You make a valid point that the general public needn’t all absorb every detail about a particular study or subject. However, I’m going to guess that “satistactory” doesn’t mean “an exposition of the history of economics”, but rather that they present any facts at all. They don’t need to give a specialists’ account, but they have to tell us something about what was done. If 90% of the articles were providing this information, the public would, in my opinion, begin to wonder why the other 10% withheld the information, and the public might begin, subconsciously even, to understand what science is about.

Ijon:
You forgot Bush [as a cause of any ills in society].

Ok, Ijon, we’re talking science here.
Please provide for me the scientific evidence (as opposed to romantic Rousseuian fairytales) that the evils of adults are due to the perversion of nice kindly children?

Looks like you’ve already created your own narrative (e.g. “Rousseauian fairytales”, “nice kindly children”, “children are curious”, “evils of adults”), so I doubt if anything I write will do you any good. I could list hundreds of references on the subject of the long-lasting effects of childhood maltreatment, from books to reviews, from scientific papers to advocacy reports. Instead, and for the benefit of everyone here, I provide a link to one particular study (PDF, 345 KB), which conveniently provides a nice review of the subject as well.

One thing is certain, sitting back and complaining about the government/system is unlikely to help.

Well I certainly agree with that. Which gets back to the difficult question of what can one man or woman do? A topic for another day I guess.

And yes, when I read articles in fields far from my own technical expertise (politics and economics spring to mind), I am frequently disappointed at them for precisely this reason.

So I’m afraid you’re going to have to do a lot better if you want to justify your use of the word “silly” in your comment.

Ok, Ijon, we’re talking science here.
Please provide for me the scientific evidence (as opposed to romantic Rousseuian fairytales) that the evils of adults are due to the perversion of nice kindly children?

So children are curious about the world? They also believe everything anyone tells them, have almost no empathy, and can be astonishingly cruel. They also don’t engage in any sort of sexual activity because, as you may have noticed, their bodies (and apparently their minds) change a whole lot during their teen years — a change that has nothing to do with the parents and adults around them.

This melange of assorted factoids does not in any way add up to any sort of proof that “raising them right” would turn them all into scientists, or at least rational sceptics, when they become adults.

Come on, Mark, this is just silly, yet another manifestation of scientists’ wish that everyone be a scientist.

When you read an article about a new historical discovery, do you expect to read an in-depth discussion of the historical methods used? Do you expect to see addressed the on-going controversy between the camp who claim that roman tax records can be taken at face-value vs those who claim they were routinely under-estimated, each marshalling its obscure items of evidence (presented, of course, in the original Greek, Aramaic and Egyptian)?

Even if you are a scientist, if you are not a specialist in the field, what good will this information do you? When I read an article by economists claiming that the effect of a cut in the gasoline tax will be …, I judge it based on the individuals involved, their political affiliations, what they have said in other contexts and whether they’ve been right, what is said by other commentators I respect and so on. Sure, sure, I could devote two years of my life to an in-depth study of the material after which I could make my own informed decision. But I don’t have two years to spend on this project, along with also spending time to validate claims about climate science, nanotechnology and the latest archeological discoveries. At some point the only thing to do, I don’t care how intelligent, educated and fast you are, is to trust other people.

So where does that leave us? The media occasionally report mistaken medical results, but that’s because medicine is a hard subject to do research in. What exactly would change if the story included a note saying “these results are provisional and it’s not quite clear the extent to which they are correct”? The people who want to believe will still believe, the people who don’t want to will not; just like now.

Sure articles could present a paragraph of the specific details of the results, presented in a scientifically rigorous form, and that would probably make the world a marginally better place. But in the grand scheme of problems on earth, it just doesn’t strike me as a very big deal. The willful unwillingness of scientists to accept the reality of the world that I presented in my 2nd and 3rd paragraphs strikes me as a far larger, far more serious problem.

Well, if you come across something let me know.

I am with you on the problem of science journalism, this topic touches on a much more general issue that is that people don’t want to realize one can’t run science like a business. Letting similar tactics influence the scientific community is going to be a huge disaster, in fact it already is. People have started to pay a lot of attention to how they advertise and sell their work, this inevitably goes on the expenses of clarity and integrity, not to mention that it is an investment of time an effort that is wasted into work other than research. Similarly, science journalists – though I am sure most of them have a genuine interest in the topic – have the pressure to make stories that sell, and this goes on the expenses of content which is excused with the ’system’, i.e. one has to get the money in, do what the editor wants, please the audience which likes superficial and entertaining stories. Their responsibility to report accurately just isn’t a variable that is measured in money in any reasonable way. To put it differently: the micro-interest don’t yield a desired macro-result. That’s a problem. And it’s a completely obvious problem. So why then are we so unable to change anything about it?

Best,

B.

One thing is certain, sitting back and complaining about the government/system is unlikely to help.