Latest post in my blog on popular science:
What is a good scientific popularization?
http://populscience.blogspot.com/2020/07/scientific-popularization.html
Regards,
Seems there are two orthogonal issues being discussed here: the actual scientists and popularizers (the likes of Feynman, Sagan, and Hawking), who really understand what’s going on and are trying to communicate it to the world; and the blithering idiots in the news media who wouldn’t know π from a hole in the ground, don’t care about accuracy, and are only interested in circulation. In between you have the likes of Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, who aren’t true experts, but play them convincingly enough on TV that people believe them anyway.
With respect to the media question, we really should be asking ourselves this question: “If they make such obvious mistakes in field X, about which I know something, why should I assume they suddenly are getting things right in field Y, about which I don’t know anything?” The same issue came up here a few months ago[1]–a web article that was being recommended as “very good” contained two blatant, serious, and trivially-verifiable factual errors. So if the authors were incompetent or dishonest enough to publish those statements, why should I trust them to get anything else right, when I don’t know the truth for myself?
Dan Brown via SpareOom (<noreply@talk.spare-oom.com>) escribió:
With respect to the media question, we really should be asking ourselves this question: “If they make such obvious mistakes in field X, about which I know something, why should I assume they suddenly are getting things right in field Y, about which I don’t know anything?”
True! That’s the reason why, when I was a professor in the university (I am now retired and a honorary professor) I used to tell my students, on the first day of term, the following: “If you read or listen to scientific news in the media, don’t believe anything without having confirmed it in some other way. Most scientific news in the media are wrong.”
Regards,
The same is true of news coverage in many specialized fields–as a lawyer and a private pilot, I notice it particularly as it relates to those fields. The law is kind of a funny field in this regard, though–they’ll often consult law professors, who ought to be subject-matter experts. But it seems those professors often have trouble distinguishing between what the law is, and what they think the law should be, presenting the latter as though it were the former.
Lewis was, at best, skeptical about the news as well; the C.S. Lewis Index has several entries regarding News or Newspapers, mostly from Surprised by Joy, and all negative. Some examples:
Of war-time news: it is most likely distorted by the time it reaches the papers; reading it is surely a waste of time. (SJ 159)
I never read the newspaper; why does anyone? They’re nearly all lies. Letters to an American Lady, 26 Oct 55
Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. (SJ 159)
Newspapers are “the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press” (Weight of Glory, p. 29)