column in the 1930s), and quoted me to the mealymouthed effect that "Marks says, 'It would be very premature to close the door on this question presently." A few months later, the paper was published in the PNAS and I could see it had half-a-dozen gaping holes in it -- none of which I had been able to call to the journalist's attention. The journalist had successfully made a poor paper into a newsworthy fact. Not that it is the journalist's fault. The journalist was doing her job, reporting what she heard. The problem is that scientists are finding that they can get more headlines with an overstatement than with an understatement, and headlines count for something these days. (And yes, peer-review sometimes leaves much to be desired!) Thus, the second force I see at work is the nature of university politics, in which headlines bring notoriety, and that makes administrators happy. Reactive criticisms don't bring headlines, and deans don't hear about that. At any rate, science is very different now than it was a very few decades ago. Overstatements are no longer considered immature and foolish; I suspect we shall have to learn to live with it. (For what it's worth, Dr. So-and-so just got tenure at Harvard.) --Jon Marks __________________________________________________ A. C. Higgins ach13@cnsvax.albany.edu College of Arts and Sciences VOX: 518-442-4678 Sociology Department FAX: 518-442-4936 University At Albany Albany, NY, USA 12222