{"id":3261,"date":"2017-12-27T14:42:44","date_gmt":"2017-12-27T13:42:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/?p=3261"},"modified":"2017-12-27T14:42:44","modified_gmt":"2017-12-27T13:42:44","slug":"new-scientist-is-not-amused","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2017\/12\/27\/new-scientist-is-not-amused\/","title":{"rendered":"New Scientist is Not Amused"},"content":{"rendered":"

You might remember the couple of days a few years ago in which the overlyhonestmethods hashtag went viral on Twitter: for those of you who don’t, it was a little joke in which academics – mainly, I think, natural scientists – made not-entirely-serious “confessions” about how they do their work and the corners they might sometimes be tempted to cut.\u00a0 (Everyone knows that those of us in the humanities don’t really have methods, natch.)\u00a0 Then someone wrote a blog post, since taken down, on plos blogs<\/a> that complained that the hashtag was dangerous because of the damage that it might do to science in the public mind.\u00a0 Similar concerns were aired elsewhere; this<\/a> is an example, though much less po-faced than the former.\u00a0 And it was the former that sprang to mind when I read Jessica Hamzelou’s editorial piece<\/a> in last week’s New Scientist<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Her target is the seasonal edition of the BMJ<\/em> and its traditionally lighter tone.\u00a0 Part of her complaint is that some of the jokes aren’t… well, aren’t all that funny.\u00a0 She notes the paper about man-flu<\/a>, which got a fair amount of media traction, as an example, asserting that “[i]f this is meant to be a joke, it\u2019s not a very good one”.\u00a0 Now: maybe papers like this are basically fluff; and maybe that even as jeux d’esprit<\/em>, they sometimes don’t hit all the high comic notes.\u00a0 But so it goes: I don’t think that there’s all that much to worry about here, and I’m not going to get into a discussion about humour, beyond pointing out that there’s a difference between papers that are meant to be taken lightly and those that are meant to be funny, and that I suspect the BMJ<\/em> selections tend towards the former category.\u00a0 But there’s another side to her complaint:<\/p>\n

[N]ot everyone is in on the joke \u2013 and in an era of fake news, maybe it is time for a\u00a0rethink. The BMJ<\/em> tells journalists reporting its papers, including these daft ones, to \u201cplease remember to credit the BMJ<\/em> \u2013 this assures your audience it is from a reputable source\u201d. And indeed, this silly science often receives straight-faced coverage from influential media outlets. What\u2019s more, once it is archived in scientific databases, these papers get cited like any other. They are even used as the basis for future studies. After all, why wouldn\u2019t you take the BMJ<\/em> seriously? […]<\/p>\n

And how might it be read in the future? Months or years down the line, devoid of the context of Christmas, who is to say this paper won\u2019t be cited seriously? Could it influence the study of flu?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well: yeah, but no.\u00a0 One of the points I keep making to my students is that they shouldn’t treat rhetorical questions as if they are, or are capable of doing the work of, arguments.\u00a0 After all, there’s a danger someone might answer them, and not in the way they expected.\u00a0 And with that in mind…<\/p>\n

The first thing to point out is that the papers are published in a particular place at a particular time.\u00a0 I don’t know what the circulation of the BMJ<\/em> is, but it’s not a mass-circulation magazine.\u00a0 The target audience is fairly small, with very few general readers – limited access to academic journals has that effect, and it’s not a newsstand publication; moreover, my guess is that most papers will be read only when someone does a search for publications on a particular topic (or, slightly differently, that papers will be read most in the light of such searches).\u00a0 More importantly, those readers will have a fairly refined set of skills when it comes to reading and using published work, and if a given paper is going to carry any weight in future work, there is only a very small chance, verging on none, that it’ll carry that weight alone.\u00a0 This means that the man-flu paper, if it’s ever cited at all, is likely to be cited as an example of work into rhinoviruses; and there’s a heck of a lot of that about.\u00a0 I simplify slightly, but not too much.<\/p>\n

Still: information does sometimes get widely disseminated, and not everyone is in on the joke.\u00a0 But so what?\u00a0 It’s a good thing that science be accessible to the public, and it’s part and parcel of throwing things into the public domain that they’re open to misunderstanding and misrepresentation.\u00a0 To insist that nothing should be published that is open to that is to insist that nothing should be published.\u00a0 (Much the same kind of concern, by the way, might well be aired in the context of something like the Ig Nobel prizes.\u00a0 And it’d have just as little heft.)\u00a0 It’s worth remembering, too, that the research that has caused most damage when got hold of by the lay community is arguably Andrew Wakefield’s MMR stuff, which was not<\/em> meant as a joke.<\/p>\n

Maybe the appeal to fake news is meant to soften the claim – to save it from the noting-should-be-published reductio<\/em>.\u00a0 But, that being the case, an important consideration is missing, which is that there’s a difference between things that can be taken the wrong way, and “fake news”.\u00a0 Fake news is either mendacious, or bullshit, in the Frankfurtian sense of the word<\/a>.\u00a0 If it’s mendacious, it’s intended at best to obscure truth, and possibly to plant a false idea.\u00a0 If it’s bullshit, that intention isn’t there; but the thing that characterises bullshit is there’s no regard for truth – to which the liar must pay some respect, if only to avoid it – at all.<\/p>\n

These points can be combined, too, to invite us to consider where the problem lies if a paper is misinterpreted or misused.\u00a0 Sometimes it’s with the writer.\u00a0 Sometimes a document can be so badly written that it’s very hard to work out what’s supposed to be going on, and misinterpretation is therefore the fault of the author.\u00a0 But that’s not always the case.\u00a0 Sometimes the fault lies with the reader.\u00a0 For example, were I to read a paper about, say, a particular protein, there’s a good chance I’d come away with at best the wrong idea, and likely as not no idea at all.\u00a0 The fault in that case would be mine: it’d be my the level of my understanding that tripped me up, and there’d be no reason at all to think that the writer wasn’t the most lucid, efficient, and elegant in the field.\u00a0 Or – brace yourselves – we might also think about The Paper Of Which We Do Not Speak, the problem with which was less to do with any fault in the author’s argument than with a misunderstanding among some about how ethical arguments sometimes run.\u00a0 “Fault” here might have a moral overtone, but it doesn’t have to; this point shouldn’t need making explicit, but there might be a reader out there who’d infer the wrong thing, tee hee.<\/p>\n

If we’re in the business of criticising scientific papers, we need to be sure where the criticism is properly focused.\u00a0 To say that something might be misunderstood when out in the wild is true enough; but misunderstandings require someone to do the misunderstanding.\u00a0 They aren’t inherent in papers.<\/p>\n

This year’s traditionally less serious Christmas edition of New Scientist<\/em> includes a Judge Dredd strip<\/a>, by the way.\u00a0 Don’t go mistaking it for genuine reportage, will you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You might remember the couple of days a few years ago in which the overlyhonestmethods hashtag went viral on Twitter: for those of you who don’t, it was a little joke in which academics – mainly, I think, natural scientists – made not-entirely-serious “confessions” about how they do their work and the corners they might […]<\/p>\n

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