Let’s Start Tracking Misleading Press Releases About Scientific Findings
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: Let’s Start Tracking Misleading Press Releases About Scientific Findings
#2Problem is: the people who care already know, and the majority of people don't care. They care enough to "share" a headline on Facebook, not to actually read the conclusions. "Scientists link coffee drinking to smart gene!"--how many people would read further than just sharing with their friends, regardless of, say, the New York Times' rebuttal of such an argument. It's not about accuracy, it's about virality.
Re: Let’s Start Tracking Misleading Press Releases About Scientific Findings
#3In the UK, the NHS (National Health Service) website has an excellent section called Behind the headlines that "provides an unbiased and evidence-based analysis of health stories that make the news".
Their articles are well-written and thorough, but unfortunately much less widely-read than the misleading newspaper reports they often debunk.
Re: Let’s Start Tracking Misleading Press Releases About Scientific Findings
#4This is particularly bad in certain fields. "Nanotechnology" (which, for PR purposes, means surface chemistry, not molecular assemblers.) seems to be the worst.
Re: Let’s Start Tracking Misleading Press Releases About Scientific Findings
#5Problem is: the people who care already know, and the majority of people don't care. They care enough to "share" a headline on Facebook, not to actually read the conclusions. "Scientists link coffee drinking to smart gene!"--how many people would read further than just sharing with their friends, regardless of, say, the New York Times' rebuttal of such an argument. It's not about accuracy, it's about virality.
"Research shows sharing links on social networks prevents cancer"
Re: Let’s Start Tracking Misleading Press Releases About Scientific Findings
#6Problem is: the people who care already know, and the majority of people don't care. They care enough to "share" a headline on Facebook, not to actually read the conclusions. "Scientists link coffee drinking to smart gene!"--how many people would read further than just sharing with their friends, regardless of, say, the New York Times' rebuttal of such an argument. It's not about accuracy, it's about virality.
"Research shows sharing links on social networks prevents cancer"
A common part of many cons is to not just get the mark to accept the offer that looks to benefit them, but to make them feel they are doing something good at the same time. There are people who will resist doing the moral thing when it doesn't benefit them, there are people who will resist doing the thing that benefits them if it's not moral, but there's very few that will resist something that offers both. It's a double whammy, right to our reward centers.
Re: Let’s Start Tracking Misleading Press Releases About Scientific Findings
#7> Why isn’t anyone holding universities accountable for their press releases?
It's about time. Maybe in the future, universities will adopt ethics guidelines that will oblige them to say, "Here's another social science study of dubious provenance, one that, based on a now-famous survey of similar past studies [1], is more likely to be false than true."
[1] http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-f...
Re: Let’s Start Tracking Misleading Press Releases About Scientific Findings
#8Problem is: the people who care already know, and the majority of people don't care. They care enough to "share" a headline on Facebook, not to actually read the conclusions. "Scientists link coffee drinking to smart gene!"--how many people would read further than just sharing with their friends, regardless of, say, the New York Times' rebuttal of such an argument. It's not about accuracy, it's about virality.
> ... "Scientists link coffee drinking to smart gene!"
Complete agreement, especially with respect to the word "link", which seems ideally suited to exploit public ignorance of the fact that a link means a correlation, not a cause-effect relationship.
Re: Let’s Start Tracking Misleading Press Releases About Scientific Findings
#9This is particularly bad in certain fields. "Nanotechnology" (which, for PR purposes, means surface chemistry, not molecular assemblers.) seems to be the worst.
Fortunately, that specific hype train appears to have left the station. The worst for me at the peak were nanotechnology articles where the structure in question was somewhere in the submicron (or rarely, micron!) range.
Re: Let’s Start Tracking Misleading Press Releases About Scientific Findings
#10In the UK, the NHS (National Health Service) website has an excellent section called Behind the headlines that " provides an unbiased and evidence-based analysis of health stories that make the news ". Their articles are well-written and thorough, but unfortunately much less widely-read than the misleading newspaper reports they often debunk. http://www.nhs.uk/News/Pages/NewsIndex.aspx
Not exactly on the subject of science, but the European Commission runs a similar blog debunking news stories about the EU: